Donuts founder replaces Pitts as MMX’s premium guru

MMX has hired one of Donuts’ recently departed co-founders to market its premium domain name inventory, the company said today.
Dan Schindler, formerly Donuts’ executive VP, has been hired as a “special advisor”, tasked with “monetizing” premiums in the US and Europe.
He appears to be functionally replacing Victor Pitts, who was hired as director of premium sales two years ago. Pitts appears to have left the company in January.
MMX, which counts .vip, .law and .luxe among its stable of 32 gTLDs, expects to report premium sales for 2018 of around $2.3 million.
The company has also hired domain consultant Christa Taylor, founder and CEO of dottba, as its new chief marketing officer, a newly created position.
News of the appointments was released as MMX published another preliminary trading update ahead of its final 2018 financial results next month.
Here are some more nuggets from the announcement:

• Total domain registrations so far in 2019 up 38% to 1.84 million compared to a year ago.
• Billings up 129% year-on-year due to contributions from ICM Registry and a 40% increase in sales of .vip and .luxe domains in China.
• ICM’s porn-themed domains are renewing at 91%.
• Integration of .luxe into two more blockchain platforms — NameCoin and XAYA — is underway.

MMX expects to announce its full-year results April 3.

Neustar completes .in migration

The transfer of India’s suite of ccTLDs from Afilias to Neustar is done.
NIXI, the .in registry, announced today: “The transition of .IN to its new Neustar-backed Registry platform is now complete.”
With 2.2 million names, not counting names in NIXI’s plethora of localized transliterations, .in is the third-largest TLD migration, behind the 3.1 million .au names that made the reverse journey from Neustar to Afilias last year and the 2.7 million .org names that went from Verisign to Afilias in 2003.
The .in migration started yesterday. NIXI had expected up to 48 hours downtime at the registry EPP level, with obviously no DNS downtime.
The name servers for .in and its IDN equivalents currently all simultaneously include Afilias-owned and Neustar-owned servers.
An Afilias lawsuit against the Indian government, which claimed Neustar lacked experience with Indian scripts and attempted to block the transition, appears to have been dropped last week.
Neustar is reportedly charging NIXI $0.70 per transaction, $0.40 less than Afilias had bid to renew its contract. It won the contract after an open bidding process last August.

Scottish registry dumps the pound over Brexit fears

The .scot gTLD registry has decided to dump the British pound as its currency of choice, due to fears over Brexit.
DotScot’s back-end, CORE, told registrars this week that it will start billing in euros from March 29.
The switch is being made due to “the expected volatility in currency exchange rates between GBP and other main currencies post-Brexit”.
March 29 is currently enshrined in UK law as the date we will formally leave the European Union, though the interminable political machinations at Westminster are making it appear decreasingly unlikely that this date could be extended.
CORE said that the prices for .scot registrations, renewals and transfers will be set at €1.14 for each £1 it currently charges. That’s the average exchange rate over the last 12 months, registrars were told.
.scot is a geographic gTLD, rather than a ccTLD, which was approved in ICANN’s 2012 application round. It has about 11,000 domains under management.
Its largest registrar, 1&1 Ionos (part of Germany’s United Internet), charges £40 a year.
Only 38% of Scots voted in favor of Brexit back in 2016, the lowest of any of the UK’s four nations, with no region of Scotland voting “Leave”.
Naturally, a great many Scots believe they’re being dragged out of the EU kicking and screaming by their ignorant, English-bastard neighbors. Which strikes me as a fair point.

.film gTLD sees spike after dropping restrictions

The .film gTLD saw a small spike in registrations this week after dropping eligibility requirements.
The Australia-based registry, Motion Picture Domain Registry, went fully unrestricted February 22 and immediately saw at least 100 new names in its zone file.
It’s a small increase, but it meant .film, which sells for roughly $70 (101domain) to $120 (GoDaddy, its biggest channel) a year, topped 4,000 names for the first time.
It has not seen seen any additional growth since the weekend, however.
.film, from its 2015 launch, was restricted to registrants that could show a nexus to the film industry and was touted as an anti-piracy measure.
It does not appear to have been particularly well-policed, however. Its most popular domains (per Alexa rank) appear today to be piracy sites.
Despite the old restrictions, and despite being more than twice the price, .film has so far actually proved more popular than Donuts’ .movie gTLD, which has been wobbling around the 2,000 to 3,000 domain mark for the last couple of years.
I expect this is probably due to the fact that the word “film” means the same thing in many languages, whereas “movie” is a distinctly American English term.

Yanks beat Aussies to accountancy gTLD

The contention set for .cpa has been resolved, clearing the way for a new accountancy-themed gTLD.
The winner is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which submitted two bids for the string — one “community”, one vanilla, both overtly defensive in nature — back in 2012.
Its main rival, CPA Australia, which also applied on a community basis, withdrew its application two weeks ago.
Commercial registries Google, MMX and Donuts all have withdrawn their applications since late December, leaving only the two AICPA applications remaining.
This week, AICPA withdrew its community application, leaving its regular “single registrant” bid the winner.
AICPA is the US professional standards body for accountants, CPA Australia is the equivalent organization in Australia. ACIPA has 418,000 members, CPA Australia has 150,000.
Both groups failed their Community Priority Evaluations back in 2015 on the basis that their communities were tightly restricted to their own membership, and therefore too restrictive.
AICPA later amended its community application to permit CPAs belonging to non-US trade groups to register.
Both organizations were caught up in the CPE review that also entangled and delayed the likes of .music and .gay. They’ve also both appealed to ICANN with multiple Requests for Reconsideration and Cooperative Engagement Process engagements.
CPA Australia evidently threw in the towel after a December 14 resolution of ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee decision to throw out its latest RfR. It quit its CEP January 9.
It’s likely a private resolution of the set, perhaps an auction, occurred in December.
The winning application from AICPA states fairly unambiguously that the body has little appetite for actually running .cpa as a gTLD:

The main reasons for which AICPA submits this application for the .cpa gTLD is that it wants to prevent third parties from securing the TLD that is identical to AICPA’s highly distinctive and reputable trademark

So don’t get too excited if you’re an accountant champing at the bit for a .cpa domain. It’s going to be an unbelievably restrictive TLD, according to the application, with AICPA likely owning all the domains for years after delegation.

Google launches .dev with some big-name anchor tenants

Google is bringing .dev to general availability this week, and it’s already signed up some recognizable brands as anchor tenants.
Salesforce.com, GitHub and Cloudflare are among several outfits that have already developed web sites using pre-launch .dev domains granted to them by Google Registry.
Salesforce is offering developer tools at the catch crm.dev, GitHub is running a spin-off tool at github.dev and Cloudflare has workers.dev.
All are developed sites, among many more highlighted by Google’s “chief domain enthusiast” Ben Fried in a blog post yesterday.
Sites targeting female coders and offering advice on accessibility issues have also been launched.
.dev appears to have attracted over 500 registrations during its pre-launch periods, including sunrise.
Yesterday, it entered its Early Access Period, a week in which early birds can acquire .dev domains for a premium fee.
From five figures yesterday, prices decrease each day until they hit their .com-equivalent regular pricing on February 28.

The internet is about to get a lot gayer

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

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

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

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.