Pheenix adds 300 more registrars to drop-catch arsenal

The domain drop-catching arms race is heating up, with budget player Pheenix this week acquiring 300 more registrar accreditations from ICANN.
According to DI records, the company now has almost 500 registrar accreditations in its family.
More accreditations means more registry connections with which to attempt to acquire expired domains as they return to the available pool.
It also means that Pheenix’s dropnet (a word I just made up that sounds a bit like “botnet” in a pathetic attempt to coin a term for once in my career) is now a bit bigger than that of Web.com, the registrar pool behind Namejet and SnapNames.
It’s still a long way behind TurnCommerce, owner of DropCatch, which two weeks ago added a whopping 500 new accreditations, bringing its total to over 1,250.
An extra 300 accreditations would have cost Pheenix over $1 million in up-front ICANN fees and will incur ongoing fixed annual fees in excess of $1.2 million.

Go Daddy’s Merdinger named DNA chair

Go Daddy VP of domains Rich Merdinger has been appointed interim chair of the Domain Name Association, replacing Neustar’s Adrian Kinderis.
In a blog post, Merdinger said the DNA will become more “vocal” under its new leadership and outlined three priorities for 2017 — awareness, adoption and access.
He said the DNA will share ways businesses can pursue a strategy of “blending” TLD types in their online activities, promote domains as search engine optimization tools, and make it easier for DNA members to participate.
There will be a new series of DNA Virtual Town Hall meetings to facilliate communication. Merdinger wrote:

Expect to see a more vocal DNA – whether it is at the next virtual town hall or learning about new research on domain name strategies and their business impact. As Interim Chair, I will be working with our leadership team on ways to spotlight how domain names are being used strategically and tactically to support business objectives in 2017 and beyond.

He replaces Kinderis, formerly CEO of AusRegistry/ARI/Bombora, who is now, post-acquisition, VP of corporate development at Neustar.
Kinderis, DNA’s founding chair in April 2013, will remain on the DNA’s board of directors, representing Neustar.
It’s interesting that Merdinger’s appointment to chair is being linked with the DNA becoming more “vocal”.
While Merdinger certainly isn’t a shrinking violet, Kinderis, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying, is one of the bluntest, mouthiest guys in the industry.
That said, GoDaddy has name recognition and has proven to be a bit of a headline magnet over the last decade or so.
It surely has a higher profile among would-be registrants — a big part of the DNA’s audience — than Neustar, which isn’t primarily a domain name company or even necessarily primarily an internet company.
The DNA will continue to operate without an in-house staff, having dumped its second executive director earlier this year in favor of outsourcing to a trade group management company, to cut costs.

Amazon backtracks after pricing free Alexa list at over $900,000

Amazon has reversed, at least temporarily, its decision to yank its free list of the world’s most popular domains, after an outcry from researchers.
The daily Alexa list, which contains the company’s estimate of the world’s top 1 million domains by traffic, suddenly disappeared late last week.
The list was popular with researchers in fields such as internet security. Because it was free, it was widely used.
DI PRO uses the list every day to estimate the relative popularity of top-level domains.
After deleting the list, Amazon directed users to its Amazon Web Services portal, which had started offering the same data priced at $0.0025 per URL.
That’s not cheap. The cost of obtaining same data suddenly leaped from nothing to $912,500 per year, or $2,500 per day.
That’s beyond the wallets, I suspect, of almost every Alexa user, especially the many domain name tools providers (including yours truly) that relied on the data to estimate domain popularity.
Even scaling back usage to the top 100,000 URLs would be prohibitively expensive for most researchers.
While Amazon is of course free to price its data at whatever it thinks it is worth, no notice was given that the file was to be deleted, scuppering without warning goodness knows how many ongoing projects.
Some users spoke out on Twitter.

The quiet death of the @Alexa_Support top million sites is a grievous blow to internet researchers everywhere. $2500 per pull now.

— April King (@aprilmpls) November 21, 2016

Removing the top 1M list is a HUGE mistake. It was extremely useful to assess the impact of new security vulnerabilities. 🙁 @Alexa_Support

— Benjamin Beurdouche (@beurdouche) November 22, 2016

@Alexa_Support I'm disappointed, but I hope you reconsider. The Top 1M list is a standard reference in research. It's simply irreplaceable.

— Santiago Zanella (@xEFFFFFFF) November 22, 2016

I spent most of yesterday figuring out how to quickly rejigger DI PRO to cope with the new regime, but it seems I may have been wasting my time.
After an outcry from fellow researchers, Amazon has restored the free list. It said on Twitter:

Thanks to customer feedback, the top 1M sites is temporarily available again. We’ll provide notice before updating the file in the future

— Alexa Support (@Alexa_Support) November 22, 2016

It seems clear that the key word here is “temporarily”, and that the the restoration of the file may primarily be designed to give researchers more time to seek alternatives or wrap up their research.

Oracle buys Dyn just weeks after huge attack

Oracle has signed a deal to buy DNS services provider Dyn for an undisclosed amount probably in the nine-figure range.
The software giant said it plans to integrate Dyn’s services into its existing cloud computing platform. For the moment, existing Dyn customers are unaffected.
Dyn provides distributed DNS resolution services mainly to the enterprise market, where it has about 3,500 customers.
But it also provides redundant DNS to some TLD registries, notably Uniregistry.
Knowing how ruthlessly opportunistic Oracle can be when it comes to M&A, I have to wonder how much impact the recent denial of service attack against Dyn had on the timing of the deal being signed.
Dyn customers including Twitter and Netflix found themselves inaccessible for millions of North American internet users a couple of weeks ago.
Customers that may have been reconsidering their DNS options following the downtime may feel more reassured now that Dyn is about to become part of a much larger company.
While the acquisition price was not disclosed, it’s certainly going to be in the hundreds of millions.
Just six months ago, Dyn received $50 million in venture capital, following on from a $38 million round in 2012.

Domaining Europe heading to Berlin next year

Next year’s Domaining Europe conference will be held in Berlin, organizers announced today.
The three-day event is slated to start May 14, 2016, at the Steigenberger Hotel, covering the usual mix of sales, development and legal issues.
“This time we are going back to the roots,” organizer Dietmar Stefitz said in an email, “the majority of the panels will discuss about monetization and Market-places.”
This year’s Domaining Europe took place in the Netherlands, after taking place for a couple of years in Spain.
Full-price tickets will be €650 (currently about $705) but there’s an early-bird discount to €350 for anyone buying before December 15.
The conference is being managed in cooperation with ECO, the Germany internet industry association.

Famous Four VP goes solo, claims $400,000 sale

Former Famous Four Media VP of sales Richard Downs has launched a new consultancy business aimed at new gTLD registry operators.
The new company, GTLD Systems is offering a multitude of services but is mainly a way for smaller registries to outsource their sales and marketing operations.
Downs told DI an early success was a recent $400,000 deal, selling a few FFM premiums (in .review and .download) to a single end user. He says he has a pipeline that he hopes will bring his total sales to $1 million before the end of the year.
He said he’s sold over $3 million in premiums over the last few years at FFM.
Spain-based Downs said that he has three employees, one a Chinese-speaker, in three different western-European countries.
Among the services on offer are premium list creation and sales, registrar channel management, Chinese regulatory approval consulting, supplier negotiations and marketing consulting.
Downs was with FFM for about three years. Before that, he was in digital recruitment.

Registries rebel against ICANN’s Whois upgrade decree

Registry operators are challenging an ICANN decision to force them to launch a new Whois-style service, saying it will cost them too much money.
The Registries Stakeholder Group has filed a Request for Reconsideration — a low-level appeal — of a decision asking them to launch RDAP services to complement their existing Whois.
RDAP, Registration Data Access Protocol, is being broadly touted as the successor to Whois.
It offers the same functionality — you can query who owns a domain — but the data returned is more uniformly structured. It also enables access control, so not every user would have access to every field.
The RySG now claims that ICANN is trying to sneak an obligation to implement RDAP into its registry agreements through a “backdoor” in the form of the new Consistent Labeling and Display Policy.
That policy, which originated in a formal, community-driven GNSO Policy Development Process, seeks to normalize Whois (or Registration Data Services, in its generic not protocol-specific wording) output to make it easier to machine-read.
It applies to all gTLDs except .com, .net and .jobs (which are “thin” registries) and would come into effect February 1 next year.
Registries appear happy to implement the CL&D policy, but not as currently written. It now contains, almost as an aside, this requirement:

The implementation of an RDAP service in accordance with the “RDAP Operational Profile for gTLD Registries and Registrars” is required for all gTLD registries in order to achieve consistent labeling and display.

The RySG argues in its RfR (pdf) that implementing RDAP was never part of the community-endorsed plan, and that it is not “commercially feasible” to do so right now.

The 2012 new gTLD Registry Agreement specifies that implementation of the protocol now known as RDAP be commercially feasible before it’s required. The RySG can’t even respond as to whether it’s feasible or not since no reasoning to that regard was provided in the notice to implement such services.
Furthermore, some of our members are on record stating that since the RDAP profile replicates the known deficiencies of WHOIS – which is currently being studied by a PDP WG – so it’s not commercially feasible to deploy it to mimic a flawed system.
The introduction of RDAP represents an additive requirement for Registries to operate a new (additive) service. As there are no provisions for the sunset of the legacy Whois service, it’s unclear how this additional requirement can be considered commercially feasible.

In other words, the registries think it could be too costly to deploy RDAP and Whois at the same time, especially given that RDAP is not finished yet.
It’s yet another case of domain companies accusing ICANN the organization of slipping in requirements without community support.
Whether the RfR will be successful is debatable. There’s only been a few Reconsideration requests that have been approved by the ICANN board in the history of the mechanism.
However, the board may be feeling especially diligent when it comes to look at this particular RfR, due to the spotlight that was recently shone on the Reconsideration process by an Independent Review Process panel, which determined that the board just rubber-stamped decisions written by house lawyers.

NamesCon confirms three more shows after being acquired

NamesCon says it has booked the venue for three more years of domain name conferences, following its acquisition this week.
The conference organizers said today that it has been acquired by 13-year-old German events outfit WorldHostingDays, which usually focuses on the hosting market, for an undisclosed sum.
NamesCon said in a press release that all existing commitments — such as tickets and sponsorship deals — will be honored, and that the same folk will still run the 2017 conference.
It said that it has booked the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas, venue for the first three events, for the next three years.
The next three events will be held January 22 – 25, 2017, January 28 – 31, 2018 and January 27 – 30, 2019, the company said.
NamesCon focuses on the business of domain names, providing sessions on the buy and sell sides of the business.

dotgay loses third .gay appeal

Death warrant or portent of impending legal action?
dotgay LLC has lost its third attempt to get ICANN to reconsider tossing its application for community priority status in the fight for the .gay gTLD.
According to ICANN, on Sunday its Board Governance Committee threw out dotgay’s third Request for Reconsideration, an attempt to give the company an unprecedented third go at the Community Priority Evaluation process.
CPEs allow community gTLD applicants to avoid expensive auctions, but dotgay has lost two primarily on the grounds that its definition of community includes people who are not gay.
Its latest RfR was pretty weak, based on a technicality about which staffers at the Economist Intelligence Unit (which carries out the CPEs) were in charge of verifying its letters of community support.
The rationale for the BGC’s determination, which still needs to be rubber-stamped by the full ICANN board, has not been published yet.
But it seems from a blog post that ICANN now expects .gay to go to auction, where there are four competing applicants in total.
ICANN does not usually publish blog posts on RfR decisions, but in the .gay case it has been keen to avoid being accused of any motivation beyond a dogged pursuit of correct procedure.
So will dotgay go quietly? It remains to be seen.
While all new gTLD applicants had to sign a release promising not to sue ICANN, .africa applicant DotConnectAfrica sued earlier this year and managed to get a sympathetic judge who seems bent on allowing the case to go to trial.

ICANN proposes pricing changes for new gTLDs

ICANN is to give gTLD registries greater power to change their pricing under a proposed new deal.
The organization also says it could accept reduced fees from registries under some circumstances.
These are among about 40 substantial changes appearing in a new version of the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement that has been put out for comment.
The proposed new RA was posted last night after ICANN and registries spent months negotiating the details behind closed doors.
The contract would apply to registries that have signed the base new gTLD contract, not legacy gTLDs such as .com (though, in the passage of time, leaks may occur).
Many of the changes seek to bring clarity to registries’ technical obligations, particularly during their launch phases, and their data reporting requirements.
But there are a few notable changes concerning fees.
First, it seems registrars are going to be stripped of their right to challenge registry fee increases through the ICANN process.
Currently, any substantial changes to their Registry-Registrar Agreements has to go through scrutiny by ICANN and the registrars, and the registrars are allowed to object to the changes.
We saw such objections at the start of the year with .sucks, but RRA changes usually happen a few times a month.
Under the proposed new RA, that process would no longer apply when the only change made to an RRA is to change the registry fee.
Registrars would still have to be provided with 30 to 180 days notice, depending on the extent of the fee change, but there would be no ICANN review or registrar challenge process.
ICANN reasons that this is sensible because, unlike legacy gTLDs, its new gTLD contracts don’t regulate prices anyway.
Second, ICANN has introduced a new “Fee Reduction Waiver” concept to the contract. The draft deal states:

In ICANN’s sole discretion, ICANN may reduce the amount of registry fees payable hereunder by Registry Operator for any period of time (“Fee Reduction Waiver”). Any such Fee Reduction Waiver may, as determined by ICANN in its sole discretion, be (a) limited in duration and (b) conditioned upon Registry Operator’s acceptance of the terms and conditions set forth in such waiver. A Fee Reduction Waiver shall not be effective unless executed in writing by ICANN as contemplated by Section 7.6(i). ICANN will provide notice of any Fee Reduction Waiver to Registry Operator in accordance with Section 7.9.

It’s not entirely clear who asked for this or why.
I can imagine scenarios in which struggling registries might seek a handout from cash-rich ICANN, or in which dot-brands whose registrations are not linked to revenue might ask for a waiver.
Dot-brands — that is, registries that have signed Specification 13 of the RA — also get some love in the new RA, including an effective right of veto over changes that could affect their special status.
If in future an RA change is proposed that would effectively amend Spec 13, it will not happen unless Spec 13 registries vote in favor of the change.
The vote would require a two-thirds majority, with registries voting power weighted according to how much they pay ICANN in registry fees.
The whole contract is now open for a 43-day public comment period, which you can find here.