GoDaddy wins .tv contract after Verisign blows off 20-year deal

GoDaddy is taking over the contract to run .tv from Verisign, after Verisign didn’t even bother to bid for renewal.

The deal brings to an end a relationship between Verisign and the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu that has lasted 20 years and contributed millions to the country’s economy.

The country’s communications ministry said on its Facebook page that GoDaddy Registry was selected after a “competitive tender process”, but DI understands that Verisign did not participate.

While terms of the new GoDaddy deal have not been disclosed, it seems likely that Tuvalu was looking for a far bigger slice of the pie than the $5 million a year it was getting from Verisign, and for moneybags Verisign, with its .com cash-printing machine, it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

Tuvalu has around 11,000 inhabitants and gross national income of around $60 million — its .tv money was a big deal for the country, even at the amount Verisign was paying.

With a likely bigger chunk of change coming from GoDaddy, it’s going to have more to invest in what it calls its “digital nation” strategy, which appears to involve investing heavily in blockchain-based technologies to compensate for the fact that it may well disappear beneath the waves over the next few decades.

.tv is a cornerstone of this strategy, the government says.

There’s thought to be at least half a million registered .tv domains, and the bog-standard non-premiums retail for about $50 a year, so it’s been a nice little earner for Verisign over the last two decades.

The company first took on .tv in 2001 when it acquired startup .tv Corp, which had inked the original deal with Tuvalu in 1998, for $45 million. The contract has been renewed a few times since then.

The ccTLD was the first example of a mainstream TLD offering tiered pricing, with premium strings carrying bigger price tags — controversial 20 years ago, almost standard practice today.

There have been reports over the years that the country thought it was getting short-changed by the deal, and the contract was put up for bidding earlier this year.

Despite reports that the tender seemed suspiciously tailored for a Donuts win, it seems GoDaddy has emerged the victor.

One can only assume it’s offered Tuvalu a bigger slice of the pie, which is what it had to do (under its previous incarnation as Neustar) to keep hold of the contract to run Colombia’s .co last year.

Neither Verisign nor GoDaddy has publicly released a statement about the switch. While it’s a lot of money, it’s not strictly material to either company’s already swollen top lines.

EURid’s CEO is retiring

EURid’s long-serving CEO is leaving and the company has started looking for someone to fill the role.

A spokesperson for the .eu registry told DI this morning that Marc Van Wesemael is planning to retire after his replacement is found, which should be a matter of months.

Van Wesemael has been CEO (general manager) of the Belgium-based company since its foundation and since it was first awarded the contract to run .eu way back in 2005.

EURid announced without sentiment or fanfare this week that candidates should apply via an agency on this LinkedIn page.

Given the nature of the role as an EU government contractor, the company is looking for somebody familiar with the workings of the European Commission.

Van Wesemael’s departure announcement comes just a few months after EURid was re-awarded the contract to run .eu and its Greek and Cyrillic variants for another five years, giving his successor some breathing room.

.org back-end deal will come up for re-bid, PIR says as it acquires four new gTLDs

The industry’s most lucrative back-end registry services contract will be rebid, Public Interest Registry said today.

The deal, which sees PIR pay Afilias $18.3 million a year to run .org, according to tax records, will see a request for proposals issued in the back half of 2023, according to PIR.

Given that’s two years away, it’s strange timing for the announcement, which came at the bottom of a press release and blog post announcing that the company is acquiring four new gTLDs, three of which belong to Afilias’ new owner, Donuts.

PIR said Donuts is to transfer control of .charity, .foundation and .gives, which will be “reintroduced” to the market. .foundation currently has about 20,000 registered domains; the other two have a few thousand each.

It’s also acquiring the unlaunched gTLD .giving from a company called Giving Ltd.

All four are on-message for PIR’s not-for-profit portfolio, which also includes the barely-used .ngo and .ong for non-governmental organizations.

Those two gTLDs are getting decoupled, allowing registrants to register one without having to buy the other, PIR also said today.

The last time the PIR back-end contract came up for renewal, in 2015, Afilias was also the incumbent but increased competition — it was up against 20 rivals — meant that its slice of .org revenue was cut in half.

EURid to drop 48,000 Brexit domains in one day

All the .eu domain names formerly belonging to Brits and UK residents will be released for registration on a first-come, first-served basis in one day, EURid announced today.

There are about 48,000 of them, and they’ll be released in batches starting at 0900 UTC on January 3, two days later than the previously announced date, the registry said.

The names all belonged to UK registrants that lost their eligibility when the country left the EU in January last year.

There were almost 300,000 .eu domains registered in the UK at the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Most have since dropped or been transferred to EU-based entities or EU citizens that still qualify.

Google to release another new gTLD next month

Google Registry is gearing up to unleash another gTLD from its stockpile of unreleased strings next month.

The gTLD is .day, one of over 100 that Google applied for in 2012 after a reported brainstorming session at the company.

According to its application:

The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to offer a new Internet environment that allows users to create and organize events that have or will occur on a particular day. The proposed gTLD will provide a single domain name hierarchy for Internet users globally to promote celebrations, such as a holi.day, wedding.day, or birth.day.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to see .day being a high-volume TLD along the lines of Google’s popular .app or .dev gTLDs.

While the company itself doesn’t seem to have addressed the launch publicly, it has given details to registrars and informed ICANN about its start-up dates.

It started a Qualified Launch Program program earlier this week. That’s where it gets to hand out a limited number of domains to hand-picked anchor tenants.

The sunrise period, restricted of course to trademarks, begins December 14 and ends January 24.

General availability starts January 25, according to registrars and ICANN records, with a seven-day Early Access Period during which domains can be purchased at daily-decreasing premium prices.

Full regular-price general availability begins February 1.

XYZ counting standard sales as “premiums” because its fees are so expensive

Portfolio gTLD registry XYZ appears to be counting regular sales of domains in certain TLDs as “premium” wins, because the base reg fee is so high.

The company said in a recent blog post that it sold over 270 “premium” names in October, but it added the following caveat:

Premium XYZ Registry domains refer to premium domains for extensions with standard and premium domains, and XYZ’s premium namespaces such as .Cars, .Storage, .Tickets, .Security, etc.

So if a name in a .com-equivalent priced TLD such as .xyz had been flagged as a premium by the registry and sold for a few thousands bucks, that counts as a premium sale, but any sale at all in .cars, where all domains cost a few thousand bucks regardless of the second-level string, also counts as a premium.

This reporting practice appears to bring in .security, .storage, .protection, .car, .auto, and .theatre, which all retail for four figures as standard. It also includes .tickets, where you won’t get much change out of a grand. It doesn’t include the fourth member of the cars family, .autos, where domains are priced as .com-equivalent.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

You can’t accuse the registry of being misleading — it’s disclosing what it’s doing pretty prominently mid-post, not even reducing the font size.

And you can’t reasonably argue that a standard $3,000 .cars domain, which renews at $3,000 a year, for example, has less claim to the adjective “premium” than a domain in .hair that has a premium-tier EPP code selling for $3,000 but renewing at $20.

It just feels weird to see the word used in this way for what appears to be the first time.

Nominet names Paul Fletcher new CEO

Nominet has named Paul Fletcher as its new CEO.

He’ll join the company in February, filling the spot vacated by Russell Haworth, who quit earlier this year a few days before he could be fired by members.

Fletcher is currently CEO at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, Nominet said. BCS, formerly the British Computer Society, is also a membership organization, with 60,000 members.

Nominet is currently headed by interim CEO Eleanor Bradley, one of the directors removed from the board at the company’s fractious Emergency General Meeting in March.

Fletcher will join the board at the same time as he joins Nominet, the company said.

CentralNic takes over a dead dot-brand

CentralNic has become the latest company to pounce on a dot-brand gTLD that was on its way to the dustbin of history.

The ICANN contract for .case was transferred to a London company called Helium TLDs, a CentralNic subsidiary, last week.

That company was previously called FANS TLD, and was the vehicle CentralNic used to acquire .fans from Asiamix Digital in 2018 before later passing it on to Hong Kong-based ZDNS International.

I believe something similar is happening here.

.case was a dot-brand owned, but never used, by CNH Industrial, which Wikipedia tells me is an American-Dutch-British-Italian company that makes about $28 billion a year making and selling agricultural and construction machinery. Diggers and forklifts and such.

CNH also managed .caseih, .newholland, and .iveco for some of its other brands, but these contracts were terminated earlier in the year.

The company had also asked ICANN to cancel its .case agreement, but that seems to have attracted acquisitive registry operators, and the termination request was withdrawn as I noted in September.

While terminating a dot-brand can often be seen as a lack of confidence in the dot-brand concept, selling off the gTLD to a third party rules out reapplying for the same string in future and can be seen as an even deeper disdain.

Now, .case is in CentralNic’s hands. I believe it’s the first dot-brand the company has taken over.

Rival registries including Donuts, XYZ and ShortDot have also swept up unwanted dot-brand gTLDs, stripped them of their restrictions, and repurposed them as general-purpose or niche spaces.

Delta variant cranks up Aussie domain regs in Q3

Australia’s ccTLD had a growth spurt in the third quarter, driven by pandemic lockdown rules.

Local registry auDA today reported that it took 171,846 new domain creates in Q3, up 22% on Q2. There were over 60,500 new regs in July, making it .au’s second-biggest sales month of all time.

auDA said in its quarterly report (pdf):

This increase took place at a time when COVID-19 restrictions were re-introduced in several states, and followed a levelling out of demand and seasonal dip over Easter in Q2. However, Q3 registrations are only slightly below the same period in 2020, which experienced a historic peak in new domain names created, driven by COVID-19.

Such lockdown bumps were experienced by many registries in 2020, as bricks-and-mortar businesses rushed to get an online presence to continue functioning while stores and venues were closed.

The delta variant of Covid-19 started worrying Australia in June, leading to lockdown rules in major cities that lasted most or all of July. The country has had a relatively low incidence of the virus, but has taken a hard line on restrictions.

At the end of September, .au registrations were up 5% at 3,386,186 names, auDA said. The .com.au level names were up 6% but .net.au was down 1.5%.

Next March, Australia will follow in the footsteps of some other ccTLDs and make second-level .au domains available for the first time.

.music goes live, plots 2022 launch

.music has become the latest new gTLD to join the internet, but it seems unlikely to hit the market before the 10th anniversary of the 2012 ICANN application period.

The TLD was added to the DNS root at the end of October, with the first domain, the obligatory nic.music, going live a few days later.

The registry, Cyprus-based DotMusic, said in a press release that it plans to launch the gTLD next year.

.music was one of the most heavily contested gTLDs from the 2012 application round, with eight total applicants.

It was one of two Community applications, which promised a more controlled, restricted namespace in exchange for a smoother ride through the ICANN approval and contention resolution processes.

But it failed to win its Community Priority Evaluation, leading to years of appeals and ICANN reviews.

The contention set was finally resolved in 2019, apparently via auction, with DotMusic prevailing against heavy-hitters including Amazon and Google.

But the victorious registry was slow out of the blocks after that, taking almost two years to negotiate its registry agreement with ICANN.

It’s still going to be a restricted-community space when it finally launches, which makes its success anything but assured, regardless of the unquestionable strength of its string.

Sadly, while DotMusic CEO Constantine Roussos looked every bit the part of the hip young rocker when the .music application was first filed, showing up everywhere in a sports car, cool haircut, and designer skinny jeans, today he lives in a senior-care home, drives a mobility scooter, and needs to be changed hourly.