Identity Digital to launch .watches this month

Identity Digital has announced the launch timetable for its .watches gTLD.

Sunrise will kick off on March 28, running for two months until May 27. This is the period where only registered trademark owners can apply for a name.

The Early Access Program, in which names carry a premium price that decreases every day for a week, will run from May 31 to June 7, immediately after which the gTLD will enter general availability.

Despite the fact that .watches has been live in the DNS since December 2015, there are no registered domains so far.

The original registry was luxury goods maker Richemont, an early proponent of new gTLDs that ultimately lost interest and offloaded its portfolio, including the Chinese version of .watches, over the years.

.watches was sold to Afilias in late 2020, shortly before that company is turn was acquired by Donuts, since rebranded Identity Digital.

IDNs — small and shrinking

It’s no secret that internationalized domain names haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves since they were first introduced over a decade ago, but the latest ICANN data shows registration volumes are shrinking.

According to its second annual IDN Progress Report (pdf), there were 1.52 million IDN names across all gTLDs (including Latin-script TLDs) at the end of 2022, which was down 2.94% from a year earlier.

ICANN pointed out that this is actually a slower decline than in previous years, where the average shrinkage from 2019 to 2021 was 11.36%.

Chinese-script names were perhaps unsurprisingly the most common, representing 50% of the total, with Latin coming second-place with 26%. Some Latin-script languages need representing as IDNs to accommodate diacritics like cedillas and umlauts.

Korean, Cyrillic and Japanese followed in popularity. The multitude of scripts used in India fall into the “other” category, with less than 1% of the total — fewer than Hebrew — despite the country’s vast population.

The relatively low number of registrations is spread across ASCII and IDN gTLDs. Ninety-one of the 1,172 total gTLDs are IDN gTLDs and 462 gTLDs support IDNs at the second-level, regardless of top-level script.

ICANN’s report does not cover ccTLDs, presumably because the zone files are not usually readily available, but we know from ccTLD registry that their own IDNs can be somewhat popular.

Russia reports 681,000 .РФ names today, while China recorded 190,000 .中国 names mid-2022.

ICANN has made IDNs and universal acceptance a cornerstone of its current strategic plan and there’s likely to be a push for IDN applications in the next new gTLD rounnd.

Verisign looking at ChatGPT-like name-spinner

Verisign is “looking closely” at overnight AI chatbot sensation ChatGPT to see if its technology can be incorporated into its name-spinner tool, NameStudio.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts last week: “ChatGPT and NameStudio will actually help you find a similar and equally good or maybe even better name and we’re looking closely at ChatGPT to see about using its capabilities to enhance what NameStudio does.”

He dismissed suggestions such AI tools might negatively impact domain names, comparing it to misplaced concerns about voice assistants (presumably meaning the likes of Alexa and Siri).

Last month, I blogged about a new name-spinner web site using the same AI technology as ChatGPT to come up with name suggestions and speculated that this will likely become the industry standard before too long.

.com shrinks again, but prices to go up again

Verisign plans to increase .com prices again this year, as its latest quarterly results show its top line and margins swelling despite renewals and overall domains under management shrinking.

The company ended 2022 with 173.8 million .com and .net regs in the domain name base, only up 0.2% from the start of the year. Only a quarter ago, it had predicted growth of between 0.25% and 1%.

A year ago, it had predicted that metric to grow between 2.5% and 4.5%, but it reduced its outlook every quarter and eventually missed even its barrel-bottom estimate. The two TLDs shrank by about 400,000 names in Q4.

For 2023, the company expects domain growth of between no growth at all and 2.5%.

The poor performance in volume terms came about as result of post-pandemic effects and China volatility, CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts. He did not blame the last few years of price increases for the dip.

The preliminary renewal rate for Q4 was 73.2% compared to 74.8% in the same quarter of 2021, but new regs were down across the two TLDs also — 9.7 million compared to 10.6 million over the same periods.

But of course domains under management alone is a poor way to measure Verisign’s cash-printing machine.

The company reported 2022 net income of $674 million which was down from $785 million a year earlier when it had benefited from a one off tax-related boost of $165.5 million.

Annual revenue was up 7.3% at $1.42 billion, a touch ahead of the 7% .com price increase it imposed during the year. Operating margin for 2022 was 66.2%, up from 65.3%.

For the quarter, net income was $179 million compared to $330 million (with the aforementioned tax benefit) on revenue that was up 8.5% at $369 million. Margin was 66.5% compared to 65.3% for Q4 2021.

The company said .com prices will go up again in September 1, from $8.97 to $9.59 per year.

One in six .au domains is a 2LD

The .au ccTLD had over 700,000 direct second-level registrations at the end of 2022, according to registry auDA.

In its annual report (pdf) published this week, auDA said it had over 716,000 2LD regs. The second level space was opened up in March last year with a six-month grandfathering period.

It had 4,160,209 domains overall at the end of December, so roughly one in six .au regs was a 2LD.

In the comparable .uk liberalization, which had a five-year grandfathering period, at its peak in 2019 roughly one in four names was a 2LD. Today, it’s more like one in 10.

Whether .au will follow the same trend remains to be seen.

GoDaddy could lose out as NIXI brings .in in-house

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI wants to become a back-end registry services provider for its own .in and other TLDs, and seems set to push GoDaddy out of its current role as it looks for a company to build its new infrastructure.

The company is looking to expand its current role as .in overseer and take over day-to-day operational management of the EPP registry, DNS, Whois, etc, from its current back-end. That’s been Neustar, now GoDaddy Registry, since 2019.

By the time the transition takes place, it could be the largest TLD migration in history.

NIXI currently says it has over three million domains under management. The previous biggest move was .au from Neustar to Afilias in 2018, at 3.1 million names. The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was for 2.7 million names.

NIXI basically wants a company to come in to design and build a registry system, run it for a year, and then hand over operations, and maybe staff, to NIXI before retreating into a maintenance role for seven years.

The selected provider must be established in India and preference will be given to “companies whose parent / holding company is registered in India having subsidiaries in other developing countries.”

If NIXI already has a preferred provider in mind, it certainly isn’t GoDaddy, judging by this criterion.

“This is as part of future expansion plan / business plan of NIXI,” the tender (pdf), which says several times that NIXI wants to become the back-end for ccTLDs in other developing countries, notes.

After a number of extensions, NIXI’s tender is due to expire next Monday.

Ferrari survives carmaker’s dot-brand bloodbath

Fiat Chrysler is to kill off five of its six dot-brand gTLDs, which it has never used.

The company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .abarth, .alfaromeo, .fiat, .maserati, and .lancia, four of its car brands.

Weirdly, .ferrari, which has also never been used, is not subject to a termination notice. Perhaps the company has plans for it.

The gTLDs were all managed by CSC on the Identity Digital (Afilias) back-end.

The news comes about a year after Volkswagen killed off some of its gTLDs. Audi and Seat are some of the most enthusiastic users of dot-brands.

CentralNic reports strong 2022

CentralNic grew faster than analysts’ expectations last year, the company said today.

The company expects to report EBITDA of “at least” $177 million, up 33%, on revenue up 77% at about $728 million, for 2022.

Factoring out acquisitions and currency fluctuations, organic growth is expected to be around 60%.

The growth has been driven by its domain monetization business, which CentralNic has been building through acquisitions over the last few years.

The company will report its results proper on February 27.

Google partners with UN on aids.day, womens.day and more

Google Registry has landed itself possibly the highest-profile anchor tenant of the new gTLD program to date — the United Nations.

Various UN organizations have picked up about 20 premium .day domains and launched redirects to promote the corresponding UN-recognized issue-awareness days that occur throughout the year.

For example UNAIDS has registered aids.day to raise awareness of the disease on December 1, World AIDS Day, UN WOMEN has registered womens.day for International Women’s Day on March 8, and UNICEF has registered childrens.day for November 20, World Children’s Day.

(If you’re wondering: International Men’s Day is not a UN-recognized event. The domain mens.day, which doesn’t resolve for me, was registered last month, apparently to somebody in Germany where, ironically, it is not observed.)

The UN domains all seem to redirect to pages on existing UN sites on other TLDs, rather than having bespoke web sites.

Google launched .day in late 2021 and has sold about 14,000 domains so far. It maintains a calendar of the various days and corresponding .day names at new.day, which also serves as a lead generator.

Verisign loses prestige .gov contract to Cloudflare

Cloudflare is to take over registry services for the US government’s .gov domain, ending Verisign’s 12-year run.

It seems .gov manager CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, opened the contract up for bidding last August and awarded it to Cloudflare in mid-December.

The deal is worth $7.2 million, Cloudflare said in a press release on Friday, which is more than twice as much as Verisign charged when it took over the .gov back-end in 2011.

But it seems the deal includes Cloudflare providing authoritative DNS for .gov domains, something Verisign does not currently provide the TLD, in addition to managing the zone file, registry, Whois, etc.

It’s not clear who’s running the exclusive .gov registrar, but CISA appears to be building a new one.

.gov domains are only available to US federal, state, tribal and local government organizations, and there was a $400-a-year fee until April 2021, when CISA made them free to register.

There are about 8,600 .gov domains today. Not a lot, but the deal comes with bragging rights.

CISA took over .gov from the General Services Administration in March 2021 and dropped the fees a month later.

It’s not clear whether Verisign had bid for a renewed contract or simply walked away, as it did when it conceded .tv to GoDaddy last year. I’ve asked the company for comment.

The loss of .gov is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to .com, which continues to make Verisign one of world’s most-profitable companies.

While it’s an ICANN-accredited registrar, I believe this is Cloudflare’s first foray into registry services. Might we see the company as an emergent threat to the established players in the next new gTLD round? It’s certainly looking that way.