ICM reveals .xxx launch dates, extends sunrise

Citing demand, ICM Registry has lengthened the .xxx sunrise period, which begins September 8, by three weeks. It will now end October 28, running for 50 days.
The new deadlines apply to all three sunrises, which will run concurrently.
Sunrise A-T – for porn publishers with trademarks.
Sunrise A-D – for porn publishers with matching domains in other TLDs.
Sunrise B – for anyone outside the porn business who wants to “turn off” their trademark in .xxx to prevent cybersquatting.
Successful Sunrise B applicants will see their chosen domains resolve to a standard information page explaining that the domain is not available for registration.
Post-launch, anyone can register a non-resolving domain that returns an NXDOMAIN response, but they’ll have to pay for it annually. Sunrise B applicants pay a one-time fee.
If applicants from Sunrise A and Sunrise B both apply for the same domains, the porn applicant will be given precedence, although they will be warned about possible trademark infringement.
If more than one Sunrise A applicant applies for the same domain, the fight will be taken to an auction, managed by Pool.com. Auction rules will be published at a later date.
The sunsrise is outlined in a policy document (pdf) ICM published on its web site today that sets out the rules for its pre-launch period.
The company has not yet announced details of its Charter Eligibility Dispute Resolution Procedure, nor its Rapid Evaluation Service, though it has said it expects them to cost between $750 and $1,500, depending on what deals it can come to with dispute resolution providers.
The Rapid Evaluation Service, previously referred to as “rapid takedown” will be an interesting one.
It’s expected to be a little like the Uniform Rapid Suspension process ICANN’s new gTLDs will have to implement, except it will only take about 48 hours to take down an obviously cybersquatted domain.
ICM says it expects to publish these policies before the sunrise begins.
Landrush is now expected to run November 8 until November 25. General availability will begin December 6.

VeriSign to raise .com and .net prices again

VeriSign has announced price increases for .com and .net domain name registrations.
From January 15, 2012, .com registry prices will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and .net fees will go up from $4.65 to $5.11.
That’s a 10% increase for .net and a 7% increase for .com, the maximum allowable under its registry agreements with ICANN.
As ever, registrants have six months to lock down their domains at current pricing by renewing for periods of up to 10 years.
The last time VeriSign raised prices, also by 7% and 10%, the higher prices became effective a year ago, July 2010.
VeriSign’s contract for .net was renewed last month after it was approved by the ICANN board of directors.
Its .com contract comes up for renewal next year.

Last chance to tell ICANN how to plug new gTLDs

“How Do We Raise Global Awareness of New gTLDs?”
ICANN asked that question a month ago and tomorrow is your last chance to respond to the public comment period it set up to gather suggestions.
So far, the number of responses is in the single figures.
I quite like Danny Younger’s suggestion: “It might be wise for a communications plan to include a warning to the general public about misleading ‘pre-registration’ schemes.”
A press release containing such a warning would almost certainly gather headlines – hacks love a bit of conflict – but it could also risk making the new gTLD process look a bit slapdash.
Easily the most laughable suggestion filed with ICANN so far comes from 4U Systems:

I would like to offer the use of .4U.com in your campaign. For example, New-gTLDs.4U.com, Domains.4U.com,Internet-Innovations.4U.com, new-domains.4U.com, Internet-expansions.4U.com, ICANN-applications.4U.com, TLD-launch.4U.com, ICANN-facts.4U.com, podcasts.4U.com, social-media.4U.com…the possibilities are limitless… the avenues to the information, countless. Therefore, we would like to talk further about how we may assist in the gTLD campaign with 4U.

Has any reader ever encountered a more fundamentally badly judged or desperation-smacking piece of business development outreach?

Ambitious .app project seeks funding

A community initiative to apply to ICANN for the .app top-level domain is looking for expert assistance and, more importantly, financial backers.
The .app Project sprung up in late June, after ICANN approved the new gTLD program. It hopes to raise a total of $535,000 to support the application, via memberships and sponsorship.
It appears to have been launched and is being coordinated by Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, director of a British mobile software consultancy called AMX Software.
The project’s site, at dotappapp.com, says:

Our aim is to keep the .app gTLD open and accessible such that it becomes an entity that properly support the app software development community, particularly in areas of intellectual property protection.

To raise money for the $185,000 ICANN fee, it’s selling memberships for between $25 and $100, which include a number of “free” .app domains if the application is approved.
It hopes to later raise an additional $350,000 for the technical infrastructure through sponsorship and investment.
I say the project is “ambitious” because I fully expect .app to be a contested TLD with multiple serious bidders that may well wind up duking it out at auction.
The iPhone platform alone already has over 400,000 third-party apps in the Apple App Store, so .app is a string that could potentially be a modest commercial success.

Anti-.jobs coalition keeps up pressure on ICANN

The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, which wants ICANN to rein in .jobs registry Employ Media, has sent a couple of stern letters to ICANN recently.
Neither are especially exciting, but as ICANN has yet to publish them on its correspondence page I thought I’d make them available here.
The first (pdf), sent July 5, demands to know why ICANN has not yet provided an update to its forthcoming arbitration with Employ Media, which was due a few weeks ago.
ICANN and the registry are set to face off at the International Chamber of Commerce over the disputed Universe.jobs service, which ICANN believes was launched in breach of the .jobs Charter.
My understanding is that the arbitration is going ahead, but that ICANN has been granted an extension to the deadline to file its reply.
The second letter (pdf) notes that .jobs’ IANA listing was recently updated with language more friendly to Employ Media’s position that not only human resources managers qualify for .jobs domains.
It asks why this change was made, invoking the Documentary Information Disclosure Policy.
The Coalition is made up of independent jobs site operators unhappy that Employ Media appears to be using its position as the .jobs registry to compete with them.

Will Larry Flynt sue over .xxx domains?

The porn publisher Hustler is “prepared to take whatever legal action may be necessary” to stop ICM Registry letting people register its trademarks in .xxx, according to a report.
I’ve been hearing rumors for several weeks that some companies are so unhappy about having to pay to block their brands in .xxx that they may consider legal action.
Now Xbiz reports that Hustler has said it refuses to be “shaken down” by the registry, but that ICM has not responded to its written demands for protection.
But will the company sue ICM (and ICANN?) over what may amount to just a few thousand dollars in defensive registration fees? And on what grounds?
In the US, the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which has been on the books since 1999, is rather friendly to registries unless they behave really, really badly.
ICM will have some of the strongest trademark protection mechanisms of any gTLD, suggesting that it could have quite a strong defense to a cybersquatting claim.
Hustler could of course decide to sue based on a different law.
Threats of lawsuits are something that new gTLD applicants will need to bear in mind if they plan to apply for a TLD that encompasses an industry or community, as .xxx does.
Even if applicants manage to win the support of a portion of the affected industry, community members that think they’re likely to be cybersquatted or lose valuable real estate may well resort to the courts.
This is why about 30% of every new gTLD application fee goes into an ICANN war chest reserved in part for legal fees. ICANN knows what could be coming down the pike.
Xbiz quoted Hustler attorney Jonathan Brown saying: “We are constantly policing the registration and use of domain names that attempt to capitalize on Hustler’s trademarks.”
But the record shows that the company does not appear to be an especially aggressive enforcer of its marks in other top-level domains.
The magazine’s parent, LFP, has filed 29 UDRP complaints since 2002, all relating to Hustler and Barely Legal and, apart from hustler.tv, all for .com domains. The most recent filing was in 2009.
The company does not own the string “hustler” in .net, .org, .info, .biz or in a number of high-visibility ccTLDs that I checked. It does, however, own hustler.mobi.

Wiki to shake up the new gTLD market

Tens of thousands of dollars worth of registry secret sauce is set to be released under a Creative Commons license on a new wiki, courtesy of the International Telecommunications Union.
Applying for a new generic top-level domain could be about to get a whole lot cheaper.
Before October, the ITU plans to publish template answers to all 22 of the questions about registry technical operations demanded by ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook.
Because they will be published under a Creative Commons license, new gTLD applicants will be able to copy and paste the whole lot into their applications for free.
And because they will be on a wiki, approved contributors will be able to fine-tune the templates to increase their chances of passing ICANN’s technical evaluation.
Currently, gTLD applicants are generally paying registry back-end providers to take care of this part of their applications, paying $10,000 and up for the privilege.
I think the word that applies here is “disruptive”.
Consultant and former ICANN board member Michael Palage, who has worked on a number of previous TLD launches, is coordinating the creation of the templates with input from registries and engineers.
The resulting “best in class” material will also be used by the ITU and the League of Arab States in their bid for .arab and its Arabic equivalent, .عرب.
According to the Guidebook, applicants do not need hands-on experience running a registry in order to have their application approved. ICANN is trying to enable competition, after all.
But there is a period of pre-delegation testing that each successful applicant must endure before their new gTLD is added to the root, so a simple copy-paste of the ITU’s templates will not suffice.
I doubt this project will take a great deal of money out of the pockets of the incumbent registries – well-funded applicants will presumably be happy to pay the extra money for certainty – but it will provide a bit of flexibility for applicants not already in bed with a back-end.
It could also help open up the new gTLD market to companies that may not have otherwise considered it, such as those in the developing world.
Indeed, part of the rationale for the Creative Commons publication is to aid with “capacity building” in these nations, according to an ITU presentation delivered in Cairo this week.
We’ve already seen pricing competition hit the registry services market in the wake of the approval of the new gTLD program, now it appears we’re seeing the dawn of “free”.

Thousands of short .co domains available

The .co registry may have sold over a million domains since it launched a year ago, but there may be quite a bit of potentially valuable real estate still available.
.CO Internet said in its registrar newsletter this week that, as of May 31, 51.2% of three-letter domains and 71.1% of three-character combinations were still available.
On the back of the envelope I’m looking at, that works out to about 9,000 three-letter names and about 33,000 three-letter/number domains.
No three-letter domains are available for the basic registration fee in .com.
Three-letter domains are often considered fairly safe investments by domainers, from a cybersquatting risk perspective, but UDRP panelists don’t always agree.
UPDATE: In response to a few skeptical reader comments, I pinged .CO for clarification. It turns out that the quoted percentages include the seven Spanish IDN characters that .CO allows — á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, ü.
Domains including these strings would presumably be far less appealing to registrants, and not all .co registrars offer IDN characters.
The number of pure ASCII three-letter domains available in .co is presumably much, much lower than my envelope math suggested.

ICANN has $750k to advertise new gTLDs

Don’t all rush at once.
ICANN is looking for an advertising agency to help it get the word out about the new generic top-level domains program, but it only has $750,000 to spend.
The organization published a request for proposals last night.
The budget is not much in the advertising world, especially considering that ICANN’s awareness program will have to be global and multilingual to be truly effective.
With such a limited budget, the RFP and accompanying FAQ acknowledges that it will need “creative solutions” from its ad agency.
This is likely to mean a big PR push for advertising equivalent editorial – lots and lots of news stories about new gTLDs.
To an extent, the word is already out by this measure. My standing Google News and Twitter searches for “ICANN” have been going crazy since the gTLD program was approved two weeks ago.
I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority deal of the coverage so far has been either neutral or negative, with much of the focus on potential legal, branding and security problems.
That’s pretty much par for the course in the domain name business, of course.
And ICANN does not necessarily need positive spin – it’s trying to raise awareness of the program’s existence, and negative coverage does that job just as well.
There is, as they say, no such thing as bad publicity.
ICANN’s job of promoting the program is already being done to a large extent by the registries, many of which were investing heavily in media outreach before new gTLDs were approved.

Neustar prices .brands at $10k

Neustar has unveiled extremely aggressive entry-level pricing for “.brand” applicants looking for a registry services provider – just $10,000 a year.
For the size of company expected to apply for .brands, that’s a rounding error. It may as well be free.
It’s called the Brand Assurance Package.
Applicants should not expect much for the money though – the package seems to be targeted at those that want to grab a .brand TLD in the first round, but may not do much at the second level initially.
It basically looks like a defensive registration package.
It covers application support and the registry infrastructure, but Neustar plans to ask clients to upgrade to more expensive services should they expand their .brand strategy in future.
Prices for those services have not been announced, but it would be a good idea to find out what they are before signing up – migrating a TLD between registries may not be trivial.
The fee does not cover ICANN’s application fees, which start at $185,000, of course.
There’s a market for this kind of thing. You need only read some of the marketing trade press to discover that there are a heck of a lot of brand managers scratching their heads about new gTLDs right now.
Many are taking a “wait and see” approach.
The problem with that strategy is that after April 12 next year we have no idea when – or, frankly, if – companies will next get their chance to apply for a new gTLD.
If Coca-Cola gets .coke in round one and .brands turn out to be a success, that could put Pepsi at a competitive disadvantage if it is left stranded in .com space, for example.
In addition, if you share your brand with a company in another vertical, applying in the first round is a must-have, unless you fancy your chances with ICANN’s untested objections procedures.