Verisign launches name-spinner tool for if you really, really need a .com

Verisign has launched a new name-spinning tool, designed to help new businesses find relevant domain names in Verisign-managed TLDs.
It’s called NameStudio. Verisign said:

NameStudio can deliver relevant .com and .net domain name suggestions based on popular keywords, trending news topics and semantic relevance. Pulling from multiple and diverse data sources, the service can identify the context of a word, break search terms apart into logical combinations and quickly return results. It can also distinguish personal names from other keywords and use machine-learning algorithms that get smarter over time.

The machine-learning component may come in handy, based on my non-scientific, purely subjective messing around at the weekend.
I searched for “london pubs”, a subject close to my heart. Naturally enough, londonpubs.com is not available, but the suggestions were not what you’d call helpful.

As you can see, the closest match to London it could find was “Falkirk”, a town 400 miles away in Scotland. The column is filled with the names of British towns and cities, so the tool clearly knows what London is, even if its suggestions are not particularly useful for a London-oriented web site.
The closest match to “pubs” was “cichlids”, which Google reliably informs me is a type of fish. “ComicCon” (a famous trademark), “barbarians” and a bunch of sports, dog breeds and so on feature highly on its list of suggestions.
NameStudio obviously does not know what a “pub” is, but it’s not a particularly common word in most of Verisign’s native USA, so I tried “london bars” instead. The results there were a little more encouraging.
Again, Falkirk topped the list of London alternatives, a list that this time also prominently included the names of Australian cities.
On the “bars” column, suggestions such as “parties”, “stags” and “nights” suggests that NameStudio has a notion what I’m looking for, but the top suggestion is still “birthdays”.
I should note that the service also suggests prefixes such as “my” and “free” and suffixes such as “online” or “inc”, so if you have your heart set on a .com domain you’ll probably be able to find something containing your chosen keywords.
The domains alllondonpubs.com and alllondonbars.com were probably the best available alternatives I could find. For my hypothetical London-based pub directory/blog web site, they’re not terrible choices.
I also searched NameStudio for “domain blog”, another subject close to my heart.
The top three suggestions in the “domain” column were “pagerank”, “websites” and “query”. Potentially relevant. Certainly some are in the right ball-park. Let’s ignore that “pagerank” is a Google trademark that nobody really talks about much any more.
The top suggestions to replace “blog” were “infographic”, “snippets” and “rumor”. Again, right ball-park, but my best bet still appears to be adding a prefix or suffix to my original keywords.
I tried a few more super-premium one-word keywords too.
The best suggestion for “vodka” was “dogvodka.com”. For “attorney”, it was “funattorney.com”. For “insurance”, there were literally no available suggestions.
Currently — and to be fair the tool just launched last week — you’re probably better off looking at other name suggestion tools.
NameStudio does not appear to currently suggest domains that are listed for sale on the aftermarket. I expect that’s a feature addition that could come in future.
But possibly the main problem with the tool appears to be that it currently only looks for available names in .com, .net, .tv or .cc.
Repeating my “london pubs” search with GoDaddy and DomainsBot, which each support hundreds more TLDs, produced arguably superior results.

They’re only superior, of course, if you consider your chosen keywords, and the brevity of your domain, more important than your choice of TLD. For some people, a .com at the end of the domain will always be the primary consideration, and perhaps those people are Verisign’s target market.

Cops tell Nominet to yank 16,000 domains, Nominet complies

Nominet suspended over 16,000 .uk domain names at the request of law enforcement agencies in the last year.
The registry yanked 16,632 domains in the 12 months to October 31, more than double the 8,049 it suspended in the year-earlier period.
The 2016 number was in turn more than double the 2015 number. The 2017 total is more than 16 times the number of suspended domains in 2014, the first year in which Nominet established this cozy relationship with the police.
The large majority of names — 13,616 — were suspended at the request of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Another 2,781 were taken down on the instruction of National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.
Nominet has over 12 million .uk domains under management, so 16,000 names is barely a blip on the radar overall.
But the fact that police can have domains taken down in .uk with barely any friction does not appear to be acting as a deterrent to bad actors when they choose their TLD.
The registry said that just 15 suspensions were reversed — which requires the consent of the reporting law enforcement agency — during the period. That’s basically flat on 2016.
“A suspension is reversed if the offending behavior has stopped and the enforcing agency has since confirmed that the suspension can be lifted,” the company said.
The company does not publish data on how many registrants requested a reversal and didn’t get one, nor does it publish any of the affected domains, so we have no way of knowing whether there’s any ambiguity or overreach in the types of domains the police more or less unilaterally have taken down.
It seems that the only reasons suspension requests do not result in suspensions are when domains have already been suspended or have already been transferred to an IP rights holder by court order. There were 32 of those in the last 12 months, half 2016 levels.
The separate, ludicrously onerous preemptive ban on domains that appear to encourage sexual violence resulted in just two suspensions in the last year, bringing the total new domains suspended under the rule since 2014 to just six.
Some poor bugger at Nominet had to trawl through 3,410 new registrations containing strings such as “rape” in 2017 to achieve that result, up from 2,407 last year.

Radix claims 77% renewal rates after two years

New gTLD registry Radix says that three of its larger TLDs have seen a 77% renewal rate two years after launch.
The company said today that .online had 75% renewals, with .tech at 78% and .site at 81%.
It appears to have carved out these three from its portfolio for attention, ignoring the rest of its portfolio, because they all went to general availability in the same two-month period July and August 2015.
The renewal rates are for the first month of GA. In other words, 77% of the domains registered in the TLDs’ respective first month have been renewed for a third year.
Radix, in a press release, compared the numbers favorably to .com and .net, which had a combined renewal rate of 74% in the second quarter according to Verisign’s published numbers.
It’s probably not a fully fair apples-to-apples comparison. Domains registered in the first month of GA are likely higher-quality names registered by in-the-know early adopters, and therefore less likely to be dropped, whereas .com and .net have decades of renewal cycles behind them.
Radix also said that 86% of domains registered during the three TLDs’ sunrise periods and Early Access Periods are still being renewed, with .tech at 92% and .site at 88%.

Amazon and Google to fight over .kids at auction

Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction.
It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016.
According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018.
The winning bid will be added to ICANN’s quarter-billion-dollar stash of auction proceeds, rather than shared out between the applicants.
Even though two different strings are at stake, it will be a so-called “direct contention” auction, meaning only .kids or .kid will ultimately go live.
Google, the sole applicant for .kid, had filed String Confusion Objections against .kids applications from Amazon and DotKids Foundation and won both, meaning the three applications were lumped into the same contention set.
Unless DotKids has a secret sugar daddy, it seems probable that the internet will next year either get a .kid gTLD operated by Google or a .kids gTLD operated by Amazon.
DotKids had applied as a “community” application and attempted to shut out both rivals and avoid an auction by requesting a Community Priority Evaluation.
However, it comprehensively lost the CPE.
Child-friendly domain spaces have a poor track record, partly due to the extra restrictions registrants must agree to, and are unlikely to be high-volume gTLDS no matter who wins.
Neustar operated .kids.us for 10 years, following US legislation, but turned it off in 2012 after fewer than 100 web sites used the domain. It made the decision not to reintroduce it in 2015.
The Russian-language equivalent, .дети, has been live for over three years but has only around 1,000 domains in its zone file.
The .kids/.kid auction may not go ahead if the three applicants privately negotiate a deal soon, but they’ve had over a year to do so already and have apparently failed to come to an agreement.

59,000% revenue growth at Donuts leads to Deloitte award

Deloitte has placed new gTLD registry Donuts at the top of its 2017 Technology Fast 500, a league table of the fastest-growing North American technology firms.
Donuts won by growing its revenue by 59,093% over three years.
Given that Donuts didn’t have its first revenue-generating gTLD delegated until the final quarter of 2013, the three-year judging period basically covers almost the entire period of its existence as a trading company.
The runners up were ClassPass (46,556%, founded 2013), which gives fitness junkies a centralized way to book from multiple classes, and Toast (31,250%, founded 2012), which makes point-of-sale software for restaurants.
Companies could submit themselves for consideration on the 500-strong table. They only needed 135% growth over three years to make it to the list.
The rankings are based on revenue, not profit, so it does not necessarily mean that gTLDs are a way to get rich quick.
Still, it’s impressive that something as dated as domain names could top the rankings, given the number of transformational technologies hitting the market every year.

XYZ relaunches .storage with $2,200 price tag

XYZ.com has reopened .storage to registrations with a new, much higher price tag.
A confusingly named “Trademark Holder Landrush” started yesterday and will run for three weeks.
It’s not a sunrise period — .storage already had its ICANN-mandated sunrise under its previous management — and it appears that it’s not actually restricted to trademark holders.
The .storage web site states that “neither registrars nor XYZ will validate trademarks during this period”. The registry says that all strings, including generic words, are available.
It basically appears to be just a way to squeeze a little extra cash out of larger companies and anyone else desperate for a good name.
There are not many registrars carrying the TLD right now, just five brand protection registrars and 101domain.
101domain prices the names at $699.99 with a $1,500 application fee during the trademark landrush.
XYZ says that the regular suggested retail price for .storage will be $79.99 per month which seems to be a roundabout way of saying $948 per year. There’s no option to register for less than a year.
.storage is designed for companies in the data storage and physical storage industries, so adopting a high-price, low-volume business model is probably a smart move by the registry.
It’s a similar model to that XYZ employs in its car-related gTLDs operated in partnership with Uniregistry.
XYZ does not appear to be relying entirely on defensive registrations to make its coin, however.
It’s offering a “complimentary” web site migration service, usually priced at $10,000, that it says can help early registrants switch to .storage in as little as 72 hours with no loss of search engine juice.
.storage was originally owned by Extra Storage Space, a physical storage company, but XYZ acquired the contract for an undisclosed sum in May.
The trademark landrush will be immediately followed by an Early Access Period, during which there will also be a sliding-scale fee (day one will be a whopping $55,000 at 101domain!), before general available starts a month from now.

Aussie govt probes .au amid member revolt

The Australian government has announced a review of local ccTLD .au, to see whether its current oversight by auDA is “fit for purpose”.
The review was announced last week, not too many weeks after a member revolt resulted in the ouster of auDA’s chairman and a number of significant policy U-turns.
The Department of Communications and the Arts said it will “examine the most appropriate framework for the domain” and “identify risk and mitigation strategies for the security and stability of the .au domain.”
The government already has reserve powers over .au under previous legislation.
So far, the exact details of what is to be reviewed are vague.
auDA has faced criticism recently over its increasingly secretive management style — something already being addressed — as well as its decision to open .au up to registrations at the second level.
The membership-based organization has also suffered serious staff churn and the departure of several board members.
auDA said in a statement that it welcomed the review, with interim chair Erhan Karabardak quoted as saying: “It is critical that we have the best possible model for managing the domain, and that our risk and mitigation strategies are among the best in the world.”
The Department said that it expects to “shortly” publish a discussion paper and for the review to conclude early next year.

This is who won the .inc, .llc and .llp gTLD auctions

The winners of the auctions to run the gTLD registries for company identifiers .inc, .llc and .llp have emerged due to ICANN application withdrawals.
All three contested gTLDs had been held up for years by appeals to ICANN by Dot Registry — an applicant with the support of US states attorneys general — but went to private auction in September after the company gave up its protests for reasons its CEO doesn’t so far want to talk about.
The only auction won by Dot Registry was .llp. That stands for Limited Liability Partnership, a legal construct most often used by law firms in the US and probably the least frequently used company identifier of the three.
Google was the applicant with the most cash in all three auctions, but it declined to win any of them.
.inc seems to have been won by a Hong Kong company called GTLD Limited, run by DotAsia CEO Edmon Chong. DotAsia runs .asia, the gTLD granted by ICANN in the 2003 application round.
My understanding is that the winning bid for .inc was over $15 million.
If that’s correct, my guess is that the quickest, easiest way to make that kind of money back would be to build a business model around defensive registrations at high prices, along the lines of .sucks or .feedback.
My feedback would be that that business model would suck, so I hope I’m wrong.
There were 11 original applicants for .inc, but two companies withdrew their applications years ago.
Dot Registry, Uniregisty, Afilias, GMO, MMX, Nu Dot Co, Google and Donuts stuck around for the auction but have all now withdrawn their applications, meaning they all likely shared in the lovely big prize fund.
MMX gained $2.4 million by losing the .inc and .llc auctions, according to a recent disclosure.
.llc, a US company nomenclature with more potential customers of lower net worth, went to Afilias.
Dot Registry, MMX, Donuts, LLC Registry, Top Level Design, myLLC and Google were also in the .llc auction and have since withdrawn their applications.

Eight more gTLDs get Chinese licenses

Radix and MMX have had four new gTLDs each approved for use in China.
MMX has had .work, .law, .beer and .购物 (Chinese for “shopping”) approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Radix gained approval for .fun, .online, .store and .tech.
The approvals mean that Chinese customers of Chinese registrars will be able to actually use domains in these TLDs rather than just registering them and leaving them barren.
It also means the respective registries have to apply more stringent controls on Chinese registrants.
They’re the first new gTLDs to get the nod from MIIT since April.
Only a couple dozen Latin-script new gTLDs have been given regulatory approval to operate fully in China.
MMX’s biggest success story to date, .vip, is almost entirely beholden to the Chinese market. Before today, it was also the only gTLD in its portfolio to pass the MIIT test.
The company said in a statement it has another four strings going through the approval process.
Radix already had .site on sale in China with government approval.

Double-charging claims as registries ramp up new gTLD refund demands

Registry operators have stepped up demands for ICANN to dip into its $100 million new gTLD cash pile to temporarily lower their “burdensome” accreditation fees.
A new missive from the Registries Stakeholder Group to ICANN this week also introduces a remarkable claim that ICANN may have “double charged” new gTLD applications to the tune of potentially about $6 million.
The RySG wants ICANN to reduce the quarterly fixed fees new gTLD registries must pay by 75% from the current $6,250, for a year, at a cost to ICANN of $16.87 million.
ICANN still has roughly $96 million in leftover money from the $185,000 per-TLD application fees paid in 2012, roughly a third of which had been earmarked for unexpected expenses.
When Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah refused this request in August, he listed some of the previously unexpected items ICANN has had to pay for related to the program, one of which was “implementation of the Trademark Clearinghouse”.
But in last week’s letter (pdf), the RySG points out that each registry was already billed an additional $5,000 fee specifically to set up the TMCH.

Your letter states that registry operators knew about the fee structure from the start and implies that changes of circumstance should be irrelevant. The TMCH charge, however, was not detailed in the applicant guidebook. ICANN added it on its own after all applications were accepted and without community input. Therefore, ICANN is very much in a position to refund registry operators for this overcharge, and we request that ICANN do so. Essentially, you would be refunding the amounts we paid with our own application fees, which should have been used to set up the TMCH in the first place.

These additional fees could have easily topped $6 million, given that there are over 1,200 live new gTLDs.
Was this a case of double-charging, as the RySG says?
My gut feeling is that Atallah probably just forgot about the extra TMCH fee and misspoke in his August letter. The alternative would be a significant accounting balls-up that would need rectifying.
RySG has asked ICANN for a “detailed accounting” of its new gTLD program expenses to date. If produced, that could clear up any confusion.
Group chair Paul Diaz, who signed the letter, has also asked for a meeting with Atallah at the Abu Dhabi public meeting later this month, to discuss the issue.
The letter also accuses ICANN of costing applicants lost revenue by introducing policies such as the ban on two-letter domains, increased trademark protections, and other government-requested restrictions that were introduced after application fees had already been paid.
The tone of the letter is polite, but seems to mask an underlying resentment among registries that ICANN has not been giving them a fair chance to grow their businesses.
UPDATE: This story was updated October 12 to correct the estimate of the total amount of TMCH setup fees collected.