In harsh tones, ccNSO rejects NomCom appointee

ICANN’s Country Code Names Supporting Organization has rejected the appointment to its Council of a Canadian registry director.
Saying NomCom ignored long-standing guidance to avoid appointing registry employees, the ccNSO Council has said the recent naming of Marita Moll to the role is “unacceptable”.
Moll will have to choose between sitting on the Council and being a director of .ca registry CIRA, the Council said in a letter to NomCom and the ICANN board.
Three of the Council’s 18 voting members are selected by NomCom. The rest are elected from ccTLD registries, three from each of ICANN’s five geographic regions.
To maintain balance, and promote independent views, the Council told NomCom most recently back in 2012 that it should refrain from appointing people connected to ccTLD registries.
The new Council letter (pdf) reads:

Council’s view (none dissenting) is that your Committee’s proposed selection directly contravenes this requirement, notwithstanding the clear and explicit assurance we received in 2012 from the then Chair of Nominating Committee that the Committee would be “avoiding any member already belonging to the ccTLD management participating in the ccNSO”.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that CIRA already has representation on the Council in the form of CEO Byron Holland.
The letter concludes that the conflict is “irreconcilable” and the appointment “unacceptable”.
As the ccNSO does not appear to have refusal powers on NomCom appointees, it will presumably be up to Moll to decline the appointment.

Millions spent as three more new gTLDs auctioned

Two or three new gTLDs have been sold in a private auction that may well have seen over $20 million spent.
The not-yet-delegated strings .inc, .llc and (I think) .llp hit the block at some point this month.
They are the first new gTLDs to be auctioned since Verisign paid $135 million for .web a little over a year ago.
At this point, nobody wants to talk about which applicant(s) won which of the newly sold strings, but it seems that the proceeds ran into many millions.
MMX, which applied for .inc and .llc, said this morning that it has benefited from a $2.4 million windfall by losing both auctions.
The auctions evidently took place in September, but CEO Toby Hall declined to comment any further, citing non-disclosure agreements.
There were nine remaining applicants for .inc and eight for .llc.
I don’t think it’s possible to work out which sold for how much using just MMX’s disclosure.
But private auctions typically see the winning bid divided equally between the losers.
I believe .llp was probably sold off by auction at the same time.
The reason for this is that .llc, .inc and .llp were contention sets all being held up by one applicant’s dispute with ICANN.
Dot Registry LLC had applied for all three as “community” gTLDs, which meant it had to go through the Community Evaluation Process.
While it failed the CPE on all three counts, the company subsequently filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN, which it won last August.
You may recall that this was the IRP that found disturbing levels of ICANN meddling in the drafting of the CPE panel’s findings.
Ever since then, ICANN has been conducting an internal review, assisted by outside experts, into how the CPE process worked (or didn’t).
Lawyers for Dot Registry and other affected applications (for .music and .gay) have been haranguing ICANN all year to get a move on and resolve the issue.
And yet, just as the end appeared to be in sight, Dot Registry seems to have decided to give up (or, possibly, cash out) and allow the strings to go to auction.
CEO Shaul Jolles declined to comment on the auctions today.
All I can currently tell you is that at least two of the Dot Registry holdout strings have been sold and that MMX did not win either of them.
The applicants for .inc were: Uniregistry, Dot Registry, Afilias, GMO, GTLD Limited, MMX, Nu Dot Co (now a known Verisign front), Donuts and Google.
The applicants for .llc were: MMX, Dot Registry, Nu Dot Co, Donuts, Afilias, Top Level Design, myLLC and Google.

MMX revenue slips despite domain growth

MMX today posted a smaller loss for the first half of the year, despite managing to grow domains under management and hit some important financial milestones.
The new gTLD registry formerly known as Mind + Machines, which announced a few months ago that it’s looking to be acquired, reported an H1 loss of $526,000 compared to a loss of $1.9 million a year earlier.
Revenue and billings were both down due to the lack of any big launches in the period; H1 2016 had benefited from the strong launch of .vip in China.
Revenue, which is recognized over the duration of the domain registrations, was $5.3 million compared to $7.4 million in 2016. Billings, a measure of cash sales, were $5.6 million compared to $8.1 million.
Despite these dips, MMX is happy enough that the “quality” of its revenue is getting better.
The company said that revenue from domain renewals more than doubled to $2.4 million and represented 45% of revenue. A year ago, it was 15%.
As another measure of the health of its business, it also said that its renewal billings was greater than its operating expenditure for the first time, after cost-cutting.
Domains under management went into seven figures for the first time, to 1.1 million. That was up from 821,000 at the start of the year.
It processed 318,000 new registrations in the six months, compared to 452,000 a year earlier (when .vip’s launch provided a boost).

.xyz back on sale in China

Chinese registrars have started to carry .xyz domains again, about five months after a Chinese government ban.
West.cn and Net.cn are two of the China-based companies that appear to be selling .xyz names at the yuan equivalent of a US dollar, based on a spot check this morning.
West.cn flagged the “restoration” of service on its blog today, saying it was “overjoyed” to resume sales.
XYZ.com revealed back in May that its new gTLD domains were “temporarily” no longer available via Chinese registrars, after the government there suspended its license.
The reason for the suspension has always been a little vague, but the registry told DNW back in May that it related to Real Names Verification.
RNV is the government-mandated identity check that must take place before anyone in China can register and use a domain name.
XYZ had been outsourcing the function to ZDNS, but that relationship fell apart for some reason (rumor has it there was a money dispute) and XYZ decided to switch to Tele-info.
In the interim, Chinese registrars, apparently under order of their government, dutifully stopped carrying .xyz domains.
XYZ also went through ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process to get its move to Tele-info approved at the Registry Agreement level.
The downtime prevented XYZ from masking the precipitous decline in its number of domains under management, which has fallen by over three million since May.
XYZ and the Chinese government have yet to issue statements about the newly reinstated license.
UPDATE 10/10/2017 — XYZ.com got in touch last week to say that .xyz was never “banned” in China.
A spokesperson said in an email: “We had RNV in place with ZDNS and opted to switch. To be compliant with ICANN, we suspended registrations in China.”
He declined to clarify whether the suspension was voluntary or ICANN-mandated.
He also declined to confirm or deny that Chinese registrars been told to suspend .xyz registrations by the government, as local sources have previously told DI and Domain Name Wire.
Other gTLDs owned by other registries have previously obtained Chinese licenses without ICANN first approving their RNV providers.

puntCAT head of IT charged with “sedition”

Catalan gTLD registry puntCAT has confirmed that its head of IT, Pep Masoliver, has been arrested as part of a Spanish government crackdown on pushes for independence.
He’s been charged with “sedition” and is still in police custody this evening, a company spokesperson told DI.
His arrest coincided with the military police raid of puntCAT’s office in Barcelona that started this morning, related to a forthcoming Catalan independence referendum.
Spanish authorities had called for the registry to delete .cat domain names used to host content related to the referendum, which has been ruled illegal by the Spanish courts.
puntCAT, which had already alerted ICANN to what it characterized as the sweeping “censorship” of .cat, has now started up a social media campaign calling for Masoliver’s release.

Outraged by the arrest of our friend and colleague. We demand his immediate release #totsambtupep pic.twitter.com/TLsFwmlnQX

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

The hashtag appears to translate as “All With You, Pep”.
Masoliver was among a dozen people arrested today by Spanish national authorities in a series of raids that have been condemned as anti-democratic.
The Guardian has a good round-up of the day’s events and local reaction.
“Sedition” isn’t a word you hear very often nowadays, particularly in democratic Western Europe, and I’m not going to pretend to have the first idea how it is treated under Spanish law.
UPDATE 1944 UTC: puntCAT issued a statement condemning the events of today in very strong terms. It’s worth quoting in its entirety.

The Fundació puntCAT wants to express its utmost condemnation, indignation and reprobation for the actions that it has been suffering lately with successive judicial mandates, searches and finally the arrest of our Director of Innovation and Information Systems, Pep Masoliver.
We are a private and non for profit foundation devoted to ensuring that Catalan – a persecuted and maltreated language – has its space in the digital world. We assist all our users with the greatest professionalism and we are a reference entity in Catalonia and in the world.
The show that we have experienced in our offices this morning has been shameful and degrading, unworthy of a civilized country. We feel helpless in the face of these immensely disproportionate facts.
We demand the immediate release of our colleague and friend.
We will continue to work for our foundational objectives as well as for the defense of freedom of expression on the Internet.

Spanish cops raid .cat registry offices in referendum censorship row

Spanish police this morning raided the offices of .cat gTLD registry Fundació puntCAT, just days after demanding the company shut down any domains referring to a forthcoming referendum.
There are reports, unconfirmed by puntCAT at this time, that head of IT Pep Masoliver has been arrested in connection with the incident.
On Twitter, puntCAT said shortly after 10am local time (translation by Google Translate): “At this time @guardiacivil is performing an intervention in our offices.”
Guardia Civil is one of Spain’s various police forces.

En aquests moments la @guardiacivil està realitzant una intervenció a les nostres oficines. pic.twitter.com/j7JeLkjfXO

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

The raid comes as the national government cracks down on a local referendum on independence for the Catalonia region.
Catalonia was to go to the polls October 1 to decide whether it should split from Spain, but the vote was recently declared illegal by Spain’s highest constitutional court.
Local government officials have reportedly been arrested this morning as part of the crackdown.
It has been reported by Spanish media that puntCAT’s head of IT Pep Masoliver was been arrested at his home.
puntCAT declined to confirm the arrest immediately, telling DI: “Our IT manager has been required for the intervention at our office.”
At the weekend, the registry wrote to ICANN to warn it that Spanish authorities had instructed it on Friday to “block all .cat domains that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum”.
“We are being requested to censor content and suppress freedom of speech,” the letter, which condemned the “unprecedented and absolute scope” of the order, said.
The letter was posted to Twitter in its entirety.

We have denounced to @ICANN the disproportionate action of the courts. Committed to freedom on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/NkvTMYJ79d

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 17, 2017

.cat, which is designed for people from the Catalonia region or who speak Catalan, went live in 2006 following ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” gTLD applications.
It had 112,000 domains under management at the last count and a smooth growth curve that would make most new gTLD operators salivate.
As the raid happened just a couple of hours ago and appears to be ongoing, this is breaking news. I’ll provide updates throughout the day as more information emerges.
UPDATE 0950 UTC: The raid appears to have been temporarily frozen while the parties await the arrival of the court order authorizing the raid and the company’s CTO.
UPDATE 1022 UTC: Story updated to reflect reports of a puntCAT employee arrest.
UPDATE 1056 UTC: Updated with statement from puntCAT.
UPDATE 1653 UTC: Masoliver has been charged with “sedition”.

Okay, pedants, only 36% of new gTLDs are shrinking

Thirty-six percent of non-brand new gTLDs are shrinking, DI analysis shows.
According to numbers culled from zone files, 156 of the 435 commercial gTLDs we looked at had fewer domains yesterday than they did a year earlier.
On the bright side, that means the majority of them are still growing, but…

You: Wait, Kev, didn’t you write this exact same story yesterday, but said that 40% of new gTLDs were shrinking? Why are you now saying it’s 36%?
Me: People in the comments and on social media complained that I’d used domains under management (DUM) from May’s registry transaction reports — the most recent available — to collate the data yesterday, rather than more recent but less accurate zone files.
You: Why did they complain?
Me: I think because the May numbers show .xyz gaining on an annual basis, and yet everyone and his grandmother knows that .xyz’s numbers dropped off a cliff in July.
Your Grandmother: It’s true, they did. They lost millions…
You: Shut up, Gran. So, Kev, presumably if you do the same survey again, using the same TLDs, but use zone file data from this week instead, you’ll discover that the number of shrinking TLDs is far greater than 40%?
Me: Why would you presume that?
You: Because I also hate new gTLDs in general, not just .xyz specifically.
Me: Actually, the number of shrinking new gTLDs turns out to be smaller.
You: How come?
Me: Because only 36% of the gTLDs I surveyed had fewer numbers in their September 18, 2017 zone file than they did in their September 18, 2016 zone file.
You: So you actually over-reported the shrinkage in your first post? How come? I thought you were a shameless stooge of the new gTLD industry.
Me: I get that a lot.
You: Is .xyz at least on the list of biggest losers now?
Me: It is. Right at the top.
You: Good. I really fucking hate .xyz. What else changed? Stands to reason that some losers first time around are now gainers.
Me: Correct. Famous Four Media’s .party, for example, was a top 10 loser in the report comparing May 2016 DUM to May 2017 DUM, losing over 100,000 names, but it’s a top 10 gainer in the September-September zone file report, adding 85,000.
You: Explain.
Me: Well, .party’s reg numbers fell off a cliff in July 2016, and were still pretty depressed a year ago, but have since regained ground, presumably due to them costing less than a pack of gum.
You: Got it. Any others?
Me: It’s a similar story for .webcam, .work, .bar, .audio, .rest and a few others. They all shrunk May-May but gained September-September.
You: So, in summary, the new gTLD industry isn’t as unhealthy as you made out on Monday?
Me: Maybe. To be honest I don’t think the disparity between 36% and 40% makes a whole lot of difference. It’s still quite a lot of TLDs growing in the wrong direction. At one time, that kind of thing was virtually unheard of.
You: True dat.
Me: Anyway, can I get back to my blog post now?
You: Sure. Just don’t expect me to read to the end.

L’Oreal is using “closed generic” .makeup in an interesting way

What do you call a registry that defensively registers names on behalf of the very people that would be its most likely customers if the TLD weren’t so hideously overpriced?
L’Oreal, apparently.
About half of its .makeup new gTLD comprises the names or nicknames of social media “influencers” in the make-up scene, and they all seem to belong to the registry.
Ironically, these are precisely the kind of people you’d expect to actually go out and register .makeup domains, if they didn’t cost close to $7,000 a pop.
L’Oreal put a $5,500 wholesale price-tag on .makeup domains, evidently as a Plan B to avoid actually having to sell names to people, after its original plan to keep the string as a “closed generic” failed due to ICANN politicking.
As you might expect, uptake has been minimal. The zone file currently has about 266 domains in it.
Beyond L’Oreal itself, there are defensive registrations by companies not remotely related to the make-up industry, such as BMW and Intuit, and registrations by competing companies in the cosmetics industry, such as Christian Dior and Estee Lauder.
But there are also something like 150 .makeup domains that were all registered at the same time, this April, representing the names and social media handles of young women who post YouTube videos about makeup for their often thousands of subscribers.
It turns out these women are all participants (willing, it seems) in WeLove.Makeup, a web site created by L’Oreal to promote its products.
The site is basically a social media aggregator. Each “influencer” has their own page, populated by their posts from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and such. It’s maintained by Findie, which specializes in that kind of thing.
The domains matching the participants names do not resolve to the site, however. They’re all registered to L’Oreal’s registry management partner Fairwinds and resolve to ad-free registrar parking pages.
The names were registered via 101Domain, which prices .makeup names at $6,999, but I’ve no idea what payment arrangement Fairwinds/L’Oreal has for this kind of thing.
This is what a wannabe closed generic can look like, it seems — the registry pricing its customers out of the market then registering their names on their behalf anyway.
Is this “innovation”?

Four in 10 new gTLDs are shrinking

Forty percent of non-brand new gTLDs are shrinking, DI analysis shows.
According to numbers culled from registry reports, 172 of the 435 commercial gTLDs we looked at had fewer domains under management at the start of June than they did a year earlier.
On the bright side, that means the majority of them are still growing, but it’s still a pretty poor showing.
As you might expect, registries with the greatest exposure to the budget and/or Chinese markets were hardest hit over the period.
.wang, .red, .ren, .science and .party all saw DUM decline by six figures. Another 27 gTLDs saw declines of over 10,000 names.
Of the portfolio registries, Famous Four Media, Uniregistry and Afilias saw the steepest falls, each churning through hundreds of thousands of domains.
FFM strings including .science, .party and .date, which are regularly offered for under $0.50 and have terrible renewal rates, were among the biggest losers.
For Afilias, its .red, .blue and .pink combined saw volumes plummet by over 300,000. Its Korean-surname-themed .kim lost 90,000 names over the year.
Much of Uniregistry’s decline, I believe, is due to the expiration of thousands of domains that were essentially registry-owned.
Here’s a list of the top 40 biggest losers.
[table id=48 /]
At the opposite end of the table, the biggest gainers over the 12-month period were .xyz, .loan, .top, .online, .men, .tech, .kiwi, .club, .site and .bid.
Those 10 TLDs all saw volumes increase by over 100,000 names.
But that’s not necessarily hugely encouraging news, for various reasons.
We already know that .xyz is set to lose millions of names over its next couple of monthly registry reports.
One could guess that the peaks in Famous Four strings .bid, .loan and .men are likely to be matched by troughs before long.
.kiwi appears to be on the list due to its waiving the fees on about 200,000 domains, under a deal with a registrar last year.
.club recently said that it only expects to get 10% to 15% renewals on about 700,000 of its million total names.
Finally, .top is widely thought of as the TLD of choice for throwaway spam domains and has already lost a couple million names since June.
Here’s the top 30 gainers from my list:
[table id=49 /]
For the survey, I selected only new gTLDs from the 2012 round that had general availability dates in 2015 or earlier. I excluded any gTLD with Specifications 9 or 13, which act as a dot-brand flag, in their ICANN contract.
The 436 resulting TLDs include both wide-open, commercially available namespaces such as .link and .xyz, and the more restricted zones such as .bank and .law.

Domain growth flat in Q2

Growth in the volume of registered domain names was exactly the same in the second quarter as it was in the first.
That’s according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by Verisign late last week.
Q2 closed with 331.9 million registered names, up 1.3 million or 0.4% sequentially. The Q1 DNIB published three months ago also showed net growth of 1.3 million names.
That’s an increase of 6.7 million names, 2.1%, over the second quarter 2016, which compares unfavorably to the first quarter’s annual growth of 11.8 million names.
A slight majority of the 1.3 million bump seems to have come from .com and .net, which together grew from 143.6 million to 144.3 million names, roughly a 700,000 name or 0.4% sequential increase.
ccTLDs fared a little better, going to to 144.2 million names from 143.1 million in Q1. That’s a 1.1 million increase.
New gTLDs took the edge off the overall industry growth, shrinking from 25.4 million names in Q1 to 24.3 million in Q2.
That’s largely due to the expiration of millions of speculative .xyz registrations that were given away for free or nearly free in 2016.
As anticipated, .xyz fell off the top 10 list of all TLDs to be replaced by 17-year-old .info, which added an impressive 300,000 names to wind up in the #9 spot ahead of flat Netherlands ccTLD .nl.