CIRA and Nominum offering DNS firewall

Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA has started offering DNS-based security services to Canadian companies.
The company has partnered with DNS security services provider Nominum to develop D-Zone DNS Firewall, which it said lets customers “block access to malicious content before it can reach their network”.
It’s basically a recursive DNS service with a layer of filterware that blocks access to lists of domains, such as those used by command and control servers, known to be connected to malware and phishing.
It’s a timely offering, given the high-profile WannaCry ransomware which infected hundreds of thousands of unpatched Windows boxes worldwide last month (though I’m not sure this kind of service would have actually prevented its spread).
The CIRA service uses Nominum’s technology but operates at Canadian internet exchange points and appears to be marketed at Canadian customers.
It’s the latest effort by CIRA to expand outside of its core .ca registry business. Earlier this year, it became ICANN’s newest approved gTLD back-end provider after a deal with .kiwi.
Many ccTLD registries are looking outside of their traditional businesses as the increasingly cluttered TLD market puts a squeeze on registration growth.

DENIC gets approved for registry escrow

DENIC is now able to offer data escrow services to gTLD registries, in addition to registrars.
The non-profit company, which runs Germany’s .de, said it gained ICANN approval for the registry escrow function June 6.
Back in March, ICANN approved it for the registrar escrow services.
All ICANN-accredited registries and registrars are contractually obliged to deposit their registrant data with escrow agents in case they go out of business, go rogue, suffer catastrophic data loss, or otherwise screw up.
Nine companies have been approved by ICANN for registry data escrow so far.
Two of others are based in Europe, but DENIC claims to be the only one that offers full compliance with the more stringent German and European Union data protection regulations.

MMX says .vip renewals to be at 70%+

MMX believes the biggest money-spinner in its new gTLD portfolio, .vip, will see first-year renewals in excess of 70%.
The company said this morning that it is projecting renewals towards the top end of industry norms based on manual renewals to date.
.vip was a bit of a hit in China, topping a quarter-million domains in its first month of general availability a year ago. It peaked at around 750,000 domains a month ago.
MMX said in a statement:

To date, actual deletions for the first 31 days of registrations for .vip from China are currently less than 1%, with manually confirmed renewals for the same period already at over 60%, with the remainder being placed on auto-renew by registrars on behalf of their customers.
Whilst not all of those placed on auto-renew will be renewed, MMX expects the overall renewal rate for the first month of .vip registrations, which will be published in late July, to place .vip in-line with the best-in-class renewal rates of leading western facing top-level domains (i.e. c. 70% and above).

While MMX has made much of the fact that it has not sold .vip names for almost nothing, unlike some competitors, they’re still pretty cheap in China.
.vip names sell for the CNY equivalent of $3 to $4 at the major Chinese registrars. GoDaddy prices them at $20.
CEO Toby Hall said that there had been some volume-based discounts available to registrars, but “nothing which took the pricing below our general availability pricing”.
Its actual renewal rate will become clear at the end of July, MMX said.

.xyz sets price for numeric domains at $0.65

XYZ.com has announced that it will charge just $0.65 wholesale for over a billion numeric domain names in .xyz.
The revelation came as part of a confusing launch of what the registry calls its “1.111B Class” domains.
That’s because the pricing affects all 1.111 billion numerical domains of six, seven, eight and nine digits in .xyz.
These will now all register and renew for $0.65 or a recommended $0.99 retail.
That’s the same price that regular alphanumeric .xyz domains are selling at at many registrars, but the pricing for the 1.111B names is said to be fixed forever; it’s not a temporary promotion.
The announcement was themed on a take on the 16-year-old “All Your Base” meme and a white paper (pdf) written in the color scheme and typeface of a 1990s Unix terminal.
There’s a whole lot of fluff involved, but the gist of it appears to be that XYZ thinks these domains have value, when registered in bulk, to do stuff like address “Internet of Things” devices. The white paper states:

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), the 1.111B Class serves as a platform to easily and uniquely identify different devices, ranging from laptops to smart thermostats. In fact, registrants can even secure tens, hundreds, thousands to millions of domains in sequential order to create a block. These blocks can match device serial numbers or vehicle VIN numbers, then be used as portals for consumers to connect with their products, and for their products to receive updates from manufacturers.

There are of course far cheaper ways to go about this, such as using subdomains of an existing branded domain (which would have the added benefit of semantic value).
XYZ also talks in vague terms about these cheap domains being similar to Bitcoin, with reference to how Chinese domainers trade worthless domains as a kind of virtual currency.
I must confess I don’t get this idea at all. In my mind, owning a domain that has no possibility of an end-user buyer is more of a liability that an asset.
Still, it’s interesting to see a registry attempting to market domains for non-traditional purposes, so I’m curious to see how it plays out.

$5 billion e-commerce site to dump .com for dot-brand

The online ticketing arm of the French national railway operator SNCF has revealed plans to migrate away from .com to its dot-brand gTLD, .sncf.
The web site voyages-sncf.com will become oui.sncf in November, the company has confirmed following press reports at the weekend.
The existing site, despite the cumbersome domain, processed €4.3 billion ($4.8 billion) of ticket and other sales in 2015.
That number was reportedly down slightly last year due to the impact of the various terrorist attacks on the continent.
Still, it’s one of France’s most visible online brands, and has been around since 2000. The site is also available in other European languages and via mobile apps.
The new domain, oui.sncf, is already online. It currently redirects to an FAQ about the rebrand, at the .com site
Parent company SNCF is France’s government-owned rail operator, with overall revenue of €32.3 billion ($36 billion).
While ICANN’s new gTLD program produced hundreds of dot-brands, only a handful to date have moved substantially away from their original domains.

Three-million-domain .au deal up for grabs

auDA has formally launched the process that will could see it replace .au back-end provider Neustar with an in-house registry by the end of June 2018.
The Australian ccTLD operator has opened a “Request for Expressions of Interest” as the first stage of a procurement process for software and/or services to support its recently announced Registry Transformation Project.
It’s looking for companies that can provide all the major pieces of a domain name registry — EPP registry, Whois, DNS, etc — and my reading of the REOI reveals a preference towards a system owned and operated by auDA.

Respondents can respond with products, technology and / or services for all or part of the elements of the Registry Transformation Project, and are free to partner with other respondents to put together combined proposals.
auDA intends to establish a dedicated .au registry, and have all arrangements in place to support this, by 30 June 2018.

The organization even talks about eventually becoming one of ICANN’s approved Emergency Back-End Registry Operators.
.au has grown to over 3 million domains over the 15 years it was being managed by AusRegistry, which was acquired by US-based Neustar in 2015. This deal is due to expire next year.
So it’s a big contract, and one that is likely to attract a lot of interest from players big and small.
That said, registry solutions are typically offered very much on a service basis. The market for licensed registry software is not exactly bustling, and auDA also requires source code access as a condition of any deal.
auDA said the deadline for responses to the REOI is June 26. It will decide upon its next steps, which could be a formal request for proposals, in the last week of July.
Further details can be found here.

Richemont kills off two more dot-brands

Luxury goods maker Richemont has decided to ditch two more of its dot-brand gTLDs.
The company has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .chloe and .montblanc, according to documents published by ICANN late last week.
Chloe is a fashion brand; Mont Blanc sells pens, jewelery and such.
No reason was given for either termination. Registries are allowed to self-terminate their Registry Agreements for any reason, given 180 days notice.
In both cases, ICANN has already agreed not to transfer the gTLD to a new operator. That’s a special privilege dot-brands get in their RAs.
Neither gTLD ever progressed beyond a single nic.brand placeholder page
Four additional Richemont dot-brands — .piaget, .iwc, .cartier, .panerai — have also been live for two years or more but are in identical states of disuse.
Richemont also runs .watches, .手表 and .珠宝 (Chinese for “watches” and “jewelry” respectively) which have been in the DNS for over 18 months but do not yet have any published launch plans.
The company was a somewhat enthusiastic early adopter of the new gTLD concept, providing speakers to industry events well before the application window opened back in 2012.
It applied for 14 strings in total, 10 of which eventually went live. It dumped two of its dot-brands before contract-signing and lost two auctions for generic strings.
Both .chloe and .montblanc are expected to be removed from the DNS in October.
There are now 22 new gTLDs that have voluntarily terminated their RAs.

Key-Systems buys reseller EDC

Key-Systems has acquired one of its resellers, European Domain Centre.
The acquiring registrar did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said EDC will help boost its own BrandShelter corporate registrar business.
EDC says it has clients including AirBnB, Campari, Lycamobile, iStockPhoto and BusinessWire.
The company was founded in 2003 by Nikolaj Borge and Christopher Hofman Laursen and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Its selling point has been its willingness to offer offer its customers the broadest range of gTLD and ccTLD options.
It’s been a customer of RRPproxy, Key-Systems’ reseller network, since 2008.
As it’s been using the Key-Systems IANA number all this time, it’s not possible to get an accurate figure for its domains under management from ICANN reports.

Neustar’s .au deal in peril as Aussies look in-house

Australian ccTLD registry auDA is looking at bringing its back-end infrastructure in house, to the possible detriment of Neustar.
In a surprise move, auDA said late last month that several months of talks with AusRegistry, aimed at possibly extending its current back-end contract beyond 2018, had failed.
AusRegistry has operated .au for auDA since 2002, during which time the ccTLD has grown to 3.1 million domains.
The company was acquired by Neustar in 2015 as part of its $87 million acquisition of Bombora Technologies, parent to AusRegistry and ARI.
auDA said it has now launched an invitation-only “restricted tender exercise” to find advisers to help it build its own registry back-end.
AusRegistry will be among those invited to participate, auDA confirmed.
This week, the registry also announced that it has hired Bruce Tonkin, formerly of Melbourne IT and the ICANN board of directors, to be its “Registry Transformation Project Lead”.
It will also form an “Industry-led Advisory Panel” to give .au registrars a say in how the new registry is designed and built.

XYZ acquires .storage, its 10th gTLD

XYZ.com said today that it has acquired the half-launched new gTLD .storage from its original owner.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but CEO Daniel Negari said in a blog post that it has been funded using some of the “excess of cash flow” from sales of .xyz domains.
The original .storage registry was Extra Space Storage, which rents out physical storage units in the US.
It started its protracted launch period a little over a year ago but had not planned to go to general availability until July this year.
Having apparently passed through its sunrise period and a special landrush for the storage industry, which ended in January, it has fewer than 800 domains in its zone file.
It looks like XYZ will be essentially relaunching the gTLD from scratch, with a new sunrise period penciled in for November and an early access period and GA slated for December.
Pre-launch pricing is around the $80 mark at the few registrars I checked today, and it looks like that will remain under the new management.
That’s despite XYZ talking today about .storage as a “premium” vertically-focused TLD along the lines of its $3,000 .cars or $750 .theatre.
The company said that it will not hold back reserved names at higher, premium pricing. Even nice-looking domains such as cloud.storage will be available at the base fee, it said.
The new acquisition becomes the 10th that XYZ has a hand in running, if you count the three car-related gTLDs it manages in a joint venture with Uniregistry. The others are .security, .rent, .protection, .theatre, and .college.