Big brands condemn “fraudulent” .feedback gTLD in ICANN complaint

Top Level Spectrum has been accused today of running the gTLD .feedback in a “fraudulent and deceptive” manner.
Over a dozen famous brands, corralled by corporate registrar MarkMonitor, today formally complained to ICANN that .feedback is a “complete sham”.
They reckon that the majority of .feedback domains belong to entities connected to the registry, violate trademarks, and have been stuffed with bogus and plagiarized reviews.
TLS denies any involvement.
MarkMonitor clients Adobe, American Apparel, Best Buy, Facebook, Levi and Verizon are among those that today filed a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Policy complaint with ICANN.
PICDRP is the mechanism third parties can use to complain about new gTLD registries they believe are in breach of the Public Interest Commitments found in their registry contracts.
The 50-page complaint (pdf), which comes with hundreds of pages of supporting documentation spread over 36 exhibits, purports to show TLS engaging in an “escalating pattern of discriminatory, fraudulent and deceptive registry misconduct”.
While the allegations of wrongdoing are fairly broad, the most interesting appears to be the claim that TLS quietly registered thousands of .feedback names matching trademarks to itself and then filled them with reviews either ripped off from Yelp! or supplied by overseas freelancers working for pennies.
TLS denies that it did any of this.
The .feedback registry is closely tied to the affiliated entity Feedback SAAS, which offers a hosted social platform for product/company reviews. Pricing for .feedback domains is dependent on whether registrants use this service or not.
The complaint states:

the overwhelming majority of domain names registered and activated within the .FEEDBACK TLD — over seventy percent (70%) — are currently owned and operated by Respondent [TLS], and parties working in concert with Respondent
…
Respondent has solicited and paid numerous third parties, including professional freelance writers who offer to post a set number of words for a fee, to write fabricated reviews regarding Complainants’ products and services.
…
These ostensibly independent reviews from ordinary consumers are intended to give the appearance of legitimate commentary within .FEEDBACK sites, when, in fact, the reviews are a complete sham.

An investigation carried out by MarkMonitor (pdf) showed that of the 2,787 .feedback domains registered up to July 31, 73% were registered to just five registrants.
The top registrant, Liberty Domains LLC of Las Vegas, owned 47% of these domains.
MarkMonitor believes this company (which it said does not show up in Nevada company records) and fourth-biggest registrant Core Domains LLC (based at the same Vegas mail forwarding service) are merely fronts for TLS, though it has no smoking gun proving this connection.
TLS CEO Jay Westerdal denies the company is affiliated with Liberty.
The MarkMonitor investigation counted 27,573 reviews on these sites, but 22% of them purported have been written prior to the date the domain was registered, in some cases by years.
The company reckons hundreds of reviews can be traced to five freelance writers who responded to February job ads looking for people who could write and post 10 150-word reviews per hour.
Other reviews appear to have been copied wholesale from Yelp! (this can be easily verified by visiting almost any .feedback site and searching for exact-match content on Google).
Westerdal told DI last week that registrants can use an API to import reviews.
The brands’ complaint goes on to criticize TLS for its Free.feedback offering, a very odd, bare-bones web site which seems to offer free .feedback domains.
When you type a domain or email address into the form on Free.feedback, it offers to give you the equivalent .feedback domain for free, automatically populating a second form with the Whois record of the original domain.
According to the complaint, after somebody registers a free .feedback domain, Feedback SAAS starts contacting the person listed in the Whois about their “free trial registration” regardless of whether they were actually the person who signed up the the domain. The complaint states:

Complainants and multiple other trademark owners who received such email notifications from Feedback SAAS and TLS registrars never visited the FREE.FEEDBACK website, and they never requested a free trial registration in the .FEEDBACK TLD

I’ve been unable to fully replicate this experience in attempts to test Free.feedback.
The complaint alleges multiple breaches of the PICs in the .feedback ICANN Registry Agreement.
The brands want ICANN Compliance to conduct a thorough investigation of .feedback, for all Free.feedback domains with phony Whois to be terminated, and for affected trademark owners to get refunds. They also want their legal costs paid by TLS.
ICANN does not typically publish the outcome of PICDRP complaints. Indeed, this is only the second one I’m aware of. It’s difficult to judge what MarkMonitor’s posse’s chances of success are.

Google could shake up the registry market with new open-source Nomulus platform

Google has muscled in to the registry service provider market with the launch of Nomulus, an open-source TLD back-end platform.
The new offering appears to be tightly integrated with Google’s various cloud services, challenging long-held registry pricing conventions.
There are already indications that at least one of the gTLD market’s biggest players could be considering a move to the service.
Donuts revealed yesterday it has been helping Google with Nomulus since early 2015, suggesting a shift away from long-time back-end partner Rightside could be on the cards.
Nomulus, which is currently in use at Google Registry’s handful of early-stage gTLDs, takes care of most of the core registry functions required by ICANN, Google said.
It’s a shared registration system based on the EPP standard, able to handle all the elements of the domain registration lifecycle.
Donuts contributed code enabling features it uses in its own 200-ish gTLDs, such as pricing tiers, the Early Access Period and Domain Protected Marks List.
Nomulus handles Whois and likely successor protocol RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol).
For DNS resolution, it comes with a plug-in to make TLDs work on the Google Cloud DNS service. Users will also be able to write code to use alternative DNS providers.
There’s also software to handle daily data escrow to a third-party provider, another ICANN-mandated essential.
But Nomulus lacks critical features such as billing and fully ICANN-compliant reporting, according to documentation.
So will anyone actually use this? And if so, who?
It’s too early to say for sure, but Donuts certainly seems keen. In a blog post, CEO Paul Stahura wrote:

As the world’s largest operator of new TLDs, Donuts must continually explore compelling technologies and ensure our back-end operations are cost-efficient and flexible… Google has a phenomenal record of stability, an almost peerless engineering team, endless computing resources and global scale. These are additional potential benefits for us and others who may contribute to or utilize the system. We have been happy to evaluate and contribute to this open source project over the past 20 months because this platform provides Donuts with an alternative back-end with significant benefits.

In a roundabout way, Donuts is essentially saying that Nomulus could work out cheaper than its current back-end, Rightside.
The biggest change heralded by Nomulus is certainly pricing.
For as long as there has been a competitive market for back-end domain registry services, pricing has been on a per-domain basis.
While pricing and model vary by provider and customer, registry operators typically pay their RSPs a flat fee and a buck or two for each domain they have under management.
Pricing for dot-brands, where DUM typically comes in at under 100 today, is believed to be weighted much more towards the flat-fee service charge element.
But that’s not how Nomulus is to be paid for.
While the software is open source and free, it’s designed to run on Google’s cloud hosting services, where users are billed on the fly according to their usage of resources such as storage and bandwidth consumed.
For example, the Google Cloud Datastore, the company’s database service that Nomulus uses to store registration and Whois records, charges are $0.18 per gigabyte of storage per month.
For a small TLD, such as a dot-brand, one imagines that storage costs could be reduced substantially.
However, Nomulus is not exactly a fire-and-forget solution.
There is no Google registry service with customer support reps and such, at least not yet. Nomulus users are responsible for building and maintaining their registry like they would any other hosted application.
So the potentially lower service costs would have to be balanced against potentially higher staffing costs.
My hunch based on the limited available information is that for a dot-brand or a small niche TLD operating on a skeleton crew that may lack technical expertise, moving to Nomulus could be a false economy.
With this in mind, Google may have just created a whole new market for middleman RSPs — TLD management companies that can offer small TLDs a single point of contact for technical expertise and support but don’t need to build out and own their own expensive infrastructure.
The barrier to entry to the RSP market may have just dropped like a rock, in other words.
And Nomulus may work out more attractive to larger TLD operators such as Donuts, with existing teams of geeks, that can take advantage of Google’s economies of scale.
Don’t expect any huge changes overnight though. Migrating between back-ends is not an easy or cheap feat.
As well as ICANN costs, and data migration and software costs, there’s also the non-trivial matter of shepherding a horde of registrars over to the new platform.
How much impact Nomulus will have on the market remains to be seen, but it has certainly given the industry something to think about.

Donuts will cut off sham .doctors

Donuts has outlined plans to suspend or delete .doctor domain names used by fake medical doctors.
Despite protestations from governments and others, .doctor will not be a restricted gTLD when it goes to general availability next week — anyone will be able to register one.
However, Donuts said last week that it will shut down phony doctor sites:

While we are firmly committed to free speech on the Internet, we however will be on guard against inappropriate or dangerous uses of .DOCTOR. Accordingly, if registrants using this name make the representation on their websites that they are licensed medical practitioners, they should be able to demonstrate upon request that in fact they hold such a license. Failure to so demonstrate could be considered a violation of the terms of registration and may subject the registrant to registrar and registry rights to delete, revoke, suspend, cancel, or transfer a registration.

A Donuts spokesperson said that the registry will have the right to conduct spot-checks on sites, but at first will only police the gTLD in response to complaints from others.
“We have the right to spot check, but no immediate plans to do so,” he said.
In a few fringe cases, the failure to present a license would not result in the loss of a domain.
For example, a “registrant is in a jurisdiction that doesn’t license doctors (if that exists)” or a “registrant that represents him/herself as a licensed medical doctor, but uses the site to sell cupcakes”, the spokesperson said.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee had wanted .doctor restricted to medical doctors, but Donuts complained noting that “doctor” is an appellation used in many other fields beyond medicine.
It can also be used in fanciful ways to market products, the registry said.
ICANN eventually sided with Donuts, allowing it to keep an open TLD as long as it included certain Public Interest Commitments in its registry contract.
.doctor goes to GA October 26.

Rightside new gTLD renewals can top 80%

Rightside says it is seeing encouraging renewal figures from its oldest batch of new gTLDs.
The company this week revealed that renewals after two years of ownership on average stand at 81%.
In a blog post, Rightside broke out some numbers for .dance, .democrat, .ninja, .immobilien, .social, .reviews and .futbol.
Those seven are the only ones in its portfolio to have gone through two full renewal cycles.
The renewal rate after year one was a modest 69% — in other words it lost almost a third of its installed base after 12 months — but this increased to 81% after the second year.
The actual number of domains involved in quite tiny — 81% equates to just 21,000 names across all seven TLDs.
Breaking out a couple of TLDs, Rightside wrote:

Our first gTLD to market, .DANCE, saw a 70% renewal rate in year one expand to 83% in year two for that same subset of domains. Our best performing gTLD of the seven is .IMMOBILIEN, which renewed at 83% in its first year, and grew to a stupendous 87% in its second—which certainly makes sense given the permanent nature of real estate.

But Rightside reckons the numbers reflect well on the new gTLD industry. It said:

domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue. Second—and likely the more significant driver—is that end users are actually picking up these domain names and putting them to use.

.xxx to get lower ICANN fees, accept the URS

ICM Registry has negotiated lower ICANN transaction fees as part of a broad amendment to its Registry Agreement that also includes new trademark protection measures.
The company’s uniquely high $2 per-transaction fee could be reduced to the industry standard $0.25 by mid-2018.
As part of the renegotiated contract, ICM has also agreed to impose the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy on its registrants.
URS is the faster, cheaper version of UDRP that allows trademark owners to have domain names suspended in more clear-cut cases of cybersquatting.
The $2 fee was demanded by ICANN when ICM first signed its RA in 2011.
At the time, ICANN said the higher fee, which had doubled from a 2010 draft of the contract, was to “account for anticipated risks and compliance activities”.
The organization seemed to have bought into the fears that .xxx would lead to widespread misuse — something that has noticeably failed to materialize — and was expecting higher legal costs as a result.
The companion TLDs .adult, .porn and .sex, all also managed by ICM, only pay $0.25 per transaction.
The overall effects on registrants, ICANN and ICM will likely be relatively trivial.
With .xxx holding at roughly 170,000 domains and a minimal amount of inter-registrar transfer activity, ICM seems to be paying ICANN under $400,000 a year in transaction fees at the moment.
Its registry fee is usually $62, though a substantial number of domains have been sold at lower promotional pricing, so the cost to registrants is not likely to change a great deal.
The reduction to $0.25 would have to be carried out in stages, with the earliest coming this quarter, and be reliant on ICM keeping a clean sheet with regards contract compliance.
Under the deal, ICM has agreed to adopt many of the provisions of the standard Registry Agreement for 2012-round gTLDs.
One of those is the URS, which may cause consternation among domainers fearful that the rights protection mechanism may one day also find its way into the .com registry contract.
ICM has also agreed to implement its existing policies on, for example, child abuse material prevention, into the contract as Public Interest Commitments.
The RA amendment is currently open for public comment at ICANN.

The DNA loses second exec director in a year

The Domain Name Association has lost its second executive director in less than a year.
The trade group has let go industry newcomer Roy Arbeit, who was hired just six months ago following the November 2015 departure of Kurt Pritz.
It does not plan to replace Arbeit, according to an email circulated to DNA members by chair Adrian Kinderis on Friday.
Instead, the day-to-day operations will be outsourced to Virtual, a trade association management company that has been working for the DNA for some time, Kinderis wrote.
The executive director was basically the only full-time DNA employee. The group is steered by a board of directors comprising representatives of major registries and registrars.
The decision to lose the position seems to be a cost-cutting measure, designed to allow the DNA to spend more on public relations campaigns promoting TLD acceptance and diversity, according to the email.

XYZ hires .top guy as first China employee

XYZ.com has hired its first Beijing-based employee, as part of its ongoing plan to formally enter the Chinese market.
The company said yesterday that it has appointed Mason Zhang, until recently chief marketing office at .top gTLD registry Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co, as its new director of business development for China.
It’s part of XYZ’s seemingly interminable entry to the Chinese market, which is over a year old.
While the majority of .xyz’s registrations have been into China, the registry (along with pretty much every other Western registry) still does not have the necessary government permissions so that its customers can start using their names.
It kicked off a process to get ICANN approval for its Chinese gateway, operated by ZDNS, a year ago, and set up the mandatory Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise in January.
The company said in a blog post that it expects to get its Chinese accreditation “very soon”.
Zhang’s former employer, .top, is second only to .xyz in terms of new gTLD registration volume, also due to Chinese sales. It has about 3.7 million names in its zone file, compared to .xyz’s 6.1 million.

Root hits 1,500 live TLDs as US oversight ends

The DNS root saw its 1,500th concurrent live TLD come into existence on Friday, just hours before the US relinquished its oversight powers.
Amazon received its delegation for .通販 (.xn--gk3at1e, Japanese for “online shopping”) and satellite TV company Hughes got .dvr, meaning “digital video recorder”.
That took the number of TLDs in the root to exactly 1,500, which is where it still stands today.
Both went live September 30, which was the final day of ICANN’s IANA contract with the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which expired that night.
An ICANN spokesperson confirmed that the two new gTLDs “were the last ones requiring NTIA’s approval.”
From now on, the small clerical role NTIA had when ICANN wanted to make changes to the root is no more.
The fact that it hit a nice round number the same day as ICANN oversight switched to a community-led approach is probably just a coincidence.
Amazon’s .通販 was almost banned for being too confusingly similar to “.shop”, but that ludicrous decision was later overturned.
Hughes’ .dvr was originally intended as a single-registrant “closed generic”, but is now expected to operate as a restricted but multi-registrant space.

For $10,000, Donuts will block hundreds of typos and premiums for your brand

Donuts has announced an expansion of its domain-blocking service that will enable brand owners to cheaply (kinda) block misspellings of their trademarks.
Brand owners whose trademarks match “premium” generic strings will also be able to take matching domains out of circulation using the registry’s new DPML Plus service.
DPML, for Domain Protected Marks List, is Donuts’ way of giving trademark owners a way to bulk-block their marks across Donuts’ entire stable of gTLDs, which currently stands at 197 strings.
With typical sunrise period prices at $200+, registering a single string across almost 200 gTLDs during sunrise could near a $40,000 outlay. In general availability, it would often be about a tenth of that price.
But the original DPML, with a roughly $3,000 retail price for a five-year block, reduced the cost to protect a single string to about $3 per domain per year.
Now, with DPML Plus, Donuts is offering a premium service that adds the ability to block typos and premium names.
Typos and substring-based blocking were near the top of the intellectual property community’s wish-list when the new gTLD program was being developed, but those features were never incorporated into ICANN rights protection mechanisms.
But for $9,999 (suggested retail price), DPML Plus buyers get a 10-year block on the string that matches their trademark and three extra strings that are either typos of the trademark or contain the trademark as a substring, Donuts said.
So Google would for example be able to block android.examples, anrdoid.examples, androidphone.examples and googleandroidphone.examples using a single DPML Plus subscription.
Basically, they get to block up to 788 domains at $9,999 over 10 years, which works out to about $1.26 per domain per year.
It looks nice and cheap on that basis, but companies wishing to block dozens of base trademarks would be looking at six or seven-figure up-front payments.
DPML Plus also lifts the ban on blocking “premium” domains.
Under the old DPML, customers could not block a domain if Donuts had flagged it with a premium price, but under DPML Plus they can.
This opens the door to brand owners who have valuable trademarks on generic dictionary words to get them blocked across the whole Donuts portfolio.
A Donuts spokesperson said the company reserves the right to reject such strings if it suspects gaming.
Another benefit of the DPML Plus is the ability to prevent other companies with identical trademarks later unblocking and snatching blocked domains for themselves.
Currently, third parties with matching brands can “override” DPML blocks, but that feature is turned off for DPML Plus subscribers. They get exclusivity for the life of the block.
Donuts said the Plus offer will only be available to buy between October 1 and December 31.
As an added carrot, from January 1 the price of its vanilla DPML service is going to go up by an amount the company currently does not want to disclose.

Over 50,000 names sold as .shop has successful launch day

GMO Registry has recorded one of the most successful new gTLD launch days to date, selling over 45,000 .shop domain names in the first hours.
The company said it sold 45,427 .shop names in the first two hours after general availability started yesterday afternoon at about 1600 UTC.
The total at that point was 51,755, including about 5,000 that were registered during the Early Access Period, during which names carried higher prices.
The latest .shop zone file contains 46,419 domains.
The registry had sold 616 premium-priced names already, GMO said.
The volume is quite impressive given the retail price tags — .shop is not priced for budget Chinese domainers, it’s selling for $20 to $30 at the major Western registrars.
That’s double, triple or even 10 times as much as Minds + Machines’ self-consciously ‘non-freenium’ .vip domains were selling for when it racked up a six-figure volume during its first day of GA earlier this year.
West.cn, the leading Chinese new gTLD registrar, priced .vip at $3 but is selling .shop at $25.
GMO paid a then record-setting $41.5 million for the rights to .shop at an ICANN auction back in January.