XYZ weighs into Epik controversy with .monster fundraising domain

New gTLD registry XYZ.com has set up a domain to help raise money for victims of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand last week.
The domain is give.monster. It redirects to a page on Givealittle.co.nz, a Kiwi crowdfunding site, that has so far raised almost NZD 7.8 million ($5.3 million) for the victims of the attack, which killed 50 and injured many more last Friday.
Given the amount of coverage in the New Zealand press, it appears that the fundraising page is legit.
The domain is obviously a reference to Epik.com CEO Rob Monster, who has come in for criticism this week for hosting and sharing the terrorist’s video of the attack, and then suggesting it might be a hoax, as I blogged earlier today.
XYZ is able to create this domain because it is the registry for .monster, a gTLD it acquired last year that is currently slap-bang in the middle of its early access launch period.
Whois records show that the domain was created a little over an hour ago and belongs to XYZ.com LLC.
I learned about it through this comment on DI:

We are sorry to see this in our industry… Please visit http://www.Give.Monster and donate to support victims of the horrific Christchurch shootings. Thank you for your support.

XYZ.com is the registry for .xyz, .college, .rent and other gTLDs. .monster previously belonged to recruitment web site Monster.com.

Another dot-brand bites the dust

Honeywell International, a $40-billion-a-year US conglomerate, has become the last major company to dump its dot-brand gTLD.
The company informed ICANN in February that it no longer wishes to run .honeywell, and ICANN yesterday published its preliminary decision not to transition the TLD to a new owner.
Honeywell never used .honeywell, which has been in the DNS root since June 2016, beyond the contractually mandated placeholder at nic.honeywell.
It becomes the 46th new gTLD registry to request a termination since 2015. Almost all have been dot-brands.
The company’s request is open for public comment until April 14. To date, there have been no public comments on any voluntary registry termination.
Honeywell is involved in the aerospace, building and consumer goods sectors. It has 130,000 employees and reported revenue of $40.5 billion for 2018.
It’s the first new gTLD termination request of 2019.

.vu to relaunch under mystery new registry

Vanuatu is to attempt to broaden the appeal of its .vu domain globally by switching to a new shared registry system.
The changes were initiated last week in Kobe, when the ICANN board of directors gave the final stamp of approval on the redelegation of the ccTLD.
.vu is now delegated to country’s Telecommunications Radiocommunications and Broadcasting Regulator (TRBR), having been managed since 1995 by Telecom Vanuatu Limited (TVL). The government passed a law in 2016 calling for the redelegation.
Under its new management, the market for .vu domains will be opened up at the registrar level. To date, TVL has operated as a sole source for .vu domains. From now on, it will just be one registrar among (presumably) many.
A registry back-end has already been selected, after tenders were received from nine companies, but it’s still in contract talks and TRBR is not ready to name the successful party just yet.
The Vanuatu government wants to encourage local ISPs and web developers to consider signing up as registrars or resellers, but the SRS will also be open to established international players.
Brand protection registrars and TLD completionists will no doubt begin to carry .vu directly as soon as they’re able to plug in to the new system.
But off the top of my head, I’m struggling to think of a strong global sales pitch for the string, other than a phonetic similarity to “view”.
It doesn’t stand for much as an acronym, doesn’t seem to work well in English as a domain hack, and doesn’t seem to mean much in other widely spoken languages (other than French, where it means “seen”, as in “déjà-vu”).
We can only hope the new management doesn’t attempt to market it with some kind of pathetic backronym.
Domains in .vu currently cost $50 (USD) per year when bought from TVL. I have no current data on how many .vu domains are registered.
InternetNZ’s Keith Davidson assisted in the redelegation and is handling comms during the handover.
Vanuatu is a Pacific archipelago nation, previously known as the New Hebrides, that gained independence from the UK and France in 1980. It had roughly 272,000 inhabitants at the last count.

O.com might be a one-off for Verisign

Verisign today was finally given approval to auction off o.com, the first single-character .com domain to hit the market since the early 1990s.
The ICANN board of directors voted to approve a contractual amendment that will lift the ban on single-character .coms in this instance, but it may not necessarily mean more will be sold in future.
The resolution passed in Japan states that the approval is “limited to the unique circumstances of this particular domain name, and the approval of the amendment does not establish a precedent that applies in other circumstances.”
So if Verisign decides it wants to sell off the remaining 22 one-letter .com domains in future, it’s going to have to go through the same lengthy approval process again, with no guarantee that ICANN will give it the nod.
Still, if the o.com proposal is hunky-dory this time around, I fail to see why ICANN would reject an identical proposal to sell a different domain.
As I explained in a blog post a week ago, Verisign will only get $7.85 a year for the domain, regardless of how many millions it raises.
The rest of the money will be distributed to non-profit causes by an independent third party.
While the auction has already cost Verisign far more money than it will make, it’s a nice PR win for the next time its .com price-raising powers are questioned.
Overstock.com, which has been lobbying ICANN and Verisign for the release of o.com for years is a virtually guaranteed bidder.
Former ICANN bigwig Kurt Pritz said recently that Overstock offered to pay ICANN $1 million to $2 million for the domain (somewhat shadily, it has to be said) over a decade ago.
Other O trademark owners that may show up include sporting goods vendor Oakley and future President of the United States Oprah Winfrey.
I hope bidders have to sign a no-suing covenant, as this is the kind of thing that could easily wind up in court.

Radix sees revenue up 30%

New gTLD registry Radix said today that its revenue increased by 30% in 2018, largely due to an end-of-year boost.
The company, which runs nine gTLDs including .online and .site, said that gross revenue was $16.95 million last year.
It added that net profit was up 45.6%, but the privately held company does not actually disclose the dollar value of its bottom line.
Radix said that the fourth quarter of the year, which presumably saw the benefits of Operation September Thrust, was its strongest quarter.
The company said that 27% of its revenue came from standard-price new registrations and 60% from renewals.
Its premiums brought in $1.9 million, 56% of which were premium renewals.

Verisign gets approval to sell O.com for $7.85

ICANN is to grant Verisign the right to sell a single-character .com domain name for the first time in over 25 years.
The organization’s board of directors is due to vote next Thursday to approve a complex proposal that would see Verisign auction off o.com, with almost all of the proceeds going to good causes.
“Approval of Amendment to Implement the Registry Service Request from Verisign to Authorize the Release for Registration of the Single-Character, Second-Level Domain, O.COM” is on the consent agenda for the board’s meeting at the conclusion of ICANN 64, which begins Saturday in Kobe, Japan.
Consent agenda placement means that there will likely be no further discussion — and no public discussion — before the board votes to approve the deal.
Verisign plans to auction the domain to the highest bidder, and then charge premium renewal fees that would essentially double the purchase price over a period of 25 years.
But the registry, already under scrutiny over its money-printing .com machine, would be banned from profiting from the sale.
Instead, Verisign would only receive its base registry fee — currently $7.85 per year — with the rest being held by an independent third party that would distribute the funds to worthy non-profit causes.
ICANN had referred the Verisign proposal, first put forward in December 2016, to the US government, and the Department of Justice gave it the nod in December 2017.
There was also a public comment period last May.
The request almost certainly came about due to Overstock.com’s incessant lobbying. The retailer has been obsessed with obtaining o.com for well over a decade, but was hamstrung by the legacy policy, enshrined in the .com registry agreement, that forbids the sale of single-character domains.
Whoever else wants to buy o.com, they’ll be bidding against Overstock, which has a trademark.
It’s quite possible nobody else will bid.
When Overstock briefly rebranded as O.co several years ago — it paid $350,000 for that domain — it said it saw 61% of its traffic going to o.com instead.
All single-character .com names that had not already been registered were reserved by IANA for technical reasons in 1993, well before ICANN took over DNS policy.
Today, only q.com, z.com and x.com are registered. Billionaire Elon Musk, who used x.com to launch PayPal, reacquired that domain for an undisclosed sum in 2017. GMO Internet bought z.com for $6.8 million in 2014.
With the sale of o.com now a near certainty, it is perhaps only a matter of time before more single-character .com names are also released.
No gTLD approved after 2012 has a restriction on single-character domains.
As a matter of disclosure: several years ago I briefly provided some consulting/writing services to a third party in support of the Verisign and Overstock positions on the release of single-character domain names, but I have no current financial interest in the matter.

At eleventh hour, most .uk registrants still don’t own their .uk names

Less than a quarter of all third-level .uk registrants have taken up the opportunity to buy their matching second-level domain, just a few months before the deadline.
According to February stats from registry Nominet, 9.76 million domains were registered under the likes of .co.uk and .org.uk, but only 2.27 million domains were registered directly under .uk, which works out at about 23%.
Nominet’s controversial Direct.uk policy was introduced in June 2014, with a grandfathering clause that gave all third-level registrants five years to grab their matching .uk domain before it returns to the pool of available names.
So if you own example.co.uk, you have until June 25 this year, 110 days from now, to exercise your exclusive rights to example.uk.
Registrants of .co.uk domains have priority over registrants of matching .org.uk and .me.uk domains. Nominet’s Whois tool can be used to figure out who has first dibs on any given string.
At least two brand protection registrars warned their clients this week that they will be at risk of cybersquatting if they don’t pick up their direct matches in time. But there’s potential for confusion here, after the deadline, whether or not you own a trademark.
I expect we could see a spike in complaints under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (the .uk equivalent of UDRP) in the back half of the year.
Nominet told DI in a statement today:

The take up right now is roughly in line with what we envisaged. We knew from the outset that some of the original 10 million with rights would not renew their domain, some would decide they did not want the equivalent .UK and some would leave it to the last minute to decide or take action. The feedback from both registrants and registrars, and the registration data, bears this out.

The statement added that the registry has started “ramping up” its outreach, and that in May it will launch “an advertising and awareness campaign” that will include newspapers, radio and trade publications.

Mohan takes the reins at Afilias

Ram Mohan appears to have taken over the C-suite at Afilias.
The long-time chief technology officer was also yesterday named to the newly created role of chief operating officer, with the suggestion that he’s also taken over much of the work of CEO Hal Lubsen.
Afilias said Mohan will continue to report to Lubsen, but that “most all of Mr. Lubsen’s previous direct reports will now report to Mr. Mohan”.
Lubsen, who has been listed on the Afilias web site as “72 years old” for at least four years, will “continue to be responsible for and oversee finance, mergers and acquisitions and most legal matters.”
Mohan has been with the company as CTO since the very outset, when it was awarded .info back in 2001. He wrapped up a 10-year term on ICANN’s board of directors last October.
He’s going to carry on with the CTO’s job “initially”, Afilias said, but it sounds like a replacement will be sought.

Nevett headhunts top execs from three rivals

Public Interest Registry has filled out its executive team by poaching senior staff from rivals Afilias, Donuts and Neustar.
Judy Song-Marshall of Neustar has joined as chief of staff, Joe Abley of Afilias is the new chief technology officer and Anand Vora has joined from Donuts as VP of business affairs.
They’re the first senior level appointments to be announced since Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett was appointed CEO three months ago.
PIR, the non-profit which runs .org and related gTLDs, has also let it be known that it’s looking for a chief financial officer. The job ad can be found here.

Internet to lose its .co.ck? Cook Islands mulls name change

The government of the Cook Islands is reportedly thinking about changing its name, putting a question mark over the long-term longevity of its .ck top-level domain.
The AFP is reporting that an exploratory committee has been set up to pick a new name for the country, which is currently named after British explorer James Cook.
The new name would be in the local language, Cook Islands Maori, but would also reflect the country’s Polynesian heritage and “strong Christian belief”, AFP reports.
The Cook Islands is in the Pacific Ocean, about 3,000km from New Zealand. It gained independence in 1965 but retains strong ties to NZ. It has about 12,000 citizens.
Telecom Cook Islands has been running its ccTLD, .ck, since 1995. Registrations, which are a few hundred bucks a year, are only possible at the third level, under .co.ck, .org.ck and so on.
It appears from reporting that any formal name change is still a long way off, but it seems possible that a change of name could well lead to a change of ISO 3166-1 string and therefore a change of ccTLD.
As I explained in my post about the possible loss of .io last week, any such change would take years to roll through the ICANN system. Nobody would lose their domains overnight.
But perhaps the most famous .ck domain appears to have already gone dormant.
Fictional mid-noughties hipster Nathan Barley, antihero of the Charlie Brooker sitcom of the same name, owned trashbat.co.ck, as the opening shot of the show established.

Sadly, that domain, which unlike clownpenis.fart actually existed and was used to promote the short-lived series, appears to stop resolving three or four years ago.