Now South Africa looks to second-level domain sales

South Africa looks to be the next country to start letting people register domains directly at the second level of its ccTLD.
Local registry authority ZADNA this week opened a policy consultation on allowing registrants access to direct, second-level .za names.
Currently, if you want a .za you have to register at the third level under the likes of .co.za or .net.za.
But ZADNA says second-level names will help it continue to compete in a market now populated by hundreds of new gTLDs.
The company said it has been “inundated” by calls for such a move.
The policy shift would see South Africa follow the the path beaten in recent years by UK, New Zealand, Kenya and (probably) Australia, which have all changed policy to allow second-level names.
But these things are never without controversy.
Domain investors are typically resistant to such moves, fearing dilution and the possible devaluing of their portfolios.
There are often also intellectual property concerns, and concerns about priority “grandfathering” rights when matching .co.za and .org.za names, for example, have different owners.
ZADNA is floating the possibility of auctions to resolve these kinds of conflicts.
The proposal (pdf) is open for comment until April 16.

Donuts scraps 200 companies, consolidates under Binky Moon

Donuts has consolidated all of its original portfolio of new gTLD contracts under a single LLC, scrapping almost 200 shell companies in the process.
At least 196 contracts, each of which were originally allocated to a unique LLC, have been assigned now to Binky Moon LLC.
This seems to have happened back in late November, but ICANN only added the transfers to its published list of reassignments last week.
When Donuts applied for over 300 gTLDs back in 2012, each application belonged to a different shell company. Apparently randomly generated names — such as New Sky LLC, Sand Shadow LLC and Bitter Fields LLC — were chosen for each.
This was for “tax and other purposes” that made sense when Donuts was a new company, I’m told.
Now, with Donuts by one measure the fastest-growing tech company in the world, it made more sense to “retire” the old LLCs and realize the “operational efficiencies” of consolidation, a spokesperson said.
Not all of Donuts’ contracts belong to Binky Moon. When the company acquired 2003-round .travel last month it assigned the Registry Agreement to Dog Beach LLC.

Industry report show slightly stronger growth than Verisign’s

The latest domain name industry growth figures from CENTR show slightly better performance than a recent report from Verisign covering the same period.
CENTR says in its latest DomainWire Global TLD Report there were 331.1 million registered domains at the end of 2017, whereas Verisign, in its Domain Name Industry Brief last month, put that at 332.4 million domains.
But CENTR’s figures show growth of 1.2% compared to the end of 2016, a figure Verisign put at 0.9%.
The CENTR report shows growth in ccTLDs offset by a 0.4% decline in gTLD registrations. The drag factors for gTLDs were largely .net, .xyz and .top.
CENTR and Verisign use mostly the same sources for their data — published zone files for gTLDs and cooperative ccTLDs, and independent researcher Zooknic to plug the gaps — but they vary in how they calculate their growth numbers.
For example, Verisign said .com ended the year with 131.9 million names, but CENTR puts that number at 130.4 million. It looks to me like Verisign counts registered domains that do not appear in the .com zone file to get to its total.
In addition, CENTR excludes dot-brand gTLDs, gTLDs with fewer than 500 domains, and ccTLDs that do not provide reliable quarter-to-quarter data from its calculations.
The CENTR report can be downloaded here.

Google’s $25 million .app domain finally has a launch date

One of the questions I get asked fairly regularly is “When is .app coming out?”, but until today I haven’t had a good answer.
Now I do. Google has finally released its launch timeline for the could-be-popular new gTLD.
.app will go to sunrise March 29, the company said last week.
Trademark holder exclusivity will end May 1, at which point a week-long Early Access Period will kick in.
There will be an extra fee, so far undisclosed, for EAP buyers.
Finally, on May 8, everyone will get access to the domain as it goes into general availability.
Registry pricing has not been disclosed.
Unusually for a new gTLD, Google plans to keep its Trademark Claims service — which notifies registrants and trademark owners when there’s a potential trademark infringement — open indefinitely, as opposed to the minimum 90-day period.
.app was delegated in early July 2015, so it’s been a loooong wait for people interested in the space.
Google paid $25 million for .app at an ICANN public auction in February 2015. At the time, that was a record-breaking price for a gTLD, but it’s since between dwarfed by the $135 million Verisign is paying for .web.
Google also said that it’s currently working on a launch plan for .dev, another gTLD that folk have been asking about, but that for now it’s focused on .app alone.

auDA probably won’t pass on full Afilias savings to registrants

Switching .au’s back-end to Afilias will cut auDA’s per-domain costs by more than half, but registrants are not likely to benefit from the full impact of the savings.
auDA’s Bruce Tonkin, who led the committee that selected Afilias to replace incumbent Neustar, told DI this week that the organization is likely to take a bigger cut of .au registration fees in future, in order to invest in marketing.
That would include marketing the ability of Aussies to register .au domains at the second level for the first time — a controversial, yet-to-roll-out proposal.
Tonkin confirmed that the back-end fee auDA will be paying Afilias is less than half of what it is currently paying Neustar — the unconfirmed rumor is that it’s 40% of the current rate — but said that Afilias was not the cheapest of the nine bidders.
While .au names are sold for a minimum of two years, the current wholesale price charged to registrars works out to AUD 8.75 ($6.85) per year, of which Neustar gets AUD 6.33; auDA receives the other AUD 2.42.
A back-end fee of roughly $5 (US) per domain per year is well above market rates, so it’s pretty clear why auDA chose to open the contract to competition.
Tonkin explained the process by which Afilias was selected:

We first considered scoring without price, and Afilias received the highest score for non-financial criteria.
We then considered pricing information to form an assessment of value for money. The average pricing across the 9 [Request For Tender] responses was less than half of the present registry back-end fee ($6.33). Afilias was close to the average pricing, and while it was not the cheapest price — it was considered best value for money when taking into account the highest score in non-financial criteria.

I asked Afilias for comment on rumors that its price was 60% down on the current rate and received this statement:

Afilias believes auDA chose us based on the best overall value for the Australian internet community. The evaluation heavily weighted expertise, quality and breadth of service over price. While we don’t know what others bid, Afilias works to be competitive in today’s market. Attempts to price significantly higher than market without a value proposition are unrealistic and could even be considered price gouging.

It’s not known what price Neustar bid for the continuation of the contract, but I expect it will have also offered a deep discount to its current rate.
By switching, auDA is basically going to be saving itself over AUD 3 per domain per year, which works out to a total of AUD 9 million ($7 million) per year at least.
But the organization has yet to decide how much of that money, if any, to pass on to its registrars and ultimately registrants.
The auDA board of directors will meet in March to discuss this, Tonkin (who is in charge of the registry transition project but not on the board) said.
“We don’t want to set expectations that the wholesale price is going to change massively,” he said.
“I don’t expect it’s going to be any higher than the current wholesale price,” he said.
But he said he expects auDA to increase its slice of the pie in order to raise more money for marketing. The organization does “basically no marketing” now, he said.
“There’s certainly strong interest in doing more to market and grow the namespace,” he said. “One option is that more money is put into marketing the namespace and growing awareness of .au… That AUD 2.42, I expect that to change.”
This would include marketing direct second-level registrations, an incoming change to how .au names are sold that has domain investors worried about confusion and market dilution.
Outrage over the 2LD proposal — it appears to be a done deal, even if the details and timeline have yet to be finalized — has started attracting the attention of business media in Australia recently.
But auDA’s own research shows that opposition is not that substantial outside of these “special interests”.
A survey last year showed that 40% of .com.au registrants “support” or “strongly support” the direct registration proposal, with 18% “opposed” or “strongly opposed” Another 42% were completely unaware of the changes.
Support among .org.au registrants was lower, and it was higher among .net.au registrants.
But 36% of “special interests” — which appears to mean people who discovered the survey due to their close involvement in the domain industry — were opposed to the plan.
There’s no current timeline for the introduction of direct registrations, but the back-end handover from Neustar to Afilias is set to happen July 1 this year.
Neustar acquired AusRegistry, which has been running .au since 2002, for $87 million a couple of years ago.

Domain universe grows almost 1% in 2017 despite new gTLD slump

The total number of registered domain names in all TLDs was up 0.9% in 2017, despite a third-quarter dip, according to the latest data compiled by Verisign.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published yesterday, shows that there were 332.4 million domains registered at the end of the year.
That’s up by 1.7 million names (0.5%) on the third quarter and up 3.1 million names (0.9%) on 2016.
Growth is growth, but when you consider that 2015-2016 growth was 6.8%, under 1% appears feeble.
The drag factors in 2017 were of course the 2012-round new gTLDs and Verisign’s own .net, offset by increases in .com and ccTLDs.
New gTLD domains were 20.6 million at the end of the year, down by about 500,000 compared to the third quarter and five million names compared to 2016.
As a percentage of overall registrations, new gTLDs dropped from 7.8% at the end of 2016 to 6.2%.
The top 10 new gTLDs now account for under 50% of new gTLD regs for the first time.
The numbers were primarily affected by big declines in high-volume spaces such as .xyz, which caused the domain universe to actually shrink in Q3.
Verisign’s own .com fared better, as usual, with .net suffering a decline.
The year ended with 131.9 million .com names, up by five million names on the year, exactly offsetting the shrinkage in new gTLDs.
But .net ended up with 14.5 million names, a 800,000 drop on 2016.
In the ccTLD world, total regs were up 1.4 million (1%) quarterly and 3.4 million (2.4%) annually.
Excluding wild-card ccTLD .tk, which never deletes domains and for which data for 2017 was not available to Verisign, the growth was a more modest 0.7 million (0.5%) quarterly and 2.3 million (1.8%) annually.
The DNIB report for Q4 2017 can be downloaded here (pdf).

Donuts may make .travel names easier to buy after acquiring its first legacy gTLD

Donuts has added .travel to its swelling portfolio of gTLDs, under a deal with original registry Tralliance announced today.
It’s the company’s first acquisition of a legacy, pre-2012 gTLD, and the first “community” gTLD to join its stable of strings, which now stands at 239.
.travel went live in 2005, a part of ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” TLD applications.
As a sponsored TLD, .travel has eligibility and authentication requirements, but executive vice president Jon Nevett told DI that Donuts will look at “tinkering with” the current process to make domains easier to buy.
The current system requires what amounts to basically a self-declaration that you belong to the travel community, he said, but you have to visit the registry’s web site to obtain an authentication code before a registrar will let you buy a .travel domain.
Given that the community captured by .travel is extremely broad — you could be somebody blogging about their vacations and qualify — it seems to be a barrier of limited usefulness.
Nevett said Donuts has no immediate plans to migrate the TLD away from the Neustar back-end upon which it currently sits.
The rest of its portfolio runs on its own in-house registry platform, and one imagines that .travel will wind up there one day.
While .travel is one of Donuts most-expensive domains — priced at $99 retail at its own Name.com registrar — Nevett said there are no plans to cut pricing as yet.
There may be discounts, he said, and possibly promotions involving bundling with other travel-related gTLDs in its portfolio.
Donuts already runs .city, .holiday, .flights, .cruises, .vacations and several other thematically synergistic name spaces.
.travel had about 18,000 domains registered at the last count, with EnCirca, Name.com, 101domain, Key-Systems and CSC Corporate as its top five registrars.
It peaked 10 years ago at just under 215,000 registrations, largely due to to speculative bulk registrations made by parties connected to the registry that were dumped a couple of years later.
It’s been at under 20,000 names for the last five years, shrinking by small amounts every year.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Why are you doing that Whois search? DENIC wants to know

In a taste of what might be coming under EU privacy legislation, DENIC wants you to jump through some new hoops before it lets you see Whois data.
When doing a Whois query on its web site today, the German ccTLD registry first asks you to answer the question: “How do you justify your legitimate interest in accessing the whois data?”
It’s a multiple-choice question, with an extra field for typing in your reasons for doing the query.
Possible answers include “because you think that the use of the domain raises a legal problem”, which appears to be for trademark lawyers, and “because you want to collect information about the domain holder for business purposes”, which appears to be for domainers.

There’s no wrong answer that will deny you access to the Whois record you want to see, but users are warned that their use of Whois data is only to be for “legitimate purposes”, under pain of legal action.
A DENIC spokesperson told DI that the new system was introduced today “for statistical reasons”
“Its aim is just to get a better idea of the DENIC whois usage pattern and of the extent to which different user groups are utilising the extended service,” she said.
The move should be viewed in the context of the incoming General Data Protection Regulation, an EU privacy law that becomes fully implemented in May this year.
While there’s been a lot of focus on how this will effect ICANN and its harem of contracted gTLDs, it’s easy to forget that it affects ccTLDs just as much.
By conducting this mandatory survey of real Whois users, DENIC will presumably be able to gather some useful data that will inform how it stays GDPR-compliant after May.

MMX profitable as acquisition talks drag on

New gTLD registry Minds + Machines became profitable as an operating company for the first time in 2017, the company announced on Friday.
MMX saw billings of $10 million in the second half of the year, compared to $5.6 million in the first half, as domains under management grew 67% to 1.32 million.
Billings is a measure of sales, rather than the more formal measure of revenue for accounting purposes.
Renewals accounted for $5.6 million of billings in the year, which “for the first-time has exceeded fixed operating costs which have been reduced to below $5.5 million for 2017”.
The company’s bottom line will also boosted by $2.1 million due to MMX losing the .inc and .llc new gTLD auctions.
MMX also provided an update on its “strategic review”, a code word for the “acquisition by or sale/merger of the Company” that it announced last May.
The company said “the longevity of the discussions has been at times frustrating” but that it hopes to have something to announce by the time it reports its formal 2017 results in April.
MMX had originally hoped to have concluded these talks before last September.

Emojis coming to another ccTLD

dotFM is to make emoji domain names available in the .fm ccTLD it manages.
The company said today that it’s currently taking expressions of interest in ‘premium’ emoji inventory, and that such domains will be registerable at an unspecified point in future.
It’s published a list of single-emoji domains it plans to sell.
Emoji domains “will be available based on Unicode Consortium Emoji Version 5.0 standards using single code point; and allowing a mix of letters and emoji characters under the top-level .FM, as well as the dotRadio extensions, .RADIO.fm and .RADIO.am”, dotFM said.
Very few TLDs allow emojis to be registered today.
The most prominent is .ws, which is Western Samoa’s ccTLD, marketed as an abbreviation for “web site”.
.fm is the ccTLD for Micronesia, but dotFM markets it to radio stations.
As ccTLDs, they’re not subject to ICANN rules that essentially ban them contractually in gTLDs.
Emojis use the same encoding as internationalized domain names, but do not feature in the IDN standards because they’re not used in real spoken languages.
Emoji domains are usually considered not entirely practical due to the inconsistent ways they can be rendered by applications.