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.

.xxx domains to get free virus scans from McAfee

ICM Registry has signed up with security software outfit McAfee to provide automatic virus scanning for all web sites hosted at .xxx domain names.
Under the $8 million deal, “every .XXX domain will be scanned for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, browser exploits and phishing sites, reputational analysis and malware”, ICM said in a press release.
The subscription, which is based on the McAfee Secure offering, will be included in the price of the domain, which is expected to start at around $75 at the cheapest registrars.
McAfee normally charges a lot more than that; ICM has basically negotiated a bulk discount for its customers.
There are two ways to take advantage of the deal.
First, webmasters can choose to put some code on their sites that displays the McAfee Secure logo, potentially increasing customer confidence and ergo sales.
McAfee reckons sales can go up by as much as 12% when sites use this “trust mark”, based on some split-testing it did a couple years ago (results may vary, it adds).
Second, because McAfee is going to automatically scan every .xxx domain every day, whether the registrant wants it or not, porn surfers will be able to use McAfee SiteAdvisor, a free browser plug-in, to verify that a .xxx site is, for want of a better word, clean.
Whether you like .xxx or not, you’ve got to admit that this probably counts as a rare example of “innovation” from a domain registry.
On the flipside, registrars that already offer such services as add-ons, such as Go Daddy, won’t get the up-sell if ICM is giving it to every registrant from the registry side.
But that doesn’t seem to have stopped any registrars from signing up to sell .xxx domains.
Oddly, the press release does not name McAfee as the service provider, but its brand is all over the ICM web site so embarrassment is probably not a factor.
McAfee currently has about 80,000 sites using the service, which could easily grow to 500,000 or more if ICM gets as many registrations as it expects to.

Beware the new gTLD cuckoos

Let’s say that for some reason you’re a big fan of horses.
Ever since ICANN announced it was going to do new top-level domains, in 2008, you’ve been desperate to apply for .horse.
This TLD could not fail, you think to yourself. Everyone likes horses, right? You could have 500,000 registrations in year one, make yourself rich. Maybe buy yourself a new horse.
For the last three years you’ve attended every ICANN meeting, you’ve lobbied for the changes you want to see in the Applicant Guidebook, you’ve spent tens of thousands on hotels and airfare.
You’ve painstakingly built your “.horse” brand, raising money and throwing it into marketing and community building, creating demand among your fellow horse lovers.
The horse community knows about .horse, and they can’t wait for it.
Fast-forward to April 12, 2012.
ICANN has just published the list of first-round gTLD applicants. Your lovingly created .horse bid is in the system, ready for processing.
But wait, what’s that?
Somebody else – some douchebag businessman who doesn’t even like horses – has also applied for .horse, and his bank account is bigger than yours by a long way.
How’s that .horse idea looking now? Did you just spend three years building up somebody else’s brand? Do you think your community will care? Or notice? The other guy is called .horse too, remember.
Oops.
This scenario is very likely to become a reality.
Probably not for .horse, but for many of the new gTLD applicants that we’ve become aware of over the last few years.
If you look at any high-profile application, .gay or .music for examples, we already see multiple applicants, one of which has usually done more to promote the TLD than the others.
Look at Sophia Bekele’s .africa application, which appears to be running into this problem already, despite all of her painstaking outreach.
There will probably be other applicants for these strings that we will know nothing about until April.
You don’t score any points in the Applicant Guidebook for having a loyal fan base, spending oodles of cash on marketing or simply being first to put out a press release.
If you find yourself in a contested string situation, the only way out under ICANN rules is an auction. The applicant with the deepest pockets wins.
Because I’m desperate to one day coin a term and have it stick, I’m going to call these usurpers “cuckoos”. Because, you know… that thing that cuckoos do with their young.
There’s a cuckoo business model, too.
While ICANN has only endorsed auctions as the method of settling contests over non-community strings, that’s there more as a deterrent than as a solution.
ICANN wants competing applicants to come to some kind of agreement between themselves before it reaches that stage and auctions are expected to be rather rare.
What we’re likely to see is a bunch of applicants withdrawing their applications after being paid off, in cash, equity, or some other consideration, by more serious rivals for the same string.
Nobody wants to risk spending millions in an auction if they can make the problem go away earlier with thousands.
Fortunately for the cuckoos, ICANN offers a substantial refund, $130,000, for applicants that drop out before their Initial Evaluation is completed.
This puts the ICANN fee for getting into pay-off talks with a “proper” applicant at a quite reasonable $55,000. If you can score a couple of points of equity in a new registry, it could be a bargain.
Of course, you’d have to hope that your rival does not call your bluff and try to force you to auction. If that happens, it would probably be wisest to admit defeat and cut your losses.
It’s high-risk, sure, but it’s potentially high reward too, and I’m certain it will happen, even if it doesn’t look like it’s happening.
It’s going to be a poker game, and no mistake.

M+M intros flat-rate new TLD services

Minds + Machines is to offer its back-end registry services to new top-level domain applicants for a flat $100,000 annual fee, the company has announced.
The deal represents a bit of a switch for the registry market, which typically charges on a per-domain, per-year basis and doesn’t talk about pricing.
The $100,000 offer will not be extended to potentially high-volume gTLDs, such as .music, or geographic strings such as .nyc, M+M said.
Customers deemed “disadvantaged or needy” will get a 50% discount.
It’s a pretty aggressive move by the company, which has been waiting for years for ICANN to approve the new gTLD program and needs to grab market and mindshare quickly.
M+M was recently compelled to partner with a larger rival, Neustar, to run the back ends for geo-TLDs supported by governmental entities nervous about using a relatively inexperienced player.
“Until now, pricing for registry services has been shrouded in secrecy, and potential applicants have had to try to decipher convoluted pricing tiers,” M+M CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a press release.
He’s not wrong.
The large incumbent registry players have not publicly disclosed pricing, but I gather it’s usually around a couple of dollars per domain per year, with some additional flat fees.
From up-and-coming registry operators, I’ve heard figures as low as $0.75 per domain per year. Competition for applicant customers is, I’m told, getting pretty fierce.
While the new M+M pricing structure is obviously simpler, it will appeal largely to applicants expecting to take a relatively low registration volume, but still high enough that $100,000 does not work out to a ludicrous per-domain fee.
A 25,000-name community registry, for example, would pay the equivalent of $4 per domain per year, which might not make a heck of a lot of sense if they can get an equivalent service for a buck a name elsewhere.
On the other hand, a company targeting a stable base of 250,000 names may lose money in the years it ramps up to that goal, but it will see its margins swell as its registration volume grows.
Still, the new gTLD program is all about innovation (right?) and this seems to be one of the first tangible examples, so it will be very interesting to see how well it plays in the market.

VeriSign’s .net contract renewed

VeriSign has been given the nod to continue to run the .net domain registry after a vote by ICANN’s board of directors today.
The vote was 14-0, with director Bertrand De La Chappelle abstaining without explanation.
The renewal is hardly surprising – nobody thought for a second that VeriSign would fail to retain the contract – but the deal was controversial anyway, due to a Boing-Boing misunderstanding.
The contract still allows VeriSign to carry on raising prices, by up to 10% in any given year, and it still calls for ICANN to receive $0.75 per domain, which currently adds up to over $10 million a year.
The money is still ostensibly earmarked for special projects including extending ICANN’s outreach into developing nations and DNS security, and the resolution passed by the board today says:

ICANN commits to provide annual reporting on the use of these funds from .NET transaction fees.

This is presumably designed to address criticisms that it basically ignored its commitment under the 2006 .net agreement to set up two “special restricted funds” to manage .net cash, as I reported on here.

OpenRegistry wins .gent registry deal

Add another city top-level domain to your lists, the Belgian city of Ghent is set to apply for .gent, using OpenRegistry as its back-end registry software provider
The application for .gent will be made to ICANN by ComBell, a smallish local registrar, which already has the required local government support.
Ghent is Belgium’s third-largest city, with 250,000 residents, so we’re probably looking at a relatively low-volume TLD.
The “Gent” spelling is Dutch.
It sounds like ComBell will be running the infrastructure, assuming the bid is approved, using OpenRegistry’s software, which has also been selected to run a couple of small new ccTLDs.

ICM names former ACLU chief to policy board

ICM Registry has appointed former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen to the Policy Council of IFFOR, the oversight body responsible for the .xxx top-level domain.
Strossen held the role at the ACLU between 1991 and 2008. Her appointment to the largely volunteer role at IFFOR is a bit of a coup for the organization.
She fills the seat designated for a free speech advocate.
Also named to the council is Sharon Girling, a former British cop who was closely involved in many high-profile child abuse imagery stings, including Operation Ore.
Law professor Fred Cate has been appointed the council’s security/privacy expert, and first amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere is ICM’s appointed representative.
There will be five other policy council members, all drawn from the porn industry, named in July or August, IFFOR said in a press release.
IFFOR, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, will get $10 a year from every .xxx domain name registered.

Afilias links up with Right Of The Dot

Afilias and Right Of The Dot have announced a partnership to jointly assist new top-level domain applicants.
Right Of The Dot is Monte Cahn and Mike Berkens’ latest venture, a consulting firm focused primarily on helping new registries price their “premium” second-level domains.
Afilias runs the .info registry and provides registry services for many other TLDs, including .org.
The Afilias deal is the first major partnership Right Of The Dot has announced.

dotBerlin hires Nic.at

Austrian registry Nic.at has signed its second city top-level domain partner in the form of dotBerlin, the company that has been planning a .berlin bid for several years.
The news follows its deal with dotHamburg, announced last week.
Nic.at, which now manages over 1 million .at domains, is the largest German-speaking registry that is also offering back-end registry services to new gTLD applicants.
This, I’m told, makes it particularly reassuring to German local government, which get proven scale and a local(ish) partner which speaks the same lingo.
There’s another .berlin applicant, UniteBerlin, which is backed by Minds + Machines and, following its recent partnership announcement, Neustar.
The support of Berlin’s local authority will decide the winner.

Neustar eats own dog food, plans .neustar bid

Neustar has become the first domain name registry to publicly reveal its own “.brand” top-level domain application, announcing this week a .neustar bid.
The company is one of many offering registry services to brand owners that want to run their own custom TLD, so it makes marketing sense for Neustar to put its money where its mouth is.
But it may also run the risk of diluting its .biz brand (such as it is), depending on whether or not it plans to migrate its primary site, neustar.biz, entirely to .neustar.
Neustar is one of only a handful of companies to announce .brand bids. Canon and Hitachi are the two best-known, but others including IBM and Nokia have expressed serious interest.
ICANN has previously predicted as many as 200 .brand bids in the first round, which begins January 12, 2012.