“UDRP-proof” .feedback gTLD loses first UDRP

The first cybersquatting complaint against a .feedback domain name has resulted in a transfer, despite registry claims that the gTLD was “UDRP-proof”.
De Beers, the diamond merchant, won a UDRP case against the registrant of debeers.feedback earlier this month.
The registrant, who used a privacy service, registered the name back in January, when .feedback was in its unusual “Free Speech Partner Program” phase.
That took the place of an Early Access Program, but saw domains deeply discounted instead of premium-priced.
Buyers had to agree to point their domain to a registry-hosted social media platform and there was a $5,000 fee if they later decided to change name servers.
The registrant of debeers.feedback lost the UDRP largely because there wasn’t much actual feedback on the site until De Beers sent him a nastygram.
On March 24, the site only contained a single two-word post. Five more were added with apparently false earlier dates at a later time, the panelist found.
He wrote:

If the website were genuinely operating as a feedback forum, one would ordinarily expect the reviews to have appeared at or close to their respective dates. That they were not on the website on March 24 and did not appear until after the letter of demand was sent calls for explanation.

The panelist doesn’t mention it, but the reviews all seem to have been copied directly from Yelp!.
Basically, the registrant lost his domain for filling the site with bogosity rather than genuine free-speech griping.
It’s not a terribly surprising or worrying result, perhaps, but it does run counter to what Jay Westerdal, CEO of registry Top Level Spectrum, told us back in January.
“It is a great opportunity for domainers to register domains that will be UDRP proof,” he said at the time. “As free speech sites they are going to improve the world and let anyone read reviews on any subject.”
“I think they are UDRP proof,” he added back then, offering the services of his lawyers to registrants who found themselves served with UDRP complaints.
Today, Westerdal qualified his earlier remarks, telling DI: “I don’t think having a privacy service and also having a .feedback domain will hold up in the current UDRP system.”
Privacy services are discouraged by the registry, though explicitly permitted in its terms of service.
Westerdal said that because De Beers obtained the domain via UDRP, the company will not have to pay the $5,000 unlocking fee if it wants to point debeers.feedback’s name servers elsewhere.

CIRA becomes first new gTLD back-end since 2012

CIRA, the Canadian ccTLD manager, has become the first new registry back-end provider to enter the gTLD market since the 2012 application round closed.
The company today announced that it has signed Dot Kiwi, operator of .kiwi, as its first client.
.kiwi will become the first non-.ca TLD that CIRA runs the back-end for, according to VP of product development Dave Chiswell.
CIRA has already completed pre-delegation testing and technical evaluation with ICANN, he told DI today.
It is believed to be the first back-end provider not attached to any 2012-round application to go through the PDT process.
That would make CIRA essentially the first company to officially enter the gTLD back-end market since 2012, in other words.
The .kiwi contract was up for grabs due to the fact that Minds + Machines, its original supplier, decided to get out of the back-end business earlier this year.
All of M+M’s own stable of gTLDs are being moved to Nominet right now, but customers such as Dot Kiwi were not obliged to follow.
Chiswell said that CIRA’s system, which is called Fury, has some patent-pending “tagging” technology that cannot be found at rival providers.
He said that registry operator clients get a GUI through which they can manage pricing tiers and promotions based on criteria such as substrings and registration dates without having to fill out a ticket and get CIRA staff involved, which he said is a unique selling point.
CIRA’s goals now are to try to sign up more TLDs (cc’s or g’s) to Fury, and to attempt to get Canadian brands and cities to apply for gTLDs in the next round, whenever that may be.
The company also intends to migrate .ca over to Fury from its legacy infrastructure at some point, he said.

Watch: Hollywood actors trash Trump, promote .vote

Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, James Franco, that bloke who plays the Hulk, and a “shit-ton of famous people” are starring in a new anti-Trump attack viral that promotes a .vote domain name.
The video, put together by cult director Joss Whedon, gently spoofs quick-cut celebrity-ensemble appeals, while making a serious point about US presidential candidate Donald Trump being a threat to domestic race relations and global security.
It directs viewers to SaveTheDay.vote, where they are encouraged to register to vote in the November 8 poll.
Here it is:

It’s probably the highest-profile “in the wild” spotting of a .vote domain to date.
While I doubt it will work magic on .vote registration volumes, it’s certainly no bad thing for the visibility of new gTLDs in general.
At time of writing, the video had received about 1.2 million views on YouTube, less than 24 hours after its release.
.vote is an Afilias gTLD with post-registration usage restrictions. It currently has about 1,800 names in its zone file but only one domain in the Alexa one million most-visited sites.

Could ICANN reject Verisign’s $135m .web bid?

ICANN is looking into demands for it to throw out Verisign’s covert $135 million winning bid for the highly prized .web gTLD.
ICANN last week told the judge hearing Donuts’ .web-related lawsuit that it is “currently in the process of investigating certain of the issues raised” by Donuts through its “internal accountability mechanisms”.
Donuts is suing for $22.5 million, claiming ICANN should have forced Nu Dot Co to disclose that its .web bid was being secretly bankrolled by Verisign and alleging that the .com heavyweight used NDC as cover to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
ICANN’s latest filing (pdf), made jointly with Donuts, asked for an extension to October 26 of ICANN’s deadline to file a response to Donuts’ complaint.
It was granted, the second time the deadline has been extended, but the judge warned it was also the final time.
The referenced “internal accountability mechanism” would seem to mean the Cooperative Engagement Process — a low-formality bilateral negotiation — that Donuts and fellow .web bidder Radix initiated against ICANN August 2.
The filing states that the “resolution of certain issues in controversy may be aided by allowing [ICANN] to complete its investigation of [Donuts’] allegations prior to the filing of its responsive pleading.”
In other words, Donuts is either hopeful that ICANN may be able to resolve some of its complaints in the next month, or it’s not particularly impatient about the case progressing.
Meanwhile, fellow .web applicant Afilias has demanded for the second time that ICANN hand over .web to it, as the second-highest bidder, throwing out the NDC/Verisign application.
In a September 9 letter, published last night, Afilias told ICANN to “disqualify and reject” NDC’s application, alleging at least three breaches of ICANN rules.
Afilias says that by refusing to disclose Verisign’s support for its bid, NDC broke the rules and should have its application thrown out.
The company also confirmed on the public record for what I believe is the first time that it was the second-highest bidder in the July 27 auction.
Afilias would pay somewhere between $57.5 million and $71.9 million for the gTLD, depending on what the high bid of the third-placed applicant was.
In its new letter, Afilias says NDC broke the rule from the Applicant Guidebook that does not allow applicants to “resell, assign or transfer any of applicant’s rights or obligations in connection with the application”.
It also says that NDC was obliged by the AGB to notify ICANN of “changes in financial position and changes in ownership or control”, which it did not.
It finally says that Verisign used NDC as a front during the auction, in violation of auction rules.
“In these circumstances, we submit that ICANN should disqualify NDC’s bid and offer to accept the application of Afilias, which placed the second highest exit bid,” Afilias general counsel Scott Hemphill wrote (pdf).
Hemphill told ICANN to defer from signing a Registry Agreement with NDC or Verisign, strongly implying that Afilias intends to invoke ICANN accountability mechanisms (presumably meaning the Request for Reconsideration process and/or Independent Review Process).
While Afilias and Donuts are both taking issue with the secretive nature of Verisign’s acquisition of .web, they’re not necessarily fighting the same corner.
Donuts is looking for $22.5 million because that’s roughly what it would have received if the .web contention set had been resolved via private auction and $135 million had been the winning bid.
But Afilias wants the ICANN auction outcome to stand, albeit with NDC’s top bid rejected. That would mean Donuts, Radix, and the other applicants would still receive nothing.
There’s also the question of other new gTLD applications that have prevailed at auction and been immediately transferred to third-party non-applicants.
The most notable example of this was .blog, which was won by shell company Primer Nivel with secretive backing from WordPress maker Automattic.
Donuts itself regularly wins gTLD auctions and immediately transfers its contracts to Rightside under a pre-existing agreement.
In both of those cases, the reassignment deals predated, but were not disclosed in, the respective applications.
There’s the recipe here for a messy, protracted bun fight over .web, which should come as no surprise to anyone.

Chinese investor pumps $7 million into M+M as .vip pushes firm into profit

Minds + Machines made a profit, kinda, in the first half of the year, due to the popularity of .vip in China.
The company today announced a loss of $1.9 million for the six months to June 30, compared to a $1.6 million loss in the comparable 2015 period, on revenue that was up 115% at $7.4 million.
But factoring out discontinued operations — M+M started to close its registrar and registry back-end businesses during the half — it actually managed to sneak a profit of $56,000.
Its revenue was also unaffected by one-time gains from gTLD auction losses, something which had pumped up its top line regularly for the last few years.
Chairman Guy Elliot said in a statement to the markets that M+M “has successfully been navigated out of troubled waters”.
The turnaround is due in no small part to the success of .vip, which racked up over 400,000 registrations in its first month (back in May), the large majority of which were sold to Chinese investors.
The company said that $5.5 million of the $8 million in H1 billings were made in the first 21 days of .vip’s availability.
Having started 2016 with no sales in Asia whatsoever, it expects 45% of its revenue to come from China by the end of the year.
As a direct consequence of .vip’s sales, M+M has received a £5.5 million ($7.2 million) investment from Goldstream Capital Master Fund I, a Cayman Islands shell company owned by Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital.
Hony, which manages $10 billion in assets, is perhaps best known for owning the pizza restaurant chain Pizza Express, which it acquired for $1.54 billion in 2014.
According to its web site, Hony’s own investors include three large Chinese state-owned investment vehicles.
The investment deal includes clauses preventing Hony from trying to get a director on M+M’s board and/or launching a hostile takeover bid.
It will own 7.17% of M+M after buying 50 million shares at £0.13 each, assuming M+M’s simultaneously announced £13 million ($17 million) share buyback is fully subscribed.
M+M opened a subsidiary in China (a Wholly-Owned Foreign Enterprise) during the half, in order to better serve the Chinese market and comply with Chinese government regulations.
It simultaneously laid off 44% of its staff in the US — engineers no longer needed due to the shift into an almost entirely marketing-focused business — and expects to end the year with only 13 employees there.

Uniregistry to release 10 million domains on October 4

Uniregistry plans to release millions of registry-reserved domain names, many at standard registration fee, two weeks from now.
The company, which has about 25 new gTLDs in its stable, will release 10 million currently reserved names on October 4, CEO Frank Schilling told DI.
The revelation follows news that the company has started allowing thousands of registry-owned domains to expire and return to the available pool.
About 200,000 domains originally registered to North Sound Names, a separate Schilling-controlled company, are being made available via regular channels.
Those domains were registered (rather than reserved) so that Uniregistry could throw up landing pages inviting potential buyers to make offers. After they drop, they will no longer resolve.
But Schilling said a further 9.8 million names will also hit the market next month.
“It’s just a much better time because we have greater distribution and we are less likely to see all our names taken at land rush by one or two commercial registrants,” he said.
“We are unblocking and deleting 10 million domain names and making them available for registration through more than 200 registrars,” he said.
“Almost all will be standard reg [fee],” he said, when asked about pricing. Others will carry premium fees.
A web site publishing lists of newly released names will go live in about a week, he said.
DNW has previously reported that Uniregistry plans to release names that were initially blocked due to ICANN’s name collisions mitigation plan.
Those lists (which are usually mostly junk) are already published by ICANN and can be found accompanying the Registry Agreement for the relevant TLD linked from this page. Here’s the 35,000-name .link collisions list (.csv) for example.

.blog gets 600 applications halfway through sunrise

WordPress developer Automattic has received over 600 applications for .blog sunrise registrations halfway through its sunrise period.
The company’s registry subsidiary, Knock Knock Whois There, said Friday that it has passed the 600 mark with about another 30 days remaining on the clock.
While it’s a poor performance by pre-2012 standards, if all the applications to date convert into registrations it’s still enough to put .blog into the top 10 most-popular sunrises of the current round.
According to DI’s data, the top three sunrise performers from the 2012 application round are .porn (2,091), .sucks (2,079) and .adult (2,049).
The most recent successful sunrise, by these standards, was GMO Registry’s .shop, which finished with 1,182 applications.
.blog’s sunrise ends October 17. It seems to be expecting to benefit from a late flood of applications, as is sometimes the case with sunrise periods.
General availability begins November 21.

Verisign data shows new gTLDs drive almost three quarters of Q2 growth

New gTLDs were responsible for the large majority of domain name industry volume growth in the second quarter, but you’d never know it reading Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The domain universe increased to 334.6 million names at the end of June, according to the latest DNIB, which was published (pdf) last week.
That’s a 8.2 million increase on the 326.4 million it reported in its Q1 DNIB report (pdf).
Verisign reports the increase as 7.9 million, possibly due to new data that emerged after the Q1 report was published.
Whether it was 7.9 million or 8.2 million, most of the growth was due to new gTLDs.
In the DNIB, data on new gTLDs is always presented on page three of the three-page report in such a way to make apples-to-apples comparisons with .com and ccTLDs not straightforward.
While the reports highlight the growth of ccTLDs and Verisign’s own .com and .net registries in absolute and percentage terms, they do not do so for new gTLDs.
(They’ve also been calling ccTLDs “geographic gTLDs” for years and nobody seems to have noticed.)
But comparing Q1 and Q2 DNIB reports shows that new gTLDs contributed 5.9 million of the 8.2/7.9 million quarterly increase, in other words just shy of 72% of the industry’s total volume growth.
That’s the biggest contribution new gTLDs have made to growth in any quarter to date.
The growth can be attributed to .xyz’s penny deals in June, which saw domainers acquire millions of names for essentially nothing.
Meanwhile, .com and .net combined contributed just 700,000 domains to growth and .net actually shrunk by 100,000 names, its first dip since Q1 2015.
The ccTLD market data presented in the DNIBs is probably not entirely reliable. Verisign is still using the December 2014 number for free ccTLD .tk, which I think is about six million names lower than its current level.

First dot-brand gTLD to go generic after TLS deal

The would-be dot-brand gTLD .observer will actually open as an unrestricted generic after the contract was bought out by Top Level Spectrum.
TLS, which has a small portfolio of gTLDs already, bought out the ICANN contract from UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media a couple of months ago, it emerged today.
The Observer is the title of the Guardian’s sister paper, published on Sundays.
But TLS CEO Jay Westerdal said it will be sold as a generic with pricing under $10 per name, as a thematic stable-mate for its gripe-oriented gTLD .feedback.
The price of the TLD has not been revealed, but Westerdal characterized it as a sub-$1 million deal.
It’s the first instance of a dot-brand, albeit one that that not yet gone live, being taken over by a portfolio gTLD player.
Westerdal said he’s looking for more, similar acquisition opportunities.
The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, with no published go-live date.
The Guardian had signed a Registry Agreement containing Specification 9. That allows registries to disregard the Code of Conduct — which obliges them to treat registrars equally.
It seems likely this will have to be removed from the RA before .observer can go to the masses as a proper generic.

Correction: what NTIA said about .com pricing

The US government has not confirmed that it expects to keep Verisign’s .com registry fee capped at the current level until at least 2024, despite what DI reported on Monday.
At this URL we published an article reporting that the US government had confirmed that it was going to keep .com prices frozen at $7.85 for the next eight years.
That was based on a misreading of a letter from the Department of Commerce to Senator Ted Cruz and others, which merely explained how the price cap could be maintained without expressing a commitment to do so.
The letter actually said very little, and nothing of news value, so I thought it best to simply delete the original piece and replace it with this correction.
I regret the error.
Thanks to those readers who got in touch to point out the mistake.