Four more dot-brands call it quits

Four more dot-brand gTLDs are to disappear after their operators decided they don’t want them any more.
These are the latest victims of the voluntary cull:

• High-priced bling-maker Richemont, an enthusiastic new gTLD early adopter, is dumping .panerai (a watch brand) and .jlc (for Jaeger-LeCoultre, another watch brand), the sixth and seventh of its fourteen originally applied-for gTLDs to be abandoned.
• Norwegian energy company Equinor, which changed its name from Statoil a few months ago, is getting rid of .statoil for obvious reasons. Will it bother to apply for .equinor next time around? We’ll have to wait (and wait) and see.
• Online printing outfit Vistaprint no longer wants .vista, one of its two delegated TLDs. It still has .vistaprint, and is in contracting with ICANN for its bitterly-won .webs, which matches its Webs.com brand.

The three companies informed ICANN of their intention to scrap their registry agreements between May 14 and June 14, but ICANN only published their requests on its web site in the last few hours.
Needless to say, none of the four TLDs had any live sites beyond their contractually mandated minimum.
The number of delegated new gTLD registries to voluntarily terminate their contracts now stands at 36, all dot-brands.
Under ICANN procedures, the termination requests and ICANN’s decision not to re-delegate the strings to other registries are now open for public comment.

Fight breaks out as Afilias eats Neustar’s Aussie baby

The transition of .au to Afilias’ registry platform over the weekend seems to have gone quite smoothly, but that hasn’t stopped Neustar and a former key executive from lashing back at what it says are the gaining company’s “misinformed” statements.
The war of words, which has got quite nasty, came as Afilias transferred all 3.1 million .au domains to its control, after 16 years with the former incumbent.
Neustar, which hadn’t said much about losing one of its most-lucrative TLD contracts, on Friday published a lengthy blog post in which it said it wanted to “set the record straight” about Afilias’ statements leading up to the switch.
Afilias, in a series of blog posts and press releases since it won the .au contract, has been bigging up its technical capabilities.
While it’s not directly criticized Neustar and predecessor AusRegistry (which Neustar acquired for $87 million), the implication of many of these statements is that Neustar was, by comparison, a bit shit.
In Neustar’s latest post, Aussie VP George Pongas takes issue with several of these claims.
Any implications that the company did not offer 24/7 registrar support were incorrect, he wrote. Likewise, the idea that it did not have a DNS node in Western Australia was not true, he wrote.
He also took issue with claims that Afilias would offer improved security and a broader feature set for registrars, writing:

We’ve raised a number of concerns directly with auDA about what we considered to be inaccurate remarks comparing Neustar’s systems with the new Registry and implying that the new Registry will include “all previous functionality plus enhanced security and authentication measures”, as stated in recent auDA Member communications. We questioned auDA about this and were informed that the statement is comparing the various testing phases of Afilias’ Registry – so the latest version has “all previous functionality” of the earlier versions. It doesn’t mean the Registry will have “all previous functionality” of Neustar’s platform – which we believe the statement implies. It is a fact that a number of the proprietary features and services that Neustar currently provides to Registrars will no longer be available under the new Registry system, and thus Registrars will likely notice a difference.

“We stand by our statements,” an Afilias spokesperson told DI today.
While Neustar’s corporate stance was fairly reserved, former AusRegistry boss Adrian Kinderis, never a shrinking violet, has been reacting in an almost presidential fashion, using Twitter to describe auDA CEO Cameron Boardman as “incompetent”, criticizing a reporter, and using the hashtag #crookedcameron.

#crookedcameron actually asked me to come work for @auda so I would be silent on all the bullshit he is peddling thinking I could be #paidoff. Happy to tell you all I gave him a polite #gofuckyourself does the @auda Board know he offered me the gig?

— Adrian Kinderis (@AdrianKinderis) July 1, 2018

Kinderis, who headed up AusRegistry for the whole of its 16-year run with .au, left Neustar in April, three years after the acquisition. He’s now running something called MadBarry Enterprises and is still associated with the new gTLD .film.
He reckons Neustar lost the .au contract purely for financial reasons.
While Neustar is believed to have lowered its registry fee expectations when pitching to continue as the back end, auDA will save itself about AUD 9 million a year ($7 million) under Afilias, compared to the old regime.
auDA is not expected to hand this saving on to registrars and registrants, though I hear registrars have been offered marketing rebates recently.
auDA has previously told us that Afilias scored highest on the technical evaluation of the nine bidders, and that it was not the bidder with the lowest fee.
Kinderis is also of the opinion that Afilias is among those helping auDA stack its membership with compliant stooges.
Last month, auDA announced a dramatic four-fold increase in its membership — getting 955 new membership applications in just a month.
auDA thanked Afilias for this growth in membership, alongside three of the largest .au registrars: Ventra IP, Arq Group (formerly Melbourne IT), and CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks.
An Afilias spokesperson said that the company had offered its staff the option to become auDA members and about half — I estimate at roughly 150 people based on Afilias’ previously published headcounts — had taken it up on the offer.
It sounds rather like Afilias footed the AUD 22 per-person “Demand-class” membership application fees.
The rapid increase in membership at auDA has raised eyebrows in the .au community, with some accusing the registry of “branch stacking”.
That’s an Australian term used to describe the practice of signing up large numbers of members of a local branch of a political party in order to swing important votes.
The 955-plus new members will not be approved in time to influence the outcome of the vote to oust the auDA chair and others later this month.
But they will have voting rights by the time auDA’s annual general meeting comes around later this year. The AGM is when auDA will attempt to reform itself in light of a harsh government review of its practices.
As for the migration to Afilias itself, it seems to have gone relatively smoothly. I’m not aware of any reports of any serious technical issues, despite the fact that it was the largest TLD migration ever.
Some members have pointed out that most of .au’s ops are now off-shore, and old auDA Whois service is now hosted on a .ltd domain (hey, somebody’s got to use it) which is itself protected by Whois privacy.
I also noticed that the auDA web site, which used to have a hook into the registry that published an updated domain count every day, is no longer working.

.kids gTLD auction probably back on

Amazon, Google and a small non-profit appear to be headed to auction to fight for ownership of child-friendly new gTLDs.
ICANN last week defrosted the contention set for .kids/.kid; DotKids Foundation’s bid for .kids is no longer classified as “On-Hold”.
This means an ICANN-managed “last resort” auction is probably back on, having been cancelled last December in response to a DotKids request for reconsideration.
The RfR was thrown out by the ICANN board of directors, on the recommendation of its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, in May.
.kids and .kid are in the same contention set because DotKids fought and won a String Confusion Objection against Google’s .kid application.
It’s also directly competing with Amazon for .kids.
A last-resort auction would mean that proceeds would be deposited in a special ICANN bank account currently swollen with something like a quarter-billion dollars.

Archaeologists protest “televangelist” .bible gTLD

The head of the Biblical Archaeology Society has harshly criticized .bible and ICANN for the gTLD’s restrictive registration policies.
Writing in the latest issue of its Biblical Archaeology Review, Robert Cargill said .bible is on its way to becoming “the internet’s equivalent of televangelism.”
The gTLD is operated by the American Bible Society, best known for its “Good News” translation of the book.
Under its rules, registrants can’t use a .bible domain to “encourage or contribute to disrespect for the Bible or the Bible community”, with ABS determining what constitutes disrespect.
Cargill writes that his own publication could be at risk of losing its hypothetical .bible domain for publishing fact-based articles about Biblical history.
Cargill writes:

No one “owns” the Bible, and no one should have to submit to the American Bible Society’s ill-conceived holiness code in order to register a .BIBLE domain name. ABS should not be able to deny a .BIBLE domain name because it feels a website does not revere the name of God enough—or because it dares not endorse “orthodox Christianity.” How ICANN ever allowed this is beyond belief!

He’s also pissed that archaeology.bible is a premium domain with a retail price of close to six grand for the first year.
He’s not the first scholarly, secular voice to air concerns about .bible policy.
In March, the head of the Society of Biblical Literature was also critical of what he described as ABS’s “bait and switch” gTLD application.
The registry earlier this year revised its original policy to permit Jewish people to register names, after complaints from the Anti-Defamation League, among others.

.co first ccTLD to get China approval

Repurposed Colombian ccTLD .co has obtained official government approval to operate in China, according to a consultant whose client worked on the project.
Pinky Brand blogged this week that .co is the “first” foreign ccTLD to get the nod, among the raft of gTLDs that have gone down the same route over the last couple of years.
China’s own .cn and Chinese-script equivalents are of course already approved.
Under China’s policy regime, administered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, TLD registries have to set up a local presence and agree to Draconian takedown policies.
Non-approved TLDs are not permitted to have resolving domains, under the rules.
Most companies seeking Chinese approval tend to use a local proxy provider such as ZDNS, which seems to be the route taken by .co here.
.co is managed by Neustar via its Colombian subsidiary .CO Internet.

All Cyrillic .eu domains to be deleted

Eurid has announced that Cyrillic domain names in .eu will be deleted a year from now.
The registry said that it’s doing so to comply with the “no script mixing” recommendations for internationalized domain names, which are designed to limit the risk of homograph phishing attacks.
The deletions will kick in May 31, 2019, and only apply to names that have Cyrillic before the dot and Latin .eu after.
Cyrillic names in Eurid’s Cyrillic ccTLD .ею will not be affected.
The plan has been in place since Eurid adopted the IDNA2008 standard three years ago, but evidently not all registrants have dropped their affected names yet.
Bulgaria is the only EU member state to use Cyrillic in its national language.

Biggest TLD handover in history happens this weekend

Australia’s ccTLD registry will be down for 36 hours this weekend as it executes the biggest back-end transition in the history of the DNS.
Starting 0800 AEST on Saturday (2200 UTC on Friday), Afilias will take over the running of .au from Neustar-owned AusRegistry, after about 16 years in the saddle.
DNS will not be affected — meaning all .au domains should continue to resolve — but there won’t be any new creates, renews, transfers or changes during the downtime.
There are over 3.1 million domains in .au, more than the 2.7 million names in the .org registry when Afilias took over that contract from Verisign in 2003.
Afilias was picked from a pool of nine candidate back-end operators last December.
auDA, the registry, will save itself AUD 9 million ($7 million) per year at least, due to the lower per-domain fee Afilias is charging.
But hardly any of that saving is going to be passed on to registrars and ultimately registrants.
Bruce Tonkin, who chaired the selection committee for auDA, told us a few months back that much of the cash will be invested in marketing.

$44 billion company is latest deadbeat gTLD registry

Indian car-making giant Tata Motors has become the latest new gTLD registry to fail to pay its ICANN fees.
According to a breach notice (pdf), $44 billion-a-year Tata hasn’t paid its $6,250 quarterly registry fee since at least November last year (though probably much earlier).
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere and part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, the company runs .tatamotors as a dot-brand gTLD.
The breach notice, dated 10 days ago, also says that the company is in breach of its contract for failing to publish an abuse contact on its nic.tatamotors web site, something it seems to have corrected.
.tatamotors had half a dozen domains under management at the last count and seems to have at least experimented with using the TLD for private purposes.
Tata becomes the second dot-brand registry to get a slap for non-payment this year.
Back in April, the bank Kuwait Finance House, with revenues of $700 million a year, was also told it was late paying its fees.

After ICANN nod, MMX buys .xxx

MMX has closed the acquisition of porn-focused ICM Registry, after receiving the all-clear from ICANN for the contract transfers.
The deal is worth roughly $41 million — $10 million cash and about $31 million in stock.
ICM runs .xxx from the 2003 gTLD application round (though it didn’t go live until 2011) and .porn, .adult and .sex from the 2012 round.
MMX, which now has 29 fully-owned TLDs and another five in partnerships, will now become roughly a quarter-owned by former ICM employees and its back-end provider, Afilias.
ICM president Stuart Lawley now owns 15% of MMX and is its largest shareholder.
CEO Toby Hall said in a statement to the markets that he has “identified a number areas of potential growth and synergy”.
The company noted that the deal increases the share of its revenue coming from the US and Europe, implicitly highlighting the reduction of its exposure to the volatile Chinese market, where .vip has been its biggest money-spinner to date.
ICM had something like 152,000 .xxx domains under management at the last count, but over 80,000 of those are reservations. It has about 92,000 names in its zone file currently.
The three 2012-round names are faring less well, with about 8,000 to 10,000 names apiece in their zones.
Somebody once jokingly told me that ICM stood for “Internet Cash Machine”, due to the perception that porn-focused names would sell like, well, porn. Just thought I’d mention that.

Donuts buys back .fan, ignores plural .fans

Donuts has purchased the unlaunched new gTLD .fan from its struggling owner, just three years after selling it.
The company said today that .fan will become its 241st TLD in its portfolio, having inked a deal with Asiamix Digital.
Asiamix also runs the plural .fans, which Donuts has not acquired.
A Donuts spokesperson said the singular variant was the only acquisition considered, but did not say why.
The gTLD has a colorful ownership history, given that it has not even launched yet.
It was originally owned by Donuts, which won it unopposed in the 2012 application round.
The company then transferred it to then-independent Rightside under a deal the two companies had covering about 100 applications.
Rightside then in 2015 briskly sold the contract to Asiamix, which already had the rights to the plural .fans and presumably wanted to reduce market confusion.
For whatever reason, Asiamix sat on .fan and never even announced launch plans.
Rightside was then acquired by Donuts last year.
Donuts’ spokesperson declined to disclose whether the latest re-acquisition was for the same, more, or less than the original 2015 transaction.
Asiamix is currently very likely facing the death of its business, having failed to make a go of .fans.
The plural has never had more than about 1,500 names in its zone file.
Donuts plans to launch .fan in short order, with general availability expected in mid-September. We should be looking at a sunrise period fairly soon.