CIRA has a record year for regs

Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA says its fiscal 2018 was its best year yet for new .ca registrations.
The company today said it registered 537,941 names in the year to the end of March.
Its previous record, from its FY12, was 511,900.
Its current total domains under management was 2,736,980, an all-time high, the company said in a press release.
CIRA has a Canadians-only reg policy, which reduces the impact of foreign speculation.

MMX rejected three takeover bids before buying .xxx

MMX talked to three other domain name companies about potentially selling itself before deciding instead to go on the offensive, picking up ICM Registry for about $41 million.
The company came out of a year-long strategic review on Friday with the shock news that it had agreed to buy the .xxx, .adult, .porn and .sex registry, for $10 million cash and about $31 million in stock.
CEO Toby Hall told DI today that informal talks about MMX being sold or merged via reverse takeover had gone on with numerous companies over the last 11 months, but that they only proceeded to formal negotiations in three cases.
Hall said he’d been chatting to ICM president and majority owner Stuart Lawley about a possible combination for over two years.
ICM itself talked to four potential buyers before going with MMX’s offer, according to ICM.
Lawley, who’s quitting the company, will become MMX’s largest shareholder following the deal, with about 15% of the company’s shares. Five other senior managers, as well as ICM investor and back-end provider Afilias, will also get stock.
Combined, ICM-related entities will own roughly a quarter of MMX after the deal closes, Hall said.
ICM, with its high-price domains and pre-2012 early-mover advantage, is the much more profitable company.
It had sales of $7.3 million and net income of $3.5 million in 2017, on approximately 100,000 registrations.
Compared to MMX, that’s about the same amount of profit on about half the revenue. It just reported 2017 profit of $3.8 million on revenue of $14.3 million.
There’s doesn’t seem to be much need or desire to start swinging the cost-cutting axe at ICM, in other words. Jobs appear safe.
“This isn’t a business in any way that is in need of restructuring,” Hall said.
He added that he has no plans to ditch Afilias as back-end registry provider for the four gTLDs. MMX’s default back-end for the years since it ditched its self-hosted infrastructure has been Nominet.
The deal reduces MMX’s exposure to the volatile Chinese market, where its .vip TLD has proved popular, accounting for over half of the registry’s domains under management.
It also gives MMX ownership of ICM’s potentially lucrative portfolio of reserved premium names.
There are over 9,700 of these, with a combined buy-now price of just shy of $135 million.
I asked Hall whether he had any plans to get these names sold. He laughed, said “the answer is yes”, and declined to elaborate.
ICM currently has a sales staff of three people, he said.
“It’s a small team, but their track record is exceptional,” he said.
The company’s record, I believe, is sex.xxx, which sold for $3 million. It has many six-figure sales on record. Premiums renew at standard reg fee, around $60.
With the ICM deal, MMX has recast itself after a year of uncertainty as an acquirer rather than an acquisition target.
While many observers — including yours truly — had assumed a sale or merger were on the cards, MMX has gone the other route instead.
It’s secured a $3 million line of credit from its current largest shareholder, London and Capital Asset Management Ltd, “to support future innovation and acquisition orientated activity”.
That’s not a hell of a lot of money to run around snapping up rival gTLDs, but Hall said that it showed that investors are supportive of MMX’s new strategy.
So does this mean MMX is going to start devouring failing gTLDs for peanuts? Not necessarily, but Hall wouldn’t rule anything out.
“Our long-term strategy is ultimately based around being an annuity-based business,” he said. He’s looking at companies with a “strong recurring revenue model”.
About 78% of ICM’s revenue last year came from domain renewals. The remainder was premium sales. For MMX, renewal revenue doubled to $4.8 million in 2017, but that’s still only a third of its overall revenue (though MMX is of course a less-mature business).
So while Hall refused to rule out looking at buying up “struggling” gTLDs, I get the impression he’s not particularly interested in taking risks on unproven strings.
“You can never say never to any opportunity,” he said. “If we come across and asset and for whatever reason we believe we can monetize it, it could become an acquisition target.”
The acquisition is dependent on ICANN approving the handover of registry contracts, something that doesn’t usually present a problem in this kind of M&A.

MMX could announce acquisition this week

New gTLD registry MMX could announce plans to be acquired as early as this week.
The company told the markets last week that its delayed 2017 financial results would be announced in “early May”, along with the “conclusion of the strategic review” it has been teasing investors about for almost a year.
The “strategic review”, announced last May, is exploring “how MMX can participate in a broader industry consolidation” including acquisition or merger.
MMX said last week that “constructive discussions continue to progress”.
It has previously described the duration of the negotiations, initially slated to close last September, as “frustrating”.
Unlike AIM-listed rival CentralNic, which has confirmed it is in reverse-takeover talks with KeyDrive, MMX has not revealed which potential buyer(s) it has been talking to.
MMX, also listed on AIM, has a market cap of £69.3 million ($94.3 million) today.
In January, it informally reported that its 2017 billings are expected to be around the $15.6 million mark, allowing the company to hit operating profitability for the first time.
The company runs 25 new gTLDs solo and five more in partnerships with other companies, but by far and a way the best volume performer is .vip, which accounts for well over half of its registrations largely due to its resonance in China.

Google’s .app gTLD beats .porn to biggest sunrise yet

The sunrise period for Google Registry’s .app gTLD closed today and it looks like it might be the biggest sunrise of the 2012 round to date.
.app had 3,068 domains in its zone file this morning.
While not all will be sunrise registrations, it seems very likely that the new domain has comfortably beaten the previous sunrise record, which according to ICANN records was 2,091, set by ICM Registry’s .porn back in 2015.
One might imagine that the proportion of purely defensive registrations in .app is smaller than .porn; there are already a couple dozen live .app sites indexed by Google.
The median number of sunrise registrations for a new gTLD launch is 77, according to ICANN records.
The .app zone file today is a mash of big app brands such as Uber and Instagram, among a strong showing from software vendors and other industries such as banking and retail.
There are also plenty of entries that can only be defensive, the names of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus, and a bunch of dictionary-word domains that look like clear cases of Trademark Clearinghouse gaming.
Now that sunrise is done, .app has entered an Early Access Period modeled on the original Donuts EAP. It lasts seven days and sees the price of retail registration fall from well over $10,000 today to a couple hundred bucks a week from now.
After the EAP is over, retail prices will settle around the $20 mark on May 8.
Google paid $25 million for .app at an ICANN auction, a record at the time since beaten by still-contested .web.

$55 billion bank not paying its $6,250 ICANN fees

Kuwait Finance House has become the latest new gTLD registry to get slapped with an ICANN breach notice for not paying its quarterly fees.
The company is a 40-year-old, Sharia-compliant Kuwaiti bank managing assets of $55.52 billion, according to Wikipedia. It has annual revenue in excess of $700 million.
But apparently it has not paid its fixed ICANN dues — $6,250 per quarter — for at least six months, according to ICANN’s breach letter (pdf).
KFH runs .kfh and the Arabic internationalized domain name equivalent .بيتك (.xn--ngbe9e0a) as closed, dot-brand domains.
Neither appears to have any live sites, but both appear to be in their launch ramp-up phase.
ICANN has been nagging the company to pay overdue fees since November, without success, according to its letter.
They’re the third and fourth new gTLD registries to get deadbeat breach notices this month, after .qpon and .fan and .fans.

auDA wins brief reprieve from boardroom battle

Australian ccTLD registry auDA has managed get a small delay, smaller than it wanted, to the deadline for a special member meeting at which the fate of its chair, CEO and two directors will be decided.
After more than 5% of its membership signed a petition calling for the vote, it had until June 7 to open the polls.
But then it was stung by the findings of a governmental review of its structure, which concluded it was “no longer fit for purpose” and ordering a board shake-up of its own.
Deciding that it had to prioritize the government review, auDA last week sued the main organizer of the petition and former board member Josh Rowe, asking a court to allow it to delay the meeting from June 7 until mid-September, to coincide with its annual general meeting.
But the court told the organization it instead has until July 27 to hold the meeting.
auDA said it was “pleased” with the ruling, but Rowe wrote that auDA had “in effect lost” the case.
Rowe called the brief litigation a “disgraceful waste of tens of thousands of dollars of .au domain name registrant’s money”.

.com adds 5.5 million names, renewals back over 70%

Verisign reported first-quarter financial results that reflected a healthier .com namespace following the spike caused by Chinese speculation in 2016.
The company Friday reported that .com was up to 133.9 million domains at the end of March, an increase of 5.5 million over the year.
The strong showing was tempered slightly by a further decline in .net, where domains were down from 15.2 million to 14.4 million.
Over the quarter, there was a net increase of 1.9 million names across both TLDs and the renewal rate was an estimated 74.9%, a pretty damn good showing.
Actual renewals for Q4, measurable only after Verisign announced its earnings, were confirmed at 72.5%, compared to a worryingly low 67.6% in Q4 2016.
In a call with analysts, CEO James Bidzos confirmed that the turnaround was due to the surge in Chinese domainer speculation that drove numbers in 2016 finally working its way out of the system.
In Q1, the cash-printing company saw net income of $134 million, compared to $116 million a year earlier, on revenue up 3.7% at $299 million.
Bidzos told analysts that it’s “possible” that the company may get to launch .web in 2018, but said Verisign has not baked any impact from the contested gTLD into its forecasts.

Another failing new gTLD stopped paying its dues

Another new gTLD registry has been slapped with an ICANN breach notice after failing to pay its fees.
California-based dotCOOL, which runs .qpon, seems to be at least six months late in making its $6,250 quarterly payment to ICANN, according to the notice (pdf).
It’s perhaps not surprising. The TLD has been live since mid-2014 and yet has failed to top more than about 650 simultaneous domains under management, at least 100 of which were registry-owned.
Right now, its zone file contains about 470 domains.
It typically sells new domains in the single digits each month, with retail prices in the $15 to $20 range.
With that volume and the inferred registry fee, a full year’s revenue probably wouldn’t cover one quarter of ICANN fees.
The string “qpon” is a pun on “coupon”. The idea was that companies would use the TLD to push discount coupons on their customers.
But they didn’t.
The number of live sites indexed by Google is in the single figures and none of them are using .qpon for its intended purpose.
ICANN’s breach notice also demands the company start publishing a DNSSEC Practice Statement on its registry web site, but that seems like the least of its worries.
As a novel, non-dictionary string, I worry that .qpon may struggle to find a buyer.
Last week, .fan and .fans, both operated by Asiamix Digital, got similar breach notices from ICANN.

Nominet to charge brands for no-name Whois access

Nominet has become the second major registry to announce that trademark lawyers will have to pay for Whois after the EU General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect next month.
The company said late last week that it will offer the intellectual property community two tiers of Whois access.
First, they can pay for a searchable Whois with a much more limited output.
Nominet said that “users of the existing Searchable WHOIS who are not law enforcement will continue to have access to the service on a charged-for basis however the registrant name and address will be redacted”.
Second, they can request the full Whois record (including historical data) for a specific domain and get a response within one business day for no charge.
Approved law enforcement agencies will continue to get unfettered access to both services — with “enhanced output” for the searchable Whois — for no charge, Nominet said.
These changes were decided upon following a month-long consultation which accepted comments from interested parties.
Other significant changes incoming include:

• Scrapping UK-presence requirements for second-level registrations.
• Doing away with the current privacy services framework, offloading GDPR liability to registrars providing such services.
• Creating a standard opt-in mechanism for registrants who wish for their personal data to be disclosed in public Whois.

Nominet is the second registry I’m aware of to say it will charge brand owners for Whois access, after CoCCA 10 days ago.
CoCCA has since stated that it will sell IP owners a PDF containing the entire unredacted Whois history of a domain for $3, if they declare that they have a legitimate interest in the domain.
It also said they will be able to buy zone file access to the dozens of TLDs running on the CoCCA platform for $88 per TLD.

auDA may sue to delay boardroom bloodbath

auDA is thinking about taking its membership to court in order to delay a vote on the jobs of four of its directors.
The Australian ccTLD registry has also delayed further consideration of its policy to introduce direct, second-level registrations in .au until late 2019.
Both announcements came in the wake of a government review of the organization, which found it “no longer fit-for-purpose”.
auDA last week asked its members to agree to a postponement of the special general meeting, called for by a petition of more than 5% of its members, at which there would be votes on whether to fire the CEO, its chair, and two independent directors.
Under the law, auDA has to hold the SGM by June 7 at the latest, according to a letter (pdf) sent to members on Friday.
But auDA wants to delay the meeting until mid-September, at the earliest, to coincide with its regular Annual General Meeting.
If its members do not consent to the delay — it gave them a deadline of 4pm local time today, meaning responses would have to be drafted over the weekend — auDA said it “intends to apply for a court order… extending the time for calling the requested SGM”.
The delay is needed, auDA said, in order to give the organization the breathing space to start to implement the reforms called for by the government review.
The government wants the makeup of the auDA board substantially overhauled within a year to better reflect the stakeholder community and to ensure directors have the necessary skills and experience.
In response, auDA has told the government (pdf) that it agrees with the need for reform, but that it will not be able to hit its deadlines unlesss the SGM is delayed.
It also said calling the SGM on time would cost it somewhere in the region of AUD 70,000, based on the cost of a similar meeting last year.
auDA announced separately last week that it is delaying any more discussion on second-level registrations — something the reform campaigners largely are opposed to — “until the second half of 2019 at the earliest”.
Josh Rowe, coordinator of the Grumpier.com.au petitioners, said in his response that he found the request for the SGM delay “extremely disappointing”, adding:

auDA is at an important juncture following the Australian Government’s review. However, it is critical that people with the right skills and experience lead auDA through its reform.
Members have lost confidence in the auDA CEO, and the three auDA independent directors. They do not have the right skills and experience to lead auDA through its reform.

He noted that members do not have the resources to fight auDA in court.