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.

First post-approval new gTLD bids announced

After ICANN approved its new generic top-level domains program here in Singapore on Monday, many people I spoke to predicted a new “quiet period” for gTLD application announcements.
There’s a feeling among some that there’s little to be gained now from revealing what gTLD you plan to apply for, particularly if you’re a smaller player that could easily be out-bid by a larger, later applicant.
Nevertheless, today we have the news that GJB Partners plans to apply for .jewelers, one of the narrowest niche gTLDs to be announced to date.
GJB’s managing partner is George Bundy, CEO of .fm and .am registry BRS Media, which also plans to apply for .radio.
I imagine the choice of string took some thought – it’s plural rather than singular, US rather than UK English (in which it would be “.jeweller”).
In such cases, you only need to pick one. If this bid is successful, ICANN’s confusing similarity rules will make sure that .jeweller, .jeweler and .jewellers never see the light of day.
Also emerging this week, the city of Tokyo has announced that it will seek a .tokyo delegation, and is calling for expressions of interest.
That news follows the announcement last week of a commercial bidder for the .okinawa and .ryukyu geo-TLDs, to represent the Japanese region of Okinawa.

Japan gets two new geo TLD projects

BusinessRalliart, a Japanese technology company, has announced that it plans to apply for two geographic top-level domains covering the prefecture of Okinawa.
According to a few local news reports, the two proposed TLDs are .okinawa and .ryukyu, covering the names of the region and the islands themselves.
It’s not entirely clear from the articles whether the company will also apply for the Japanese-script equivalents.
What’s particularly interesting is the fact that, according to a translation provided by UrbanBrain, the investors in the project are reportedly a car rental firm and a restaurant chain.
I’m speculating, but it seems likely that these investors will get some premium domain name real estate under these TLDs as part of the deal.
I’m expecting to see quite a few of these kinds of relationships emerging in the first round of new TLD applications – getting an investor and an anchor tenant on board in one deal makes good sense for a limited community or geographic TLD.

Nic.at strikes .hamburg deal

Hamburg Top-Level-Domain GmbH, a potential bidder for the .hamburg top-level domain, has headed across the border into Austria for its registry services provider.
The company has signed up to use Nic.at, currently the registry for the .at country-code TLD, according to a press release.
The initiative appears to be looking for money at the moment.
dotHamburg’s chief executive Oliver Süme said: “The knowledge that the technical side of things is in safe hands is an important criteria for potential investors looking to invest in .hamburg.”
The company will also need to secure the support of Hamburg’s local government, given the recent changes to ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook.