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The internet is about to get a lot gayer

Kevin Murphy, February 20, 2019, Domain Registries

Seven years after four companies applied for the .gay top-level domain, we finally have a winner.
Three applicants, including the community-driven bid that has been fighting ICANN for exclusive recognition for years, this week withdrew their applications, leaving Top Level Design the prevailing bidder.
Top Level Design is the Portland, Oregon registry that already runs .ink, .design and .wiki.
The withdrawing applicants are fellow portfolio registries Donuts and MMX, and community applicant dotgay LLC, which had been the main holdout preventing the contention set being resolved.
I do not yet know how the settlement was reached, but it smells very much like a private auction.
As a contention set only goes to auction with consent of all the applicants, it seems rather like it came about after dotgay finally threw in the towel.
dotgay was the only applicant to apply as a formal “community”, a special class of applicant under ICANN rules that gives a no-auction path to delegation if a rigorous set of tests can be surmounted.
Under dotgay’s plan, registrants would have to have been verified gay or gay-friendly before they could register a .gay domain, which never sat right with me.
The other applicants, Top Level Design included, all proposed open, unrestricted TLDs.
dotgay, which had huge amounts of support from gay rights groups, failed its Community Priority Evaluation in late 2014. The panel of Economist Intelligence Unit experts awarded it 10 out the 16 available points, short of the 14-point prevailing threshold.
Basically, the EIU said dotgay’s applicant wasn’t gay enough, largely because its definition of “gay” was considered overly broad, comprising the entire LGBTQIA+ community, including non-gay people.
After dotgay appealed, ICANN a few months later overturned the CPE ruling on a technicality.
A rerun of the CPE in October 2015 led to dotgay’s bid being awarded exactly the same failing score as a year earlier, leading to more dotgay appeals.
The .gay set was also held up by an ICANN investigation into the fairness of the CPE process as carried out by the EIU, which unsurprisingly found that everything was just hunky-dory.
The company in 2016 tried crowdfunding to raise $360,000 to fund its appeal, but after a few weeks had raised little more than a hundred bucks.
Since October 2017, dotgay has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process, a form of negotiation designed to avert a formal, expensive, Independent Review Process appeal, and the contention set had been on hold.
The company evidently decided it made more sense to cut its losses by submitting to an auction it had little chance of winning, rather than spend six or seven figures on a lengthy IRP in which it had no guarantee of prevailing.
Top Level Design, in its application, says it wants to create “the most safe, secure, and prideful .gay TLD possible” and that it is largely targeting “gay and queer people as well as those individuals that are involved in supporting gay cultures, such as advocacy, outreach, and civil rights.”
But, let’s face it, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of porn in there too.
There’s no mention in the winning bid of any specific policies to counter the abuse, such as cyberbullying or overt homophobia, that .gay is very likely to attract.
Top Level Design is likely to take .gay to launch in the back end of the year.
The settlement of the contention set is also good news for two publicly traded London companies.
MMX presumably stands to get a one-off revenue boost (I’m guessing in seven figures) from losing another auction, while CentralNic, Top Level Design’s chosen back-end registry provider, will see the benefits on an ongoing basis.

ICANN director Burr leaving Neustar

Kevin Murphy, February 11, 2019, Domain Registries

Neustar is losing its chief privacy officer, Becky Burr, who also sits on ICANN’s board of directors.
Burr, a lawyer, said last week that she’s decided to return to private practice after almost seven years at the registry.
Her last day will be March 1, but she’ll continue to advise the company as outside counsel on issues such as privacy and .us policy.
Lips are sealed on her exact destination, but it’s apparently small, Washington, DC-based, and focused on data protection.
Prior to Neustar, Burr worked for the law firm Wilmer Hale. Prior to that, she was in the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she helped create ICANN 20 years ago.
Despite no longer being directly employed by a registry or registrar, Burr said she’s hoping to be reelected to the ICANN board, where she represents the Contracted Parties House, when her current term expires at the end of the year.
In addition to .us, Neustar runs .co, .biz and acts as back-end for dozens of other TLDs.

Right of the colon? IDN getting killed over dot confusion

Kevin Murphy, February 11, 2019, Domain Registries

An internationalized domain name ccTLD is reportedly getting buried because of a confusion about how many dots should appear.
Armenia’s .հայ (.xn--y9a3aq) today has fewer than 300 registered domains, well under 1% of the volume enjoyed by the Latin-script .am, apparently due to a unique quirk of the Armenian language.
According to a report in the local tech press, sourcing a registry VP, .հայ domains are not working because of how the Armenian script uses punctuation.
In Armenian, a full-stop or period is represented by two vertically aligned dots called a verjaket that looks pretty much identical to a colon in English and other Latin-based languages.
A single dot, looking and positioned exactly like a Latin period, is called a mijaket and is used in the same way English and other languages use a colon.
It’s not entirely clear whether the problem lies with the user, the keyboards, the browsers, or elsewhere, but it’s plain to see how confusion could arise when you have Armenian-script characters on both sides of a Latin-script dot.
The registry, ISOC Armenia, is today reporting just 298 .հայ domains, compared to 34,354 .am domains.
The Latin-script ccTLD has benefited in the past from its association elsewhere with AM radio. It’s also sometimes used as a domain hack, including by Instagram’s URL shortener.
It’s probably worth noting that while Armenia seems to have a unique problem, it’s far from unusual for an IDN ccTLD to perform poorly against its Latin stablemate.
.հայ, which transliterates to “.hay”, is an abbreviation of the Armenian name for Armenia, Հայաստան or “Hayastan”. It was delegated by ICANN in 2015 as part of its IDN ccTLD fast-track program.
Armenian has fewer than seven million speakers worldwide. Armenia has roughly three million inhabitants.

Despite Afilias lawsuit, Neustar names date for Indian takeaway

Kevin Murphy, February 7, 2019, Domain Registries

Neustar has named the date for the transition of the .in registry away from incumbent Afilias..
It’s due to happen February 28, according to a new web site the company has set up to publicize the handover.
The registry will be down for up to 48 hours, starting from 1830 UTC, February 17, as a result.
There will be no new adds, and registrants won’t be able to update their domains, during the downtime. DNS will not be affected, so domains should still resolve.
Neustar won the back-end contract from .in manager NIXI last year, out from under Afilias, after reportedly undercutting Afilias’ $1.10 per-domain-per-year bid with a $0.70 bid of its own.
Given the 2.2 million domains in .in, that makes the contract worth about $7.7 million over its five-year duration.
The transition appears to be going ahead despite a lawsuit filed by Afilias against the Indian government last August, which sought to block the deal.
According to Neustar, the contract was awarded, regardless, last September.
But the lawsuit seems to be still active, judging by the latest filings published on the Delhi High Court web site, which show no judgement has yet been filed.

Operation September Thrust leads to another million-domain Radix gTLD

Kevin Murphy, February 4, 2019, Domain Registries

Radix has become the first new gTLD portfolio registry to hit over one million domains in more than one TLD.
It said today that .site has crossed the seven-digit threshold, joining .online, which hit a million names in 2018.
It’s huge recent growth for .site, which had around 561,000 domains under management at the end of September.
Radix CEO Sandeep Ramchandani told DI today that the rapid uptick comes as a result of a marketing program internally code-named “September Thrust”.
This involved promotional pricing — Ramchandani said the cheapest a .site could have been obtained would be about $0.99 — and joint-marketing efforts with multiple registrars.
This mostly involved plugs on registrar home pages, email shots, and promotion in the “check availability” part of registrar storefronts, he said.
The latest transaction reports filed with ICANN show .site grew by about 120,000 DUM in October, with West.cn, NameCheap and Network Solutions (Web.com) the biggest beneficiaries.
NetSol’s .site DUM actually grew by about 10x in the month.
The $1 retail pricing was apparently available at some registrars prior to September, and continues to exist on storefronts today.

Brexit blamed as .eu hits six-year low

Kevin Murphy, February 4, 2019, Domain Registries

EURid’s .eu top-level domain has hit a six-year low in terms of total registrations, and Brexit is to blame.
The registry has just announced that it had 3,684,750 domains under management at the end of 2018, down 63,129 domains compared to the 3,747,879 it had at the end of September.
That’s the lowest end-of-quarter number since September 2012, when it had 3,665,525 domains.
EURid said in a statement that the decline can be attributed to its “ramped up efforts towards tackling domain name abuse” and “uncertainty surrounding Brexit”.
The registry recently announced that UK-based .eu registrants can expect to lose their names by May, should the country crash out of the EU with no transition deal on March 29.
EU citizens living in the UK could also risk having their names temporarily suspended.
The number of .eu domains registered to the UK addresses dropped from 273,060 at the end of Q3 to 240,887 at the end of Q4, a 32,173 decline.
EURid said it also suspended 36,520 domains for abuse during the period.
Factoring out both of these drops, registrations would have otherwise been up by about 5,000.

CentralNic expects flat profit as revenue almost doubles

Kevin Murphy, February 4, 2019, Domain Registries

London-listed domain firm CentralNic today gave investors a sneak preview of its 2018 financial performance.
The company expects its profits at the adjusted EBITDA level to be up only slightly — from £6.6 million ($8.62 million) to £6.7 million ($8.75) — compared to 2017.
But revenue is expected to soar from £24.3 million ($31.7 million) to £42.5 million ($55.5 million), largely due to the impact of its merger with KeyDrive, which completed in August.
KeyDrive was the holding company for brands including the registrars Key-Systems, Moniker and BrandShelter, and the registry providers OpenRegistry and KSRegistry.
The Luxembourgish firm reversed into AIM-listed CentralNic in a deal, described as “transformative” for CentralNic, valued at up to $55 million.
Most of the company’s revenue now comes from the registrar part of the business, though the registry division is the more profitable.
CentralNic said today that “subscription products” are now roughly 90% of total revenue.
The company expects to save £1 million ($1.3 million) this year by migrating its old registrars over to the KeyDrive platform and migrating its new registries onto the CentralNic platform.
It has also appointed KeyDrive’s former CFO as CentralNic CFO, replacing Don Baladasan. Michael Riedl has also joined the board of directors, while Baladasan remains on the board as group managing director.
Full, audited financial results will be announced in May.

XYZ reveals .monster gTLD launch dates

Kevin Murphy, February 4, 2019, Domain Registries

XYZ.com has quietly unveiled its launch plan for its recently acquired gTLD, .monster.
General availability, with no eligibility requirements, is due to begin April 1.
The 30-day sunrise period is due to begin in just a couple of weeks — February 18.
.monster was acquired late last year from recruitment web site Monster.com, which had intended to operate it as a dot-brand, for an undisclosed sum.
Before the acquisition closed, Monster and ICANN amended the registry contract to cut the special dot-brand terms that would have removed the need for a sunrise period and would have prevented the domain being sold to regular registrants.
XYZ also intends to run a week-long Early Access Period — where premium prices apply — starting March 21.
I quite like the idea of .monster as an open gTLD.
While it’s certainly not going to perform as well volume-wise as .xyz, say, I can see it fitting nicely into the “quirky” niche occupied currently but the likes of Donuts’ .guru and .ninja — not really viable as standalone TLDs, but decent enough as part of a portfolio.
The company is pitching the TLD as “a domain for creative thinkers, masters of their craft, and modern-day renegades.”

Huge batch of Afilias TLDs approved in China

Kevin Murphy, January 31, 2019, Domain Registries

Seventeen Afilias-operated gTLDs have been approved for use in China.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced yesterday that the following Afilias-owned TLDs now have its official seal of approval: .archi, .bio, .black, .blue, .green, .lotto, .organic, .pet, .pink, .poker, .promo, .ski, .vote, .voto and .移动 (xn--6frz82g, means “mobile”),
Also approved are .asia and .网站 (.xn--5tzm5g means “website”), which to the best of my knowledge are not owned by Afilias but are quite closely managed by it.
All 17 were approved via the same Shanghai-based Afilias subsidiary, due to MIIT’s local presence requirements.
Chinese approval means Chinese registrants using Chinese registrars will be permitted to have their names resolve in China, subject to the country’s rather stringent censorship practices.
It’s the first batch of Afilias names to get the nod since April 2017, when .info, .pro and .mobi were approved.

.SE sells off $3.2 million registrar biz

Kevin Murphy, January 31, 2019, Domain Registries

Swedish ccTLD registry IIS has sold off its registrar business, .SE Direkt, to a local registrar for an undisclosed sum.
The buyer is Loopia, a web hosting company focused on the Swedish market. It will take over in a couple of weeks.
IIS said that starting February 12, lasting a few days, its customers’ domains will be transferred to Loopia. No disruption is expected.
.SE Direkt had 121,836 .se domains under management and 87,852 customers at the last count. Its 2018 revenue was expected to be around $3.2 million.
Loopia has around 225,000 customers. It does not appear to be ICANN-accredited, but you don’t need to be to sell ccTLD names.
It might actually be good news for departing .SE Direkt customers. Loopia sells .se domains for SEK 149 ($16.50), whereas .SE Direkt’s list price is SEK 270 ($29).
IIS said the sale was finalized following a review of competing bids following its October announcement that the unit was up for sale.
The .SE Direkt business has been on the decline for the best part of a decade, apparently deliberately. It was created as part of .se’s transition to a two-tier registry-registrar model in 2009.
IIS had expected to divest the business earlier, but customers did not jump ship as fast as expected.