TLDH to invest in rival new gTLD names

Top Level Domain Holdings is to launch a new company, backed with a $2 million starting pot, devoted to investing in second-level names in rival registries’ new gTLDs.
TLDH chairman Fred Krueger told us today that the new company, which will be found at SecondLevel.co, will start buying up attractive names as soon as new gTLDs start going into general availability.
The move is one of several announcements TLDH is making — focusing on the registry, registrar and buyer levels — at the NamesCon conference here in Las Vegas this week.
SecondLevel.co will take money from institutional investors, buy up new gTLD second-levels, and return 70% of the profits to its investors on a quarterly basis if and when the names are flipped, Krueger said.
There are no plans to monetize the names in other ways yet, Krueger said. He doesn’t think new gTLD domains are going to get enough type-in traffic to exploit, for example.
It sounds like there’s going to be a bit of bargain-hunting going on here.
Other new gTLD registries have of course already slapped premium pricing, and in many cases premium renewal fees, on the names they consider most attractive.
When TLDH buys up such a name it will effectively be saying that it reckons its competitor undervalued the name.
That said, rivals such as Donuts have claimed that they’ve priced their premium names at levels that will still allow flippers to make a profit, so maybe there’s an opportunity here.

NamesCon will be biggest new gTLD show yet

The inaugural NamesCon new gTLDs conference, set to run for three days in Las Vegas next week, has attracted roughly 525 registrations, making it the largest such event to date.
Organizers are speculating that the final tally of attendees could pass 600, despite the fact that early bird pricing ended last night and tickets went up $200 to $599.
All of the previous new gTLD conferences I’m aware of — .nxt, gTLD World Congress, newdomains.org and a handful of smaller ones — have struggled to get half that number of delegates.
I suspect that the relatively low cost of tickets, hotel rooms and flights will have something to do with the relatively high participation for an as-yet unproven event.
According to organizers, there are about 100 speakers/panelists and 30 sessions over the two full days of the conference.
With just 45 minutes scheduled for most sessions, and five speakers on many of the panels, moderators will have their work cut out making sure discussions are balanced yet focused.
I will be on two panels, “Meet the industry Press” and “Important Tools of the Industry”, both of which are on Wednesday afternoon.

Donuts picks young British firm for Sunrise disputes

A newish UK company managed by some old internet policy hands has been appointed by Donuts to handle disputes arising from its Sunrise and Domain Protected Marks List policies.
Oxford-based Synetergy, which says it worked with Interconnect Comunications on new gTLD evaluations, is managed by Emily Taylor (formerly of Nominet) and Tony Holmes (formerly of BT).
The company will handle Donuts’ Sunrise and DPML Dispute Resolution Policy, which ICANN published (pdf) today.
The policy comes into play whenever somebody suspects that a Sunrise registration or DPML block in a Donuts gTLD was made based on a bogus trademark submission.
The price of filing a complaint under the process is £250 for up to five names registered to the same registrant.
Taylor said that IP experts from Sipara will handle the substantive evaluations, with Synetergy administering the process.
United TLD, the Demand Media/Rightside new gTLD applicant subsidiary, is also using Synetergy for its dispute resolution services, Taylor said.

Our unpredictions for 2014

Over the close to four years we’ve been publishing, DI has so far resisted running annual prediction lists.
As a reader, they always strike me as being largely holiday-period filler guff. As a writer, they kind of obligate you to revisit and score yourself a year later. Hugely embarrassing pain in the bum.
But this year we’ve had a change of heart.
It’s really, really quiet out there today.
So here’s our list of events we think will definitely, definitely, definitely happen in 2014.

• Bob Parsons will give ten bucks to a homeless guy outside a Scottsdale Starbucks, according to a Go Daddy press release.
• NomCom, hands tied by its gender quotas policy, will be forced to appoint a minor Kardashian to the ICANN board of directors.
• Pat Kane will quit Verisign in order to head up kp.com, the newly launched sub-domain service for North Koreans who couldn’t get the .kp name they really wanted.
• A pseudonymous domainer will send TLDH’s share price into a death spiral by predicting that “all new gltds will fail lol” in a comment on an industry blog.
• Tucows CEO Elliot Noss will accidentally blind four people during a particularly enthusiastic bout of gesticulation.
• An ICANN director will answer Paul Foody’s question during the Public Forum in Singapore. Foody will leave the room moments later, never to be seen again.
• Somebody will write a blog post about 27-year-old .xyz applicant Daniel Negari without mentioning his age.
• ICANN will blame a “glitch” after accidentally delegating .islam to a New York synagogue.
• Mike Berkens will use apostrophes correctly for a week straight.
• After the GNSO dies for the fifth time, the entire Council will regenerate as Peter Capaldi, forcing an immediate structural review.
• 1&1 will start selling pre-registrations in new gTLDs that it expects will probably be applied for at some point between 2018 and 2024.
• Fox will green-light the production of “Jeff Neuman vs Predator”.
• DotConnectAfrica will finally withdraw its application for .africa, but only after failed attempts to withdraw applications for .africas, .africka, and .dotdotafrica.
• Christine Jones will suffer a humiliating wardrobe malfunction during a campaign rally.
• A smartphone-friendly version of DI will be launched.
• During an unannounced visit to ICANN’s LA office, Fadi Chehade will stumble across John Jeffrey fucking an apple pie in the staff kitchen.
• Jennifer Wolfe will speak during a GNSO Council meeting.
• The Intellectual Property Constituency will complain that ICANN’s latest rights protection mechanisms “go too far to protect trademark owners” and demand an immediate rollback.
• Rick Schwartz will invest $200 million in Donuts.
• The sentence “Esther Dyson declined to comment.” will appear in a mainstream media article about new gTLDs.

Happy new year everyone!

Today’s new gTLD passes, signings and withdrawals

ICANN signed 21 new gTLD registry contracts late last week, while one applicant has withdrawn and another has passed evaluation.
First, Donuts has pulled out of its two-way contest for .global, leaving the path clear for CloudNames to be awarded the gTLD, which is to be an open-registration generic.
I gather that the contention set was settled in a rare example of a privately negotiated deal, rather than an auction, involving Donuts.
On Thursday, several applicants signed Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Famous Four Media, which applied for 60 strings, signed its first RA, for .bid.
Fellow portfolio applicant Top Level Domain Holdings signed for .miami, .country, .work, .vodka and .rodeo; Donuts got .supplies, .supply and .商店 (“shop”) and Top Level Spectrum got .feedback.
PeopleBrowsr contracted for .best and .kred and Punto 2012 got .rest (for “restaurant” and its many non-English variants).
In dot-brands, World Trade Centers Association got .wtc, Sohu.com got .sohu, Frogans got .frogans, AXA got .axa and Brazilian media conglomerate Globo got .globo.
In geographic strings, PointQuebec got .quebec, while FAITID got .moscow and its Cyrllic IDN equivalent .москва.
Finally, on Friday ICANN passed Bosch Rexroth’s dot-brand application for .rexroth through Extended Evaluation.

NamesCon ticket winners selected

Over the weekend we randomly selected the five winners of free tickets to the NamesCon conference.
To enter, all you had to do was leave a comment answering the question:

What’s the best way to explain the benefits of new gTLDs to somebody from outside the domain industry?

The prizes are free conference passes to NamesCon, which runs at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas from January 13 to 15.
The winners were picked using the random number generator at Random.org. By screen name, they are:

1. JS
2. Tony C
3. Nic Steinbach
4. Adam Strong
5. Pat

They will be all contacted via email by DI today to arrange for ticket delivery.
Many thanks to everyone who participated. There were some interesting answers in there.

No costs to registries from TM Claims extension

New gTLD registries will not have to pay any extra fees due to the Trademark Clearinghouse’s extension of the Trademark Claims service, according to the the TMCH.
When the TMCH announced a few days ago that it planned to extend Claims indefinitely — beyond the 90 days required by ICANN contract — a couple of gTLD registries asked me if it would mean more costs for them.
According to the TMCH, the answer is “no”.
The TMCH said in a statement (with my emphasis):

no additional costs will be charged to the registries
…
The Clearinghouse will create an extra interface that works separately from the existing trademark database interface for the 90 days Claims Notifications (during these 90 days registries have to pay 0.25 USD per registration when there is a successful registration matching a mark in the Clearinghouse). The 90+ interface will charge no such fee when there is an exact match.

The TMCH plans to use other means, such as scraping zone files, to provide the extended service.

TMCH extends Trademark Claims indefinitely, kinda

The Trademark Clearinghouse is to give the intellectual property lobby something that it’s been crying out for for years — an indefinite extension of parts of the Trademark Claims service.
And it’s going to be free.
Trademark Claims is a mandatory service for all new gTLD operators, sending pre-registration warnings to registrants and post-registration alerts to mark owners whenever a domain matching a trademark is registered.
But it only runs for 90 days, per the ICANN new gTLD contracts, which TMCH project director Jan Corstens said is IP owners’ “number one complaint” about the system.
So the TMCH is going to extend the post-registration alerts half of the service indefinitely.
When the first new gTLDs officially end their Claims periods next year, the TMCH will continue to send out alerts to mark owners (or, in 90% of cases, their registrar “agents”) when matching domains are registered.
Would-be registrants will only receive their pre-registration warnings for the original 90-day period.
Corstens said that the pre-registration side of Claims would only be possible with the cooperation of registries and registrars, and that there’s a lot of reluctance to help out.
“A lot of them are not really interested in doing that,” he said. “I understand it takes work, and I understand they think it could demotivate potential registrants.”
Trademark owners that have directly registered with the Clearinghouse, rather than going through an agent, will get the extended service for no added charge.
However, Corstens made it clear that the TMCH is not trying to compete with registrars — such as MarkMonitor and Melbourne IT — that already offer zone file monitoring services to trademark owners.
“We know the market exists,” he said. “It’s not our intention to become a monopoly. We will deliver it to them, of course, and assume they can integrate with it.”
Agents will be able to plug the service into their existing products if they wish, he said.
There are a few initial limitations with the new TMCH service such that its registrar agents may not find it particularly labor-saving.
First, only domains that exactly match labels in the Clearinghouse will generate alerts.
By contrast, brand-monitoring registrars typically generate alerts when the trademark is a substring of the domain. To carry on doing this they’ll need to carry on monitoring zone files anyway.
Second, the TMCH service only currently covers new gTLDs applied for in the 2012 round. It doesn’t cover .com, for example, or any other legacy gTLD.
Corstens said both of these limitations may be addressed in future releases. The first Trademark Claims period isn’t due to end until March, so there’s time to make changes, he said.
He added that he hopes the extension of Claims will lead to an uptick in the the number of trademarks being registered in the TMCH. Currently there are about 20,000.

Win free tickets to NamesCon Las Vegas (even if you’ve already paid)

We’ve got five (FIVE!) free tickets to NamesCon to give away to lucky DI readers.
NamesCon is “a pro-new TLDs conference” happening at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas from January 13 to 15, 2014.
It’s being organized by domain investor Richard Lau, Jothan Frakes (Domain Roundtable, DomainFest), and Jodi Chamberlain of 32Events (TRAFFIC, Domaining Europe)
NamesCon seems to be planning something a bit different when compared to new gTLD conferences held to date, judging by the speaker line-up, in that there’s more of a crossover between the ICANNer-heavy new gTLD industry and the traditional domainer community.
There’s a whole bunch of confirmed speakers and panelists (including yours truly) and the organizers tell us that over 300 people have so far registered to attend.
Tickets currently cost $399 (it’s $749 on the door) but we have five passes to give away to DI readers.
The organizers tell me that if any of the winners have already purchased a ticket, they’ll get a full refund.
To enter the draw, just leave an answer to the following question (set by NamesCon) in the comments section of this post.

What’s the best way to explain the benefits of new gTLDs to somebody from outside the domain industry?

Winners will be selected from comments using a random number generator at the weekend.
The prizes are 100% discount codes for full conference passes. You’ll still have to arrange and pay for your own travel and accommodation.
If you cannot or do not intend to attend, but still feel compelled to leave a comment, please say so, so I can be sure to exclude you from the draw.

Architelos offers entry-level NameSentry

New gTLD software provider Architelos has released a cheaper version of its flagship NameSentry security compliance tool.
NameSentry Lite strips out the automated workflow and mitigation components found in the original, leaving the core threat reports and statistics intact.
It’s designed for smaller TLDs that don’t expect to see a lot of malware or phishing in their zones and it’s priced starting at $139 a month for a TLD with under 5,000 domains under management.
That’s about $100 cheaper than the standard NameSentry, which is geared more towards mitigation and has monthly charges ranging from $249 to $3,999, depending on zone size.
Boutique gTLDs and large portfolio registries such as DotKiwi and Donuts are early customers of the more-expensive version.