auDA chair quits days before vote to fire him

The chair of .au registry auDA has quit the job just three days before members were due to vote on a motion to fire him.
Stuart Benjamin, who took on the role in late 2015, faced a special member meeting on Monday that had just one resolution on its agenda:

That Stuart Benjamin be removed as a director of the Company with immediate effect.

Benjamin said today: “I have reached the view that there is no possible positive outcome for the organisation from the vote planned for Monday.”
That could mean he anticipated losing the vote, but it could also mean that he viewed a narrow victory as just as bad an outcome, optically, for auDA.
The confidence vote had been on the agenda due to a campaign at Grumpy.com.au organized by domainer/blogger Ned O’Meara.
Grumpy’s supporters reckon auDA has gone to the dogs over the last couple of years, with staff quitting or being fired en masse and an unwelcome culture of secrecy being imposed.
But Benjamin wrote:

As Chair I have overseen an increase in policy generation, in effective oversight, and in good governance.
We have also commissioned some of the largest member consultation projects in auDA’s history.
However, the auDA Board and members need to forge a different way of working together and I think there is a better chance for that to happen if I step away.

One bone of contention had been a new “code of conduct” that allowed auDA to revoke membership from any member who harassed or bullied staff.
Grumpy had opposed this measure because the code also included a gag order barring members from criticizing auDA in the media.
Benjamin took the opportunity to address this in his resignation announcement today, saying:

Everyone at auDA is open to robust criticism on strategy, policy and decision-making – that interaction makes us stronger. When that healthy engagement devolves into personal attacks on board members, the capacity of the organisation to attract and retain good people is affected.
I will continue to take a stand against cyber bullying and will not be deterred in standing up to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to personally attack staff and directors. I do not want my experiences to discourage others from running for election, or accepting an appointment, to this important organisation.

Another fractious issue, auDA’s decision to build a new in-house registry infrastructure, appears to have softened this week also.
The special general meeting is to proceed as planned on Monday. The only other items on the agenda are a CEO’s report and “any other business”.
Benjamin’s resignation letter to the .au community can be read here.

Donuts to complete Rightside acquisition tonight

Donuts is on the verge of closing its acquisition of coopetitor Rightside, after the vast majority of Rightside shareholders agreed to sell up.
Rightside just disclosed that owners of 92% of its shares — 17,740,054 shares — have agreed to sell at Donuts’ offer price of $10.60 per share.
That means the remaining 8% of shares that were not tendered will be converted into the right to receive $10.60 and Donuts can close the acquisition before the Nasdaq opens tomorrow morning.
After the $213 million deal closes, Rightside will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Donuts and Donuts can get on with implementing whatever efficiencies it has identified.
Rightside will cease to be publicly listed afterwards.
Together the combined company will be the registry for about 240 new gTLDs, as well as owning its own back-end registry infrastructure and the retail registrar Name.com.

MMX says .vip renewals running at 75%

MMX has revealed that its renewal rate for first-month .vip registrations in China were over 75%.
The portfolio gTLD registry, also known as Minds + Machines, said that 317,000 domains that were registered during .vip’s first month of availability have now been renewed.
The news follows a June announcement that the renewal rate would be over 70%.
The large majority of .vip names registered are registered via Chinese registrars, where prices can be around the $3 to $4 mark.
MMX CEO Toby Hall said in a statement that the company now plans to release some of its reserved “premium” .vip names.
He added that the company is confident that its recurring revenue from renewals will soon be high enough to cover its fixed overhead costs, one of its key performance benchmarks.

auDA now looking to outsource .au registry

Australian ccTLD overseer auDA appears to have softened its approach to overhauling the management of .au.
The organization said today that it’s now planning to look for an “outsourced registry operation” that will come online in July 2018.
In recent months, the company had been looking for suppliers to help it build a dedicated, in-house, .au infrastructure, in addition to keeping its outsourcing options open.
Today, auDA said that its recent request for expressions of interest had concluded. It said:

The [Registry Transformation Project] team have been very pleased with the strength of responses received and recommended to the auDA Board that auDA should proceed to the next stage of the project. The auDA Board subsequently resolved to undertake a formal Request for Tender (RFT) process. The RFT will be restricted to the respondents of the REOI with a scope to deliver an outsourced registry operation, based on auDA’s updated specifications, by July 2018.

It looks like any registry providers that did not get their foot in the door with the REOI are now permanently shut out of the process.
Additionally, it appears as though auDA has settled on an outsourced, rather than in-house, solution. Given the fact that the majority of the industry is based on service-based registry solutions, that had always seemed like a strong possibility.
auDA now plans to post a draft technical spec for comment August 14 and a formal request for tenders August 28, with a view to picking a winner in October/November for a July 2018 launch.
The company currently uses Neustar as its back-end due to Neustar’s 2015 acquisition of 15-year incumbent AusRegistry.
The names of the companies responding to the REOI, and their number, have not been disclosed.
auDA is currently facing a member revolt, partly but by no means exclusively over its decision to build an in-house registry. The company’s chair finds out whether members want him fired or not on Monday.

.blog tops 100,000 names, 66,500 blogs

The new gTLD .blog has gone through the 100,000 registered domain mark, according to its registry.
Knock Knock Whois There said that the milestone was reached with the registration of kitchenmagic.blog today.
It’s a pretty good start for the gTLD, which went into general availability last November, making for an average of 12,500 names added per month.
While KKWT has offered discounts and volume incentives to registrars, its wholesale prices have not approached levels low enough to start attracting abusive use en masse. We’re talking around the $8 mark at the cheapest, I hear.
In fact, the registry said today that it reckons 66.5% of its domains — 66,500, in other words — “have a unique website associated with them”, compared with an industry average under 40%.
Both of those statistics seem to have been supplied by Pandalytics, the DomainsBot service to which KKWT subscribes, and do not appear to be publicly available.
If accurate, 66.5% usage is a much better statistic to brag about than 100,000 registrations, in my view. Usage, of course, drives the virtuous circle that leads to more sales.

CentralNic brings back old CFO

CentralNic has swapped its currently chief financial officer for his immediate predecessor.
Glenn Hayward has left the company after three and a half years “to pursue other opportunities”, the company said in a statement to the markets today.
He has been replaced by Don Baladasan, who was CFO of the company between 2010 and 2014.
During his previous stint in the role, he oversaw CentralNic’s flotation on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

Short .vegas domains go on sale

Dot Vegas has made one and two-character .vegas domain names available to register on a first-come, first-served basis.
Single-character domains such as a.vegas and 7.vegas and two-character names such as 77.vegas and bj.vegas all appear to be available, including domains that match country-code TLDs.
Prices seem to be around the $2,750 to $3,299 mark for the one-character names at the three registrars Dot Vegas plugged in its announcement.
For the two-character names, you’re looking at $550 to $699, again depending on registrar.
Renewal fees for these short names seem to be about double what you’d expect to pay per year for a regular .vegas name, starting at over $100 per year.
Of the three promoted registrars — GoDaddy, Uniregistry and NameCheap — Uniregistry appears to be the cheapest and GoDaddy the most expensive.
The .vegas gTLD has been on the market for about three years and has about 16,000 domains in its zone file currently.

Domain growth slows a lot in Q1

The growth of the domain name industry slowed in the first quarter, numbers published today by Verisign reveal.
According to its latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), the domain universe grew to 330.6 million in Q1.
That’s an increase of 1.3 million names on Q4 2016, a 0.4% sequential increase, and 11.8 million names, 3.7% growth, compared to Q1 2016.
In the Q4 DNIB, Verisign reported industry growth of 0.7% and 6.8% respectively.
The only change on the list of the top 10 TLDs was that .nl and .xyz switched places (.xyz is now in 10th place, with 5.6 million names, but this rank will not last long).
ccTLDs in general did not match the growth of the overall market. There were approximately 143.1 million ccTLD domains at the end of March, up 0.3% sequentially and 1.7% year over year, both substantially smaller numbers than reported in Q4.
The free ccTLD .tk, which has been responsible for huge swings in recent reports, is reported to have declined by about 100,000 names to 18.6 million.
Excluding .tk, the growth rate of ccTLDs was better — 0.5% sequentially and 3.9% compared to the year-ago quarter.
Verisign’s data is largely based on zone files for gTLDs and independent researcher ZookNic for ccTLDs.

ICANN gives the nod to Donuts-Rightside merger

ICANN has given its consent to the acquisition of Rightside by rival new gTLD registry Donuts, according to the companies.
The nod means that one barrier to the $213 million deal has been lifted.
Rightside, which is listed on Nasdaq, still needs the majority of its shareholders to agree to the deal and to satisfy other customary closing conditions.
ICANN approval does not mean the organization has passed any judgment about whether the deal is pro-competition or anything like that, it just means it’s checked that the buyer has the funds and the nous to run the TLDs in question and is compliant with various policies.
All new gTLD Registry Agreements given ICANN the right to consent — or not — to the contract being assigned to a third party.
The acquisition was announced last month at the end of a turbulent year or so for Rightside.

Junk drop cuts .xyz in half, .top claims volume crown

The .xyz gTLD has seen its zone file halve in size, as millions of free and cheap domains were not renewed.
The former volume leader among new gTLDs started this month with a tad over 5.2 million domains in its zone.
But its July 17 zone contained 2.5 million, much less than half as many, DI analysis shows.
The precipitous decline means that Chinese-run gTLD .top, increasingly notorious as a go-to TLD for spammers, is now literally at the top of the league table, when you measure new gTLDs by zone file volume, with 2.6 million names.
The primary reason for .xyz losing so many names is of course the expiration of most of the domains that were sold for just $0.01 — or given away for free — in the first few days of June 2016, and the aggressive promotional pricing on offer for the remainder of that month.
On May 30, 2016, there were just under 2.8 million names in the .xyz zone. By July 1, 2016, that number had topped 6.2 million, an increase of 3.4 million over a single month.
That was .xyz’s peak. The zone has been in gradual decline ever since.
Domains generally take 45 days to drop, so it’s entirely possible XYZ.com will see further losses over the next month or so.
There’s nothing unusual about seeing a so-called “junk drop” a year after a TLD launches or runs a free-domains promotion. It’s been well-understood for over a decade and has been anticipated for .xyz for over a year.
But compounding its problems, the .xyz registry appears to still be banned in China, where a substantial portion of its former customer base is located.
The company disclosed over two months ago that it had a “temporary” problem that had seen its license to sell domains via Chinese registrars suspended.
The ban was related to XYZ falling out with its original “real name verification” provider, ZDNS, which was tasked with verifying the identities of Chinese registrants per local government regulations.
I’ve never been able to confirm with either party the cause of this split, but everyone else involved in the Chinese market I’ve asked has told me it related to a dispute over money.
Regardless, two months later the major Chinese registrars I checked today still appear to not be carrying .xyz names.
XYZ has meanwhile signed up with alternative Chinese RNV provider Tele-info, and just three days ago submitted the necessary paperwork (pdf) with ICANN to have the move approved as a registry service under its contract.
In that request, XYZ said the new RNV service “will allow XYZ to reenter certain domain name markets”, suggesting that it has not yet regained Chinese government approval to operate there.