Hold on to your stats! ShortDot gets two gTLDs approved in China

ShortDot, which makes a business repurposing unwanted gTLDs for the budget end of the market, said today it has had two more horses in its stable approved for use in China.

The company said that .bond and .cyou have been given the necessary nods by Chinese authorities.

What this could mean, if history is any guide, is a sharp increase in sales for the two extensions, possibly to the extent that they materially affect overall domain industry volume stats for the next few years.

ShortDot seems to think so, saying in a press release: “Given the massive success of .icu in China, it is quite clear that .bond and .cyou will follow suit to become largely successful.”

.icu currently has about 600,000 names under management, more than half of which are registered via Chinese registrars. Its numbers are on their way down.

At its peak 18 months ago it had more than 10 times as many, about 6.6 million, due to its low pricing and popularity among Chinese speculators.

The sudden rise and wholly predictable precipitous fall of .icu has been messing with overall new gTLD industry stats for the last couple of years. No volume analysis is complete without a .icu-related asterisk.

It’s by no means assured that the same will be true of .cyou and .bond of course.

.cyou, which was originally a dot-brand matching the ticker symbol of a Chinese company, had 118,000 names under management at the end of May and 136,000 in its zone file yesterday.

Names in .cyou can be had for $2 at Namecheap and NameSilo, its top two registrars, which together hold over 70% of the market.

.bond, originally an Australian university’s dot-brand, has fewer than 5,000 names at the last count and retails for about $55 retail at the low end.

CentralNic spends $6.5 million on traffic network

CentralNic this morning said it has paid $6.5 million to acquire “a publishing network of revenue generating websites”.

The company, which is seeing an increasingly large chunk of its revenue coming from domain monetization, said the network generates $2 million in annual revenue and $1.5 million in earnings.

The seller is White & Case, a 120-year-old international law firm, not exactly the kind of company you’d expect to own a bunch of random monetized domains.

Neither the size of the network nor the means of monetization were disclosed.

CentralNic said the network was already a customer for roughly half of its sites, so the acquisition will add about $1 million to revenue and $1.5 million to earnings, reducing annual cost of revenue by about $500,000.

While the company is best know for selling domain names, following recent acquisitions revenue from its fast-growing “online marketing” segment outpaced its traditional revenue sources, bringing in $96.4 million in the first half compared to $78.3 million in it two domain-related segments.

Nothing but losses ahead for MMX

Former new gTLD registry MMX has delivered its latest set of financial results and warned that, without any operating business, it will be loss-making for the foreseeable future.

The company today reported a first-half loss of $783,000, compared to a loss of $1.25 million in the year-ago period.

That’s calculated from its ongoing operations, which since the $120 million sale of its registry business to GoDaddy comprises no revenue-generating activities but substantial costs keeping the company running and maintaining its listing on the AIM stock market.

Profit from discontinued operations was $3.38 million, compared to $2.68 million.

It still has small “RSP” business, providing non-technical back-office management services to a few former gTLD partners, but this will be wound down or sold off.

CEO Tony Farrow said in a statement:

We are now in the process of delivering the transition services agreed with GoDaddy Registry and disposing of, or otherwise winding down, our RSP Business. Whilst the transition services are being provided on a cost recovery basis, the Company’s ongoing administrative and other public company costs will result in operating losses for the Group going forward.

When the winding down of existing businesses is done, MMX will look for acquisition opportunities or act as a vessel for a reverse takeover.

It’s currently returning $80 million of its GoDaddy cash to investors with a buyback, but this is not enough to clear all of its shares.

Afilias appeals .web ruling, Verisign responds with “rigging” claims

Afilias has filed an unusual and unprecedented appeal against the May ruling that found ICANN broke its bylaws by awarding the .web gTLD to a Verisign affiliate.

The company is arguing that the Independent Review Process panel that decided the .web case shirked its duties, by not actually resolving the major disputes placed before it.

Verisign, in response, has accused Afilias of asking for a “do-over”, which it said is against the rules, and published information it said showed the company had tried to “rig” the .web auction.

The IRP followed the 2015 ICANN last-resort auction, which saw Verisign secretly fund a shell applicant called Nu Dot Co to win with a $135 million bid, on the basis .web would later be transferred to its custody.

Afilias was the runner-up, and argued that ICANN should have voided the NDC bid because Verisign’s involvement was not disclosed.

But the IRP panel merely found that ICANN had breached its bylaws by failing to have the courage to actually rule on the legitimacy of Verisign’s tactics, and threw it back to ICANN to make a decision.

ICANN has yet to make that decision. Instead, Afilias has filed an appeal (pdf) with the in the form of an “application for an additional decision and interpretation”.

IRP cases are handled by the International Center for Dispute Resolution, and Afilias is invoking the ICDR Arbitration Rules that allow a claimant to request an “interpretation” or “additional award” from the original decision:

By failing to resolve all of the claims and issues Afilias presented to the Panel for decision, the Panel has not only failed to satisfy its mandate; it has also undermined the very Purposes of the IRP (as set out in Section 4.3(a) of the Bylaws)—especially, but not exclusively, by its decision to refer Afilias# claim arising from Nu Dot Co’s (“NDC”) violation of the New gTLD Program Rules back to the ICANN Board and Staff to “pronounce” upon “in the first instance.”

The lengthy request is, I believe, an unprecedented attempt at an appeal of an IRP ruling. It’s also heavy on the legal arguments and does not really shed much light on the facts of the case.

The gist of it is that Afilias wants the panel to rule that ICANN breached its bylaws, new gTLD program rules and international law by failing to disqualify NDC and awarding .web to Afilias instead.

Verisign, in response, said in a blog post that Afilas’ application is “not permitted by the arbitration rules – which expressly prohibit such requests for ‘do overs.'”

It also published a letter (pdf) from NDC to ICANN in which it argues that Afilias tried to engage in a “collusive scheme” to “rig” the .web auction.

The letter contains many pages of private correspondence — emails and phone text messages — in which rival .web applicants, before Verisign’s involvement had been confirmed, fruitlessly attempted to persuade NDC to join them in a private auction in which the winning bid would have been shared among the losers rather than all going to ICANN.

While this kind of private settlement was envisaged, and indeed encouraged, by new gTLD program rules, Verisign reckons its smoking gun is messages sent by Afilias during the so-called “blackout period” before the last-resort auction, during which communications between applicants were forbidden.

As far as I can tell, all or almost all of the documents provided by NDC to ICANN had already been submitted to the public record during the IRP.

Note — the “Afilias” referred to throughout this post is the portion of the company, now known as Altanovo Domains, left behind after most of its operating businesses were acquired by Donuts late last year.

Dead dot-brands top 100. Here’s the list and breakdown

The list of dot-brand gTLDs that have had their ICANN registry contracts torn up has now topped 100.

SC Johnson, the big American cleaning products company, has informed the Org it no longer wishes to run .afamilycompany, .duck, .glade, .off, .raid, and .scjohnson.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been keeping a running tally of dot-brand terminations for the last several years, and according to that tally that number is now 101.

But it’s a bit more complex than that, so I thought I’d use the occasion of this milestone to provide a more substantial breakdown.

ICANN has records for 104 dot-brands either being terminated by ICANN or asking to be terminated of their own accord.

The number of registry-initiated termination requests is 90. These are typically gTLDs that were never used, or were experimented with and then abandoned. A smaller number relate to brands that were discontinued following mergers or product end-of-life, rendering the dot-brand pointless.

ICANN initiated the other 14 terminations, mostly because the registry operator got cold feet during the pre-delegation testing phase, before going live, but also in one instance for non-payment of fees and in two cases whatever the hell this is.

Six of the registry-initiated transfer requests were withdrawn before being fully processed. Of those, three (.boots, .mobily, and its Arabic translation) went on to be terminated anyway.

Two registries filed for self-termination then changed their minds and committed auto-genericide by selling their contracts — for .bond and .sbs — to discounting portfolio registry ShortDot instead.

One dot-brand, .case, withdrew its December 2020 termination request and appears to still be active.

Thirteen termination requests are currently in the system but have not yet been fully processed.

Five dot-brand gTLD contracts — .observer, .quest, .monster, .select, .compare — were sold to other registries to be repurposed as open generics. You could add .cyou to that list, depending on how you define a dot-brand.

One gTLD that was originally a generic — .moto — made the move in the other direction to become a dot-brand.

Here’s the list of dot-brands that have either requested a termination, or been terminated.

[table id=67 /]

Volkswagen drives IDN dot-brand off a cliff

Volkwagen has decided it no longer wishes to run its Chinese-script dot-brand gTLD.

The car-maker’s Chinese arm has asked ICANN to terminate its contract for .大众汽车 (.xn--3oq18vl8pn36a), which has been in the root for five years.

It’s the standard terminating dot-brand story — the gTLD was never used and VW evidently decided it wasn’t needed.

The company also runs .volkswagen, and that’s not used either, but ICANN has yet to publish termination papers for that particular string.

Fellow German car-maker Audi is one of the most prolific users of dot-brands. Its .audi gTLD has over 1,800 registered domains, most of which appear to be used by its licensed dealerships.

.volkwagen is the 95th terminated dot-brand and the seventh terminated internationalized domain name gTLD.

France gets more domain takedown powers

Afnic, the French ccTLD registry, has updated its policies to make it easier for the government to take down .fr domain names, and has banned names that could be used for government-related phishing.

The company has incorporated provisions of a 2020 national law that allows the General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control to instruct the registry to suspend domains believed to be used in fraud.

It sounds similar to the set-up in the neighboring UK, where consumer protection agencies have a deal with Nominet to take down domains used for things like counterfeiting and piracy.

Afnic has also banned all domains where the second-level string ends in “-gouv”.

In France, official government domains end in .gouv.fr, but fraudsters could register the similar-looking -gouv.fr to trick citizens into thinking they were visiting a legit government web site. Not any more.

MMX to return GoDaddy cash to investors

Former new gTLD portfolio registry Minds + Machines (MMX) said Friday that it has started returning most of its recent GoDaddy windfall to shareholders.

It has launched a tender offer to buy back £58 million ($80 million) worth of shares, after selling off its wedge of 20-odd ICANN contracts to the registrar giant.

The offer price is 9.6p ($0.13) per share. MMX said that’s a premium of 12.9% on its September 8 closing price and 13.1% over the average between August 11 and September 8.

It’s roughly the same price shares were trading for at the start of 2012, when ICANN opened the last new gTLD application window, but substantially lower than its peak when it started making new gTLD money a couple years later.

The proposal does not cover all of its shares; over 31% will remain in shareholder hands after the tender offer expires October 1.

The company has about $110 million in cash right now, and expects to spend $24 million of that on the GoDaddy transition, taxes, employee payments, professional services and the like, as it winds down over the fourth quarter.

MMX will retain its listing on AIM in London after the wind-down of operations, making it a vessel for a potential reverse-takeover, in which another company (not necessarily in the domains business) could back into it for an easier way into the public markets.

The company sold its registry portfolio to GoDaddy for about $120 million, and has wound down its registrars.

Domain industry SHRINKS again… except of course it doesn’t

Verisign has published its latest Domain Name Industry Brief, once again showing growth numbers thrown off wildly by a single factor.

The second quarter closed with 367.3 million registrations across all TLDs, down by 2.8 million over the same point last year, the DNIB states.

But the entirety of that decline can be attributed to a single TLD. It’s Tokelau again!

.tk was down by 2.8 million domains compared to the year-ago quarter also. This decline was first recorded by Verisign in the fourth quarter last year, where it had a similarly depressing effect on the overall picture.

The ccTLD is operated by Dutch company Freenom, which gives away most of its domains for free, often on a monthly basis, and monetizes residual traffic whenever a name expires or is suspended for abuse.

It’s quite possible that most of its names are registry-owned, so it’s in Freenom’s discretion to keep hold of its entire inventory or periodically purge its database, which may be what happened in Q4.

It’s debatable, in other words, whether .tk’s numbers is really any reflection or guide on the rest of the domain name industry. To it’s credit, Verisign breaks out the non-.tk numbers separately.

The DNIB reports a rosier quarterly growth comparison — total internet-wide regs were up by 3.8 million names, or 1.0%.

The company’s own .com did well, growing by 2.4 million names to end June at 157 million. Even .net did better than usual, adding a net of a couple hundred thousand names, to 13.6 million.

All the top 10 ccTLDs were flat sequentially after rounding, with the exception of Brazil’s .br, which was up by 200,000 names.

Total ccTLD regs were 157.7 million, up 1.2 million sequentially but down 2.4 million year-over year. Factoring out .tk, the increases were 1.2 million and 400,000 respectively.

The second quarter of last year was a bit of a boom time for many registries due largely to the lockdown bump, which saw businesses in many countries rush to get online to survive pandemic restrictions.

Tokelau can not be blamed for the whopping 8.8 million decline in new gTLD registrations between the Junes, of course.

About six million of the plummet can be blamed on heavily discounted .icu, which saw its first junk drop begin about a year ago, and another two million seem to be attributable to .top.

Quarterly, the picture was a little brighter — Verisign says new gTLDs were up by under 100,000 compared to Q1 at 22.9 million.

Latest geo-gTLD goes to sunrise

After a protracted limited registration process, the latest geographic gTLD is due to shortly go live.

.zuerich, representing the canton and city of Zürich in Switzerland, went into sunrise yesterday. Registrations come with residency restrictions.

The sunrise runs the whole month of September, to be followed by a month-long limited registration period. General availability comes November 22.

In DNS terms, Zürich has the misfortune of having a diacritic in its name. While it could have applied for an internationalized domain name variant, it chose to deumlautize the string with the addition of a “E” instead.

The gTLD has been in the root for almost seven years, believe it or not, but it only now getting around to its formal launch phases.

ICANN records show its first restricted registration phase started in 2017.

Zone files show 25 live domains, but a web search reveals only one active non-registry web site — an addiction treatment center.

.zuerich is government-run, using CentralNic for registry services.

The canton has around 1.5 million inhabitants, around 440,000 of whom live in the city.