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ICANN to earmark $10 million for new gTLD subsidies

Kevin Murphy, July 18, 2024, Domain Policy

ICANN is planning to give $5 million of its auctions war-chest to new gTLD applicants from less well-off nations and wants community feedback on the idea.

The Org is sitting on over $200 million raised by auctioning gTLDs from the 2012 application round, and thinks some of it could be well-spent on subsidizing applicants in the next round.

It wants to create a $10 million fund for the Applicant Support Program, half of which will come from the auction proceeds and half of which will be covered by the existing program budget.

ICANN says this will be enough to provide “meaningful support for up to 45 new gTLD applicants”.

The auction funds have previously been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve and to launch the new Grant Program, which is making $10 million available with year to worthy, on-topic projects.

Clearly, at that rate, the Grant Program may well never exhaust the auction fund, given the likelihood of future auctions and investment gains over the next couple of decades.

The Applicant Support Program will be open to non-profit or small business applicants in most of the world’s territories, as I previously blogged. In the 2012 round, three applicants applied but only one received the discount.

The request to divert some of the cash into the ASP is not subject to a regular public comment process. Rather, ICANN’s community groups have been asked to send their thoughts to the board directly before August 12.

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TV network rebrands on single-letter domain

Kevin Murphy, July 17, 2024, Domain Sales

UKTV, the company that runs a number of basic cable TV stations in the UK, has rebranded itself as U, and is now using u.co.uk as its primary destination domain.

Its channels have been rebranded to the domain-resistant U&Dave, U&W, U&DRAMA and U&YESTERDAY. The “masterbrand” U will be used for its streaming services.

The domain u.co.uk was released back in 2011 as part of Nominet’s release of one and two-character domains. It was claimed as a trademark by multiple parties and was auctioned for a likely four-figure sum.

The winning bidder in 2011, Ubrands, doesn’t seem to have ever used the domain, and it’s not clear how much U paid for it this time it changed hands.

The matching second-level, u.uk, is owned by a domain investment company and has a BIN price of £500,000 on its landing page.

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First registry gets breach notice over new abuse rules

.TOP Registry allegedly ignored reports about phishing attacks and has become the first ICANN contracted party to get put on the naughty step over DNS abuse rules that came into effect a few months ago.

ICANN has issued a public breach notice claiming that the registry, which runs .top, has also been ignoring the results of Uniform Rapid Suspension cases, enabling cybersquatting to take place.

The notice says that .TOP breached new rules, which came into effect April 5, that require it to act on reports of DNS abuse (such as malware or phishing attacks) by suspending the domains or referring them to the responsible registrar.

The registry didn’t do this with respect to a report of April 18, concerning “multiple .top domain names allegedly used to conduct phishing attacks”. It didn’t even read the report until contacted by ICANN, according to the notice.

As of yesterday, only 33% of the phishing domains have been suspended by their registrars, some three months after the attacks were reported, ICANN says.

Compliance is also concerned that .TOP seems to be ignoring notices from Forum, the company that processes URS cases, requiring domains to be locked within 24 hours when they’ve been hit with a charge of cybersquatting.

The registry “blatantly and repeatedly violated” these rules, according to ICANN.

.TOP has been given until August 15 to get its act together or risk having its Registry Agreement suspended or terminated.

The registry has about three million .top domains under management, having long been one of the most successful new gTLDs of the 2012 round in volume terms. It typically sells domains very cheaply, which of course attracts bad actors.

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Americans and ICANNers avoid Kigali in droves

Kevin Murphy, July 15, 2024, Domain Policy

The number of North Americans and ICANN staffers turning up to the latest community meeting hit their lowest numbers since records began, according to newly published ICANN statistics.

In-person attendance plummeted compared to the same meeting last year, and the total number of North Americans collecting lanyards was the lowest since ICANN started tracking these things in 2016.

The number of staffers showing up to ICANN 80 in Kigali, Rwanda last month also tied as the lowest-ever turnout for Org employees.

There were 214 North Americans at Kigali, compared to 612 at the Washington DC meeting a year earlier and 262 at the meeting in The Hague in 2022, which was the first post-pandemic non-virtual meeting.

The previous low was 310, at the ICANN 65 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.

It’s probably no surprise that many regular attendees stayed away. The shorter, mid-year Policy Forum meetings typically see the lowest in-person participation, and that’s particularly noticeable when the rotation has them held in Africa.

Flight web sites I checked show no direct flights from the US to Kigali. A connection at a European hub is required and you’re realistically looking at over 24 hours of travel time. Asian community members have it a little easier, with connecting hubs available in the Middle East.

For ICANN, the lower number of staff being sent may be indicative of the Org’s latest belt-tightening moves, which recently saw a number of staff laid off.

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RDRS stats improve a little in June

Kevin Murphy, July 15, 2024, Domain Services

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service saw a small improvement in usage and response times in June, but it did lose a registrar, according to statistics published today.

There were 170 requests for private Whois data in the month, up a little from May’s historic low of 153, and 20.88% were approved, compared to 20.29% in May.

The mean average response time for an approved request was down to 6.59 days, from 11.34 days in May and April’s huge 14.09 days. Since the RDRS project began last November, the median response time is two days.

Smaller registrar OwnRegistrar opted out of the program during the month, but the coverage in percentage terms held steady at 59%, with 90 registrars of various sizes still participating.

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Unstoppable Domains goes down after domain hijack

Kevin Murphy, July 12, 2024, Domain Tech

Unstoppable Domains, operator of the blockchain-based alternative naming system, has had its domain hijacked and is warning customers to be wary of further scams and attacks.

“Unstoppabledomains.com has been subject to an attack. Do NOT open emails from @unstoppabledomains.com or use the website until further notice,” the company tweeted on Twitter.

Company founder Matthew Gould suggested in a tweet that the company’s registrar account, at SquareSpace, has been compromised. He said he suspected it may be related to SquareSpace’s acquisition of Google Domains.

He said the attackers are already sending out “fake emails” and that he expects them to set up a fake web site at the .com domain. It does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

The Whois record shows that the domain was updated shortly after 0200 UTC today and then again just a few minutes ago.

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Four more gTLDs in emergency measures

ICANN has thrown four more gTLDs into the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, presumably as a prelude to terminating their registry’s contracts in a few weeks.

Asia Green IT System’s .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) are all going EBERO, meaning Nominet will take over their operation on ICANN’s behalf.

Not that they need much operation, given that all four, which all connect in some way to Iran and Iranian culture, were unlaunched and dormant, with no third-party registrations.

The four TLDs, along with AGIT’s .nowruz, which went into EBERO last week, had been running on CoCCA’s back-end, but it sounds rather like the registry forgot to pay its bills, causing CoCCA to disable its services.

That led to functions such as Whois going offline, triggering a breach of the ICANN Registry Agreement. A day of Whois downtime in one week gives ICANN grounds to get Nominet involved and move towards termination.

A breach notice issued a couple weeks ago gave AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk termination. That escalation now appears inevitable.

AGIT almost got to run .islam and .halal, but had its applications rejected after protests from governments of Muslim-majority country. Somehow, .shia did not receive the same outcry.

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New gTLDs and ccTLDs drive domain universe growth

Kevin Murphy, July 12, 2024, Domain Services

The seasonally strong first quarter saw growth return to the domain industry, despite .com’s continuing woes, according to the latest edition of Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief.

There were 362.4 million domain registrations across all TLDs at the end of March, up by 2.5 million names or 0.7% from the start of the year, according to the report. Growth over 12 months was 7.5 million or 2.1%.

The growth came in spite of continued shrinkage at Verisign’s own .com and .net. The flagship .com was down from 159.6 million to 159.4 million while .net remained flat at 13.1 million, the DNIB states.

The two TLDs combined lost a total of 0.3 million names over the quarter and 2.3 million names over the year, Verisign said.

ccTLD regs were up to 139.5 million, an increase of 1.2 million or 0.9% from the start of the year and 3.7 million from a year earlier.

Russia’s .ru overtook the Netherlands’ .nl to become fourth largest ccTLD. That’s 6.4 million versus 6.3 million, but Verisign’s methodology sees it count some 770,000 Cyrillic .РФ domains as if they were also .ru.

All of the top 10 ccTLD grew apart from .uk and .it.

New gTLDs also performed strongly, with 33.3 million regs at the end of the quarter, up 1.5 million (4.7%) sequentially and six million (22.1%) year over year.

Perhaps because the raw volume numbers have started make Verisign’s TLDs look terrible in comparison over the last few editions, the DNIB has started reporting an estimated renewal rate for many of the TLDs the DNIB tracks.

As you might expect, the renewal numbers for new gTLDs suck. While established TLDs like .com have the usual mid-70s percent renewal rate, that number plummets to the 20s when you look at big 2012-round TLDs such as .xyz, .online and .top.

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Eight interesting recent dot-brand registrations

If somebody told me that this blog spends altogether too much time shitting on dot-brand gTLDs, I probably wouldn’t argue with them very long or hard before conceding they probably have a point.

So I thought it might be useful, in the interests of balance, to occasionally (perhaps monthly) highlight some of the more interesting dot-brand registrations I’ve spotted recently.

There’s usually plenty to choose from — 34 dot-brand registries registered a total of 135 domains in June, many of which already resolve to live web sites, and there have been over 25,000 registrations to date — so these picks are purely subjective.

lra.amazon

LRA could stand for a great many things, but one of those things is Labour Relations Agency, which raises an eyebrow given that Amazon is currently fighting its warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize in the UK. Right now, it doesn’t resolve for me.

showthemyourpride.itv

I’ve seen this one promoted on the actual television here in the UK! It’s a campaign by broadcaster ITV, fronted by comedian Alan Carr, to get people to make gay people’s lives a little easier by calling out homophobia and such. It was registered June 27, when Pride Month was pretty much over.

go.volvo

The domain only leads to a 404 right now, but it’s notable because it’s Volvo’s first registered .volvo domain and the name is suggestive of some kind of planned portal site or redirect function. Fifty other dot-brands already have go.brand domains registered. Car brands have had a mixed history in the dot-brand space — some have enthusiastically embraced the concept, others have cancelled their registry contracts. In the first category, both .bmw and .mini also received “go.” registrations in June.

listen.afl

.afl is for the Australian Football League, and this domain redirects to a directory of its podcasts on its main .com.au web site.

ca.pioneer

Providing national portals using two-letter country codes at the second level is a fairly popular dot-brand use case, with Germany’s .de the most popular if you exclude strings that are also English words (my, id, it, etc). You might expect ca.pioneer to lead you to a Canadian portal, but it actually takes you to… ahem… usa.pioneer.

admaker.jio

Indian telco JIO is using this domain for a service that makes advertisements, believe it or not. It has about 20 other .jio domains, like stream.jio and translate.jio, that lead, without redirects, to similar hosted apps.

gpt.lundbeck

Registered by the pharma giant back in May, this is the second registered “gpt” in a dot-brand after gpt.fox. Presumably standing for AI buzz-phrase Generative Pre-trained Transformer, I can’t tell you what either site does because they’re password protected. Lundbeck has over 270 .lundbeck domains, most of which resolve.

beam.google

Could this be the eventual brand for Google’s Project Starline videoconferencing technology, which was first announced back in 2021? It certainly seems possible, given that this April-registered domain leads, without a domain redirect, to the Starline web site.

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.me premium sales down

Registry-reserved premium domain sales were down a fair bit last year, according to a summary released by the registry today.

DoMEn said it sold €317,500 of premiums last year. That compares to a total of €591,500 in 2022, when the numbers came in two halves.

It sold 51 premiums in total, compared to 77 in 2022, with an average sale price of €6,215.69.

One and two-character domains accounted for 16 sales, compared to 24 in 2022.

DoMEn blamed a “much weaker primary domain market in the post-COVID era, coupled with the slower economic and venture capital investment activities on a global scale” for the decline.

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