Get your first look at ICANN’s new gTLDs microsite

ICANN is stepping up its so-far lackluster new top-level domains outreach campaign with the launch tomorrow of a microsite dedicated to the topic.
The site is expected to host the long-anticipated “final” or production version of the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook, which could be published as early as Monday evening.
It’s designed to educate potential gTLD applicants from outside the usual crowd of insiders.
The site is scheduled to go live at roughly 1930 UTC tomorrow, but DI has had a sneaky peek and can bring you some exclusive preview screen captures today.
Unlike icann.org, which strikes many as confused and a little bewildering, the microsite adopts a more conventional, basic, business-focused design.
Abstract clip art? Check. Businessperson pointing to bar graph? Check. Globe? Check. Smiling Asian lady? Check.
Here’s a a grab of the front page.

And the Program Status tab gives an indication of what ICANN is planning for the web site a few months down the line.

Director of marketing and outreach Scott Pinzon also has a new blog on the microsite, possibly the first of a few.
Here’s a grab of the Applicant Guidebook page. The links are not yet working, but note the date.

The site has a video page. ICANN’s very well-received plain-English overview of new gTLDs has been uploaded, in addition to plain-French, plain-Russian, plain-Chinese and plain-Spanish versions.
There are several talking-head featurettes, which edit together soundbites from gTLD registry executives, giving a very high-level flavor of what it’s like running a registry. Here’s a sample.

Overall, it looks like an encouraging step in the right direction.
The design is clean and accessible and there’s very little ICANNese and very few acronyms. As a gateway for the new gTLD program, it appears to be easily up to the task.

RodBeckstrom.xxx will never see the light of day

ICM Registry has reserved the names of dozens of ICANN directors, former directors and members of staff from the new .xxx top-level domain.
RodBeckstrom.xxx, it seems, is going to be permanently protected from cybersquatters.
I’ve reported before that thousands of celebrity names – about 4,300, it has since emerged – were placed into Registry Reserved status.
I can’t believe it did not occur to me until now to see if any domain industry “personalities” were also given the same preemptive protection.
It seems that every current member of the ICANN board has had their name reserved. One borderline case appears to be Ray Plzak, who’s only protected as RaymondAPlzak.xxx.
Two former ICANN directors who left the board this year – Peter Dengate Thrush and Rita Rodin Johnston – are also reserved, though Rita only as RitaRodin.xxx.
Further back, there’s spotty coverage. Raimundo Beca (left the board in 2010), former CEO Paul Twomey (2009) and Michael Palage (2006) have their names reserved, but many others have not.
Lots of ICANN staffers have been bestowed reserved status too, but again it appears to be quite random whether they’re included or not.
It does not appear to be based on rank (some VPs are excluded, but some mid-level employee names are reserved) or profile (some reserved names will be unfamiliar to anybody who does not attend ICANN meetings).
ICM has also reserved the names of all of its own employees.
I have been unable to find any big industry names from outside ICM and ICANN that are on the list. Bob Parsons is going to have to defensively register bobparsons.xxx, for example.
It’s worth noting that it’s against ICM’s rules to register any personal name under .xxx that is not the registrant’s own legal name or stage name, no matter what their intentions are.
Unlike .com, with .xxx registrants have to enter into an agreement with the registry – not just the registrar – when they buy a .xxx name.
It’s quite possible – though I’ve yet to confirm – that ICM will be able to disable any unauthorized personal name registered in .xxx without the offended party having to file an expensive claim.
And because registrants’ identities will be checked by ICM at the time of registration, even if they use Whois privacy, that should presumably be fairly easy to enforce in most cases.

Eurid to release 9,000 .eu names after lawsuit

It’s going to be first-come, first-served on almost 9,000 seized .eu domain names next month, following a Eurid lawsuit against a Chinese cybersquatter.
The registry operator said today that it has taken control of the domains, which were registered shortly after .eu launched in 2006 by one Zheng Qinying, and will start to release them October 24.
Eurid went to court in 2007 after a string of cybersquatting cases against Zheng highlighted the fact that, as a Chinese citizen with no presence in the EU, she did not qualify to own .eu names.
An appeals court finally ruled a year ago that Zheng had no right to the domains, and Eurid now plans to make them available again on a first-come, first-served basis.
Don’t get too excited.
Judging by the small number of English domains on the 8,894-strong list, Zheng, despite being quick off the mark after .eu launched, registered quite a lot of garbage.
Don’t expect to see too many valuable English keyword domains. Do expect to see a lot of domains that probably would not stand up to a cybersquatting complaint.
The gems may lie in the many European surnames on the list. There may be some good non-English generics on it too, but this monolingual Anglo-Saxon has no idea.
The full list of Zheng’s domains in CSV format can be downloaded here.
UPDATE: A longer, no-holds-barred commentary by HosterStats’ John McCormac can be found here.

Watch ICM’s first .xxx TV commercials

ICM Registry has posted its first wave of TV commercials for .xxx onto YouTube.
The theme running through the four commercials is that not registering a .xxx may save you a bit of cash, but that registering one will make you rich.
Or something.
I can’t say I “get” the humor, but I’m probably not the demographic.
Here’s the first three. The character, “King Gavin”, is played by Gavin McInnes, founder of Vice magazine.



ICM says the commercials will start to air on TV in the US soon.

How much money will ICM make from .xxx blocks?

There’s a pretty ludicrous report in the Australian media today, claiming that Aussie businesses are being forced to pay AUD $400 million to ICM Registry to protect their brands in .xxx.
The laughable number ($411 million) appears to have been fabricated from whole cloth. The report in the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun does not even bother trying to source or justify it.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that ICM is going to make some money out of its .xxx sunrise, including from Sunrise B – the one-time defensive “blocks” that do not result in a domain registration.
The company priced Sunrise B at $162 per domain based on an assumption that it would see 10,000 of them. Any fewer and it would lose money, any more and it would profit.
According to official registry reports, no TLD launched in the last five years – .asia, .co, .jobs, .mobi – saw more than about 10,000 domains defensively registered during its sunrise period.
But my hunch is that .xxx will blow those out of the water. I would not be at all surprised if the final number tops 20,000 names.
It’s just a hunch at this point, based on a comparison to the .co launch – which had a reported 11,000 sunrise applications last year – and four main assumptions:
First, that 10,000 was a conservative estimate. I don’t think ICM would have risked making a big loss.
Second, based on a very small number of conversations, I think that some companies are not taking any chances. They’re applying for blocks in more second-tier brands that maybe they strictly need to.
Third, ICM has a much larger registrar channel than .co enjoyed, and much more aggressively FUDdy registrar marketing tactics.
ICM has approved about 70 registrars, compared to the 10 that .CO Internet had at launch, and a lot of registrar promotion has focused on the “Protect Your Brand!” angle, which was discouraged by .co.
Fourth, the vast amount of mainstream media attention the .xxx sunrise has been receiving, most which has doggedly followed the same line as the registrar FUD.
While the value of defending against typosquatting during the .co sunrise last year was probably more important to trademark holders from a security and traffic loss perspective, the brand protection angle did not receive nearly the same amount of press as .xxx has.
ICM president Stuart Lawley has done dozens of media interviews since the sunrise kicked off last week. I even heard him on a UK radio news show aimed at teenagers.
And this press has been going on for over six years, remember. ICANN first approved .xxx in 2005, and the story has been in and out of the media ever since.
It’s worth noting that a Sunrise B block, with its one-time fee, basically denies ICM Registry a bunch of recurring revenue events forever.
Nike is going to be paying $20 to .CO Internet for its defensively registered nike.co domain name every year until the end of time, in addition to the up-front sunrise fee.
If it blocks nike.xxx, it will pay $162 to ICM now but it will also deny the registry its $60 fee for every year it could have been a renewing domain. In three years, ICM’s losing revenue.
But Sunrise B is very probably going to be profitable for ICM. At 20,000 applications, its top line would be $3.24 million, with profit probably pushing seven figures.
Nowhere near $411 million, obviously, but not a bad payday for selling domain names that will never resolve.

VeriSign CFO quits after buyout rumors

VeriSign has just announced that its chief financial officer, Brian Robins, will leave the company at the end of the month.
The announcement follows a couple of trading days in which VeriSign’s shares have rallied on rumors that the company was on the verge of being acquired.
Ironically, it was Robins’ decision to cancel an appearance at a financial conference that sparked the rumors.
Robins’ resignation follows that of his old boss, CEO Mark McLaughlin, who quit to join a pre-IPO tech startup in late July.
Robins’ destination is not yet known, and VeriSign has yet to name a replacement.

If you pre-register a domain, you are the product

“If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.”
That’s a maxim that has been doing the rounds on the internet for the last few years to describe services such as Facebook, which gets users in for free and then monetizes them to third parties.
It struck me today that this saying also applies to services that allow you to pre-register domain names in non-existent top-level domains.
If you’ve recently registered your interest in a domain in a new gTLD – example.web, say – you’ve gained nothing and potentially lost a lot.
Pre-registering creates two main benefits as I see it, and neither accrues to the registrant.
First, you’re now on the company’s mailing list. When your selected new gTLD(s) go live, the company you pre-registered with is going to try to convert you into a paying customer.
Second, you’ve just freely contributed information to an extremely valuable database, possibly to your own detriment.
When new gTLDs launch, many registries are going to reserve thousands of premium domains to either sell or auction at a later date, to periodically drum up interest in their extensions.
How will these companies decide which domains to add to their premium lists? A database of hundreds of thousands of pre-registrations would be a great place to start looking.
If you pre-register, what you may be doing is voting for your desired domain to be reserved by the registry, for possibly years, and then sold at a large premium.
Something to think about.

What The X Factor taught me about new gTLDs

Elitist, pseudo-intellectual snob that I am, I rarely watch commercial television. But I make an exception when the The X Factor is on.
I’m not sure I’d even describe the show as a guilty pleasure. It’s just consistently great television.
I’m not alone. According to BARB, which tracks viewing figures in the UK, The X Factor is Britain’s top-rated show, with about 11 million viewers each Saturday night.
It is estimated that a 30-second spot in the latest series costs advertisers £154,000 ($250,000), which will likely increase dramatically as buzz builds toward the December finals.
If a company is willing to spend $250,000 on a single ad spot, I got to wondering how these advertisers use domain names. The price of a new “.brand” gTLD is in the same ball park, after all.
So rather than zoning out during The X Factor‘s commercial breaks last night, I took notes.
Of the 15 brands advertised during the show, five did not promote their online presence at all. Ads for products such as breakfast cereal showed no URLs, search terms or Facebook profiles.
Another three displayed their domains on-screen as footnotes, but with no explicit call to action.
Two advertisers, amazon.co.uk and weightwatchers.co.uk, explicitly encouraged the viewer, on-screen and in the voice-over, to visit their sites.
Barclays was the only advertiser that asked viewers to find it using a search engine. Its call to action was “search Barclays offset mortgage”, with no accompanying URL.
There were also a couple of ads that used call-to-action .co.uk domains.
Mars used bagamillionmovies.co.uk to direct viewers to an M&Ms movie competition, while Microsoft (windows.co.uk/newpc) was the only advertiser to use a directory in addition to its domain.
But the two commercials that interested me the most were those that used alternative or “new” TLDs – the ones that are usually afterthoughts when you’ve already put a .com into your cart.
Mars used getsomenuts.tv to advertise Snickers, and the healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson asked viewers to visit sleepchallenge.info.
That’s right. J&J seems to be spending six-figure sums advertising a .info domain during Britain’s most-watched TV show every Saturday night.
This is noteworthy for, among other reasons, the fact that J&J has a seat on the board of directors of the Association of National Advertisers.
The ANA is of course currently leading the campaign against ICANN’s new gTLD program.
ANA general counsel Doug Wood rubbished .info, albeit only by association, in a video interview with WebProNews on Friday, stating:

The idea of [ICANN’s new gTLD program] being successful and delivering the competition or the innovation that they’re speculating on is clearly questionable to a great degree, based purely on the success or lack of success of the last group they introduced – .biz, .travel, .jobs, etc – none of which has as done anything significant vis-a-vis competition or innovation

I would suggest that the existence of sleepchallenge.info shows how dubious these claims are.
First, sleepchallenge.info redirects to a rather longer URL at johnsonsbaby.co.uk. This indicates that it was registered purely to act as a memorable and measurable call-to-action domain.
The fact that J&J used the .info, rather than sleepchallenge.co.uk, which it also owns, suggests that the company appreciates the additional meaning in the word “info”.
(Mere added semantic value would make a poor definition of innovation, but until now it’s been one of the few things that new gTLD registries have been able to offer.)
The domain sleepchallenge.info was a hand registration in May 2010, according to Whois records, costing J&J just $35 from Network Solutions.
The .com equivalent has been registered since 2007 and would have cost substantially more to acquire from its current registrant, if indeed it was for sale, which it may not be.
Because ICANN introduced competition into the gTLD market 11 years ago, J&J was able to obtain a meaningful domain for a massive ad campaign at a low price.
Watching The X Factor has taught me that Johnson & Johnson is an ANA board member that has already directly benefited from new gTLDs.
I guess commercial TV can be educational after all.

Olympic-backed .sport bidder looking for partners

SportAccord, a worldwide coalition of sports federations with Olympic support, is looking for partners to help it with a possible .sport top-level domain bid.
In a request for proposals published today, the organization said it is looking not only for expertise and potential technical partners, but also financial backing:

The objective of SportAccord is to develop the best possible promotion of Sports Themed gTLDs by leveraging its unique relationship with its members, and to establish a usage policy that ensure respect of Sports key values.
SportAccord is therefore seeking to developing partnership with entities that could bring technical expertise and financial support to the common development of Sport themed gTLDs.

The 17-question RFP reveals that the organization has evidently done its homework.
Questions cover pertinent topics such as registrar integration, trademark protection, premium name monetization, and how to beat the ICANN threshold score for community-based applications.
The deadline for replying is September 30.
SportAccord, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is an umbrella group comprising the international federations for over 100 sports, covering everything from football to tug of war.
The RFP states that the International Olympic Committee supports its gTLD initiative.
That’s an endorsement that may prove the deal-breaker for any .sport application. The IOC has been a vigorous defender of its rights in the new gTLD program.
Its lobbying efforts most recently compelled ICANN to build special protection for Olympic trademarks into the Applicant Guidebook itself (as well as lumbering the GNSO and ICANN staff with a bunch of unnecessary policy-development work).
Two other organizations have previously announced .sport applications
The loudest, Ron Andruff’s DotSport LLC, had appointed some of SportAccord’s member federations to its policy advisory council.
But SportAccord says in its RFP that “neither SportAccord nor any of its Members have made any commitment to support or participate in any sport themed gTLD.”
It looks like we may be looking at yet another push of the reset button on a well-lobbied gTLD.
The SportAccord RFP can be downloaded here.

Domainer Jan Barta invests in dotFree

The Czech company hoping to apply to ICANN for the .free top-level domain next year has secured an undisclosed investment from local domainer Jan Barta.
Jeremie Godreche from dotFree described the deal as “an active and long term relationship”.
Barta is the founder of Elephant Orchestra, a domain investment and lead generation company based in Prague. You can read a recent interview with him in the Prague Post here.
DotFree appears to have recently overhauled its web site also.
It now has a planned launch schedule that would see a .free founders program open in January 2012 and its sunrise period begin a year later.
Now there’s confidence.
I expect .free to be a contested gTLD, and we won’t find out until April at the earliest how many other applicants are also chasing it.
The company plans to monetize .free by charging for 200,000 premium names and imposing an annual upgrade fee on registrants with more than one non-premium domain.
It has had 97,000 pre-registrations since last November.