.org now has no price caps, but “no specific plans” to raise prices

ICANN has rubber-stamped Public Interest Registry’s new .org contract, removing the price caps that have been in effect for the best part of two decades.
That’s despite a huge outcry against the changes, which saw the vast majority of respondents to ICANN’s public comment period condemn the removal of caps.
The new contract, signed yesterday, completely removes the section that limited PIR to a 10% annual price increase.
It also makes PIR pay the $25,000 annual ICANN fee that all the other registries have to pay. Its ICANN transaction tax remains at $0.25.
PIR, a non-profit which funnels money to the Internet Society, is now allowed to raise its wholesale registry fee by however much it likes, pretty much whenever it likes.
But PIR again insisted that it does not plan to screw over the registrants of its almost 11 million .org domains.
The company said in a statement:

Regarding the removal of price caps, we would like to underscore that Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes for .ORG. Should there be a need for a sensible price increase at some point in the future, we will provide advanced notice to the public. The .ORG community is considered in every decision we make, and we are incredibly proud of the more than 15 years we have spent as a responsible steward of .ORG. PIR remains committed to acting in the best interest of the .ORG community for years to come.

That basically restates the comments it made before the contract was signed.
The current price of a .org is not public information, but PIR has told me previously that it’s under $10 a year and “at cost” registrar Cloudflare sells for $9.93 per year.
The last price increase was three years ago, reported variously as either $0.88 or $0.87.
ICANN received over 3,200 comments about the contract when it was first proposed, almost all of them opposed to the lifting of caps.
Opposition initially came from domainers alerted by an Internet Commerce Association awareness campaign, but later expanded to include general .org registrants and major non-profit organizations, as the word spread.
Notable support for the changes came from ICANN’s Business Constituency, which argued from its established position that ICANN should not be a price regulator, and from the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which caps should remain but should be raised from the 10%-a-year limit.
There’s a bit of a meme doing the rounds that ICANN has been hit by “regulatory capture” in this case, following a blog post from ReviewSignal.com blogger Kevin Ohashi last week, which sought to demonstrate how those filing comments in favor of the new contract had a vested interest in the outcome (as if the thousands of .org registrants filing opposing comments did not).
But I find the argument a bit flimsy. Nobody fingered by Ohashi had any decision-making power here.
In fact, the decision appears to have been made almost entirely by ICANN employees (its lawyers and Global Domains Division staff) “in consultation with the ICANN board of directors”.
There does not appear to have been a formal vote of the board. If there was such a vote, ICANN has broke the habit of a lifetime and not published any details of the meeting at which it took place.
After the public comment period closed, ICANN senior director for gTLD accounts and services Russ Weinstein prepared and published this comment summary (pdf), which rounds up the arguments for and against the proposed changes to the contract, then attempts to provide justification for the fait accompli.
On the price caps, Weinstein argues that standardizing .org along the lines of most of the other 1,200 gTLDs in existence fits with ICANN’s mission to enable competition in the domain name industry and “depend upon market mechanisms to promote and sustain a competitive environment”.
He also states:

Aligning with the Base gTLD Registry Agreement would also afford protections to existing registrants. The registry operator must provide six months’ notice to registrars for price changes and enable registrants to renew for up to 10 years prior to the change taking effect, thus enabling a registrant to lock in current prices for up to 10 years in advance of a pricing change.

This appears to be misleading. While it’s true that the new contract has the six-month notice period for price increases, so did the old one.
The new contract language takes several sentences to say what the old version did in one, and may remove some ambiguity, but both describe the notice period and lock-in opportunity.
If there’s a problem with how the new .org contract was signed off, it appears to be the lack of transparency.
It’s signed by GDD senior VP Cyrus Namazi, but who made the ultimate decision to sign it despite the outrage? Namazi? CEO Göran Marby? It certainly doesn’t seem to have been put before the board for a formal vote.
What kind of “consultation” between GDD and the board occurred? Is it recorded or noted anywhere? Was the board briefed about the vast number of negative comments the price cap proposal elicited?
Are public comment periods, which almost never have any impact on the end result, just a sham?
In my view, .org (along with .com and .net) are special cases among gTLDs that deserve a more thorough, broad and thoughtful consideration than the new .org contract received.
UPDATE: This article was updated at 1600 UTC to correct information related to .org’s current wholesale price.

What happens in Vegas… gets released in .vegas

Dot Vegas is releasing 2,266 previously reserved .vegas domain names, most of which accord to a decidedly sleazy theme.
Based on my eyeball scan of the list, I’d say easily half of the names being released are related to pornography, prostitution, gambling, drugs, and venereal diseases.
A large number are also family-friendly terms related to travel, tourism and general commercial services.
On the release list are domains including taxi.vegas, rentals.vegas, motels.vegas, lucky.vegas and magic.vegas,
Registrars may be interested to know that domains such as register.vegas, name.vegas and names.vegas are also on the list.
Undisclosed premium prices will be charged for 283 of the names, with the rest hitting the market at the regular .vegas price, which at the top two registrars (GoDaddy and 101domain, each with about 38% market share) is about $70-$80 retail for renewals.
The registry said that the release is happening as part of “an ongoing effort to increase awareness and usage of .vegas domain names”.
.vegas has yet to top 22,000 domains under management and has been on the decline, volume-wise, since last July.
Because they’ve never been available before, the new domains will have to run through the ICANN-mandated Trademark Claims period first, enabling trademark owners to snap up their brand-matches first.
I did spot a few obvious brands — such as Playboy and ChatRoulette — on the list.
Dot Vegas expects this claims period to run from August 1, with the general availability November 1.
The X-rated part of list is actually surprising educational. I thought I knew all the words, but apparently not. Without leaving the T’s, who knew “tribbing”, “teabagging” and “thai beads” were things?
I feel so naive.

ICANN gives .bj to Jeny

The ccTLD for Benin has been redelegated to the country’s government.
ICANN’s board of directors yesterday voted to hand over .bj to Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et de la Poste du Bénin, ARCEP, the nation’s telecoms regulator.
It had been in the hands of Benin Telecoms, the incumbent national telco, for the last 15 years, but authority over domain names was granted to ARCEP in legislation in 2017 and 2018.
A local ISP, Jeny, has been awarded the contract to run the registry.
According to IANA, Jeny was already running the registry before the redelegation request was even processed, so there’s no risk of the change of control affecting operations.
As usual with ccTLD redelegations, you’ll learn almost nothing from the ICANN board resolution. You’ll get a better precis of the situation from the IANA redelegation report.
Benin is a Francophone nation in West Africa with about 11 million inhabitants.

1.8 million UK grandfathers die after Nominet deadline hits

The deadline for registering “grandfathered” second-level domains in .uk passed this morning, leaving at many as 1.88 million names unclaimed.
From June 2014 until 0500 UTC this morning, anyone who owned a third-level domain in zones such as .co.uk or .org.uk had rights to register the matching 2LD under .uk.
Those rights have all expired now, and all the unclaimed 2LDs will be returned to the available pool next month.
Four days ago, Nominet said that there were still 1.88 million rights that had not been exercised. That’s from the over 10 million 3LDs whose registrants were initially given rights.
In March, 3.2 million names were still unclaimed. It seems about 1.4 million names have been claimed, or expired, at the eleventh hour, almost all in June.
One way of looking at it is that the owners of almost one in five .co.uk domains either decided they didn’t want the matching 2LD, or were unaware that it was available.
But about half of the original domains with rights have since dropped, so the portion of current 3LD owners now at risk of confusion with their 2LD match could actually be more like four in 10.
At the end of May, 2,439,181 .uk domains had been registered (including non-grandfathered domains) and there were 9,729,224 names registered at the third level.
The 1.8 million unclaimed names will now be the subject of a landrush.
On July 1, Nominet will start releasing the names in batches, alphabetically.
Accredited registrars will start slamming the registry — Nominet has set up a separate set of EPP infrastructure purely for this expected onslaught — with requests to register the most-valuable names.
Some registrars have been taking pre-registrations and will auction any names they successfully claim to the customers who put in pre-orders.
After a week, any names not already claimed by registrars will be released to the public, again in batches, starting from July 8.
The system has been criticized by smaller registrars, many of which believe Nominet is giving its larger registrars a much better chance at winning the good names simply because they have deeper pockets.

Afilias buys the other half of .global

Afilias has acquired one of its new gTLD back-end customers, Dot Global Domain Registry Limited, the registry for .global.
It immediately makes .global Afilias’ best-performing 2012-round new gTLD.
The price of the deal, between two private companies, was undisclosed.
As DI reported last November, Afilias already owned 45% of the company, which had 2017 revenue of $1.9 million and a $320,000 loss.
.global is a relatively good new gTLD business, as new gTLDs go.
We’re looking at a business with probably still low-seven-digit annual revenue, with annual adds and renewals trending upwards.
It had over 48,000 domain under management at the last count, with about about 22,500 annual renews.
The names renew at $100 at GoDaddy, which with 30% of .global regs is the largest .global registrar.
NameCheap, the second-largest registrar (with 11%), renews at about $65.
Anecdotally, it’s a new gTLD that I regularly come across in the wild, which is still relatively noteworthy. It’s often used by multinational companies for global gateway sites.
Afilias said that because .global already runs on its back-end, there won’t be any burdensome migration work for registrars, just some “paperwork will need to be updated”.
In terms of domains under management, .global immediately becomes Afilias’ highest-volume new gTLD (excluding pre-2012 .info, .pro and .mobi).
Its biggest 2012-round TLD, from the about 20 it owns, was .red, with around 34,000 DUM.

auDA reveals cut-off date for 2LD priority

Australian ccTLD manager auDA has revealed how old your .com.au domain has to be to qualify for priority registration of the matching second-level .au domain.
If you registered your current domain before February 4, 2018, you will get “category 1” priority. Names registered after that are considered “category 2”.
The categories will come into play when auDA makes direct 2LDs registrations available at some point in the fourth quarter this year.
Category 1 domain owners will have until April 20 next year to catch their match, then category 2 owners get until August 1.
It’s a much speedier process than the five-year grandfathering period Nominet offered in .uk domains.
After the priority periods are over, all unclaimed .au domains will be released to the available pool.
Brand owners, domain investors, and actually basically anyone who owns a .com.au or .org.au domain has a little over 13 months to make their mind up whether they want to run the risk of confusion with a third-party owner of a very similar domain.
Pricing is the same as third-level domains, so opting in to the 2LD basically doubles the price of participating in .au ownership.
auDA’s draft rules for the process can be read here (pdf).

Nic.br wins dot-brand from Afilias

Brazilian registry Nic.br has won its sixth gTLD client.
It’s taking on the dot-brand back-end business of Natura, a cosmetics company based in its home town of Sao Paulo.
The .natura gTLD was previously managed by Afilias.
I can’t imagine it’s a hugely valuable deal.
Natura has only a few domains in its zone. It’s using global.natura as a portal to its various national ccTLD sites and app.natura as a gateway to app stores where its mobile app can be obtained.
It’s the latest gTLD to change back-ends in the current wave of new gTLD rejiggering to come about as contracts negotiated during the 2012 application round start to expire.
Nic.br also runs the dot-brands .uol and .globo, the small city TLD .rio, the unlaunched generics .bom (means “good” in Portuguese) and .final, and of course its original ccTLD, .br.

.CLUB lowers premium prices to sell through registrars

.CLUB Domains has lowered the price of many of its reserved “premium” domain names in order to make them more easily available via the registrar channel, the company announced today.
Dozens of names previously priced above $20,000, and therefore only available via brokers, have been reduced to between $10,000 and $19,000, according to chief marketing officer Jeff Sass.
The company’s EPP system has tiered pricing and the top tier is $20,000, so registrars are not able to directly sell higher-priced names.
Sass said some of the repriced names include nyc.club, travellers.club, delivery.club, biking.club, fun.club, growth.club and home.club.

auDA chair racks off after just 18 months

Australian ccTLD manager auDA has lost its chair, again.
Chris Leptos quit abruptly, for undisclosed reasons, earlier this week.
He’d been in the job since November 2017, when he replaced Stuart Benjamin, who had resigned shortly before facing a no-confidence vote from members.
Leptos himself survived a similar attempted ousting last July, despite losing the “popular vote” of members.
auDA’s brief statement does not say why he’s resigned, but notably absent from the release is the usual set of boilerplate quotes talking up the successes of the departed’s tenure, which are pretty standard when a resignation is amicable.
Aussie domain blogger David Goldstein is reporting that Leptos had a disagreement about “governance issues” with CEO Cameron Boardman at a board meeting this week, which led to Leptos filing his resignation letter.
auDA has come under almost-daily criticism for the duration of Leptos’ spell in the chair. Many members are not happy with initiatives such as the registry back-end handover, the imminent release of second-level domains, and myriad general governance and transparency issues.
Leptos has been nothing if not confrontational in return.
During his tenure, a story alleging lavish spending by former directors (including one of auDA’s chief critics) was placed in the national media, and Leptos’ board referred an unspecified number to the Victoria Police.
Leptos has been replaced on an interim basis by Suzanne Ewart, an independent director, while his permanent replacement is sought.

After $30 million deal, is a .voice gTLD now inevitable?

Do big second-level domain sales translate into new gTLD success, and does the record-breaking $30 million sale of voice.com this week make a .voice gTLD inevitable?
The answers, I believe, are no and maybe.
Before the 2012 new gTLD application round, one way applicants picked their strings was by combing through the .com zone file to find frequently-occurring words that terminated the second level string.
This is where we get the likes of .site and .online from Radix and much of Donuts’ portfolio.
But applicants also looked at lists of high-priced secondary market sales for inspiration.
This is where we get the likes of .vodka, from MMX.
The latter strategy has seen mixed-to-poor results.
Five of the top domain sales, as compiled by Domain Name Journal, were not eligible for gTLD status are they are too short.
Of the remaining 15 strings, “sex” (which occurs twice), “fund”, “porn”, “toys” and “vodka” were all applied for in 2012 and are currently on sale.
The strings “clothes” and “diamond” do not appear as gTLDs, but Donuts runs both .clothing and .diamonds.
Not delegated in any fashion are “porno” (unless you count it as a derivative of “porn”), “slots”, “tesla”, “whisky” and “california”. A company called IntercontinentalExchange runs .ice as a dot-brand.
As well as .clothing and .diamonds, .fund and .toys are both also Donuts TLDs. None of them are doing spectacularly well.
At the lower end, .diamonds currently has fewer than 3,000 domain under management, but has a relatively high price compared to the the higher-volume TLDs in Donuts’ stable.
At the high-volume end, .fund has just shy of 16,000 names and .clothing has about 12,000.
Judging by their retail prices, and the fact that Donuts benefits from the economies of scale of a 240-strong TLD portfolio, I’m going to guess these domains are profitable, but not hugely so.
If we turn our attention to .vodka, with its roughly 1,500 domains, it seems clear that MMX is barely covering the cost of its annual ICANN fees. Yet vodka.com sold for $3 million.
So will anyone be tempted to apply for .voice in the next gTLD application round? I’d say it’s very possible.
First, “voice” is a nice enough string. It could apply to telephony services, but also to general publishing platforms that give their customers a “voice”. I’d say it could gather up enough registrations to fit profitably into a large portfolio, but would not break any records in terms of volume.
But perhaps the existence of voice.com buyer Block.one as a possible applicant will raise some other applicants out of the woodwork.
Block.one, which uses a new gTLD and an alt-ccTLD (.io) for its primary web sites, is certainly not out-of-touch when it come to alternative domain names.
Could it apply for .voice, and if it does how much would it be willing to spend to pay off rival applicants? It still apparently has billions of dollars from its internet coin offering in the bank.
How much of that would it be prepared to pay for .voice at private auction?
That prospect alone might be enough to stir the interest of some would-be applicants, but it has to be said that it’s by no means certain that the highly gameable application process ICANN deployed in 2012 is going to look the same next time around.