ICANN throws out “Ugly Houses” UDRP appeal

ICANN has rejected an unprecedented attempt to get a UDRP decision overturned using the Reconsideration process.

The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee late last week summarily dismissed a Request for Reconsideration filed by a group called the Emily Rose Trust.

Emily Rose had lost a UDRP case in May concerning the domain name uglyhousesri.com, which it had been using for the last couple of years to run a home renovation-and-resale service in Rhode Island.

The complainant was a company called HomeVestors, which has been running a near-identical service called We Buy Ugly Houses (a phrase it has trademarked) for substantially longer.

The National Arbitration Forum panelist had decided that the domain was confusingly similar to the mark, and that the similarity of the services constituted bad faith use.

In filing the rather poorly-written RfR, Emily Rose argued among other things that “Ugly Houses” is a generic term not protected by the mark.

But ICANN did not consider the merits of its request, instead rejecting the RfR for being outside the scope of the process.

The BAMC said that UDRP decisions do not involved the action or inaction of the ICANN board or staff, and are therefore not subject to board Reconsideration.

While UDRP decisions are often contested in court, this RfR makes it clear that ICANN is not an avenue for appeal in individual cases.

Comment Tagged: bamc, cybersquatting, emily rose, homevestors, ICANN, reconsideration, rfr, udrp

Brazil to launch domains for detectives, librarians and geologists

Bucking the worldwide trend for major ccTLDs to simplify their namespaces, Brazil is poised to launch another dozen new third-level domain options.

NIC.br said last week that it will launch five open spaces and seven more dedicated to specific professions.

The open zones include .app.br and .dev.br, aping two fairly successful Google-owned gTLDs, as well as log.br (for “logistics”), .seg.br (for “security”) and .tec.br (for “technology”).

The profession-specific ones are .bib.br for librarians, .des.br for designers, .det.br for detectives, .enf.br for nurses, .coz.br for chefs, .geo.br for geologists and .rep.br for sales reps.

.br is already probably the most taxonomical of all the ccTLDs, with an eye-watering 130 3LD options, including over 40 profession-specific spaces, available.

Prices for .br domains are BRL 40 ($7.45) a year. The 12 new options become available July 20.

3 Comments Tagged: .br, nic.br

Endurance also got a lockdown bump in Q2

Endurance International Group added its name to the list of registrars to see a lift from the coronavirus pandemic in the second quarter.

The company, which counts brands including Domain.com, BuyDomains and ResellerClub in its stable, this week upgraded its guidance for Q2.

Endurance said it added roughly 97,000 net subscribers in the quarter, compared to a loss of 13,000 in Q2 2019.

It expects revenue to be $274 million compared to an analyst consensus of $271.25 million, and adjusted EBITDA of about $84 million compared to the $76.3 million reported a year ago.

Cash bookings, perhaps a better indicator of actual sales during the quarter were up 5% year over year at $281.6 million.

Unlike other registrars and registries that have reported a lockdown bump, Endurance suggested that it performed well in spite of, rather than because of, the pandemic. In a statement, CEO Jeffrey Fox said:

As we entered the second quarter, the healthcare and economic uncertainties brought on by COVID-19 were impacting global businesses, including the millions of small businesses we serve. Despite these challenges, we remain focused on delivering value to our customers as they navigate this complex environment.

Endurance will report its Q2 results July 30.

Comment Tagged: coronavirus, earnings, endurance

Nominet wants to kill off the .uk drop-catching market

Nominet has revealed a sweeping set of policy proposals that would totally revamp how expired domains are deleted and could essentially kill off drop-catching in the .uk domains market.

The company is thinking about auctioning off expired domains at the registry level, or charging drop-catchers up to £6,000 ($7,500) a year to carry on more or less as normal.

Currently, expired .uk domains are deleted at an undisclosed time each day, leading drop-catch registrars to spam the registry back-end with availability checks on the best names.

Upon finding a desired domain has dropped, they then attempt to register it immediately by spamming EPP create commands.

About 0.7% of the domains deleted each year, about 12,000 of the 1.76 million names dropped in 2018, are re-registered within a second of release, Nominet says.

The system as it stands bothers the registry due to the technical load it creates and the fact that it means the most desirable names are snapped up by small number of domainers for resale.

It also does not like the fact the current system encourages collusion between Nominet members and the creation of dummy memberships by drop-catchers.

So it’s proposing two main options for rejiggering the economics.

The first and apparently preferred solution would be for Nominet to auction off the names, rather than deleting them. It would look a lot like auctions often seen in newly launching TLDs.

The second option is to charge drop-catchers extra fees for a greater number of simultaneous EPP connections.

Currently, each registrar gets six. Under the proposal, called “Economically controlled access to expiring domains”, they’d be able to buy additional batches of six for £600 a pop, up to a maximum of 10 batches or £6,000.

Regardless of which option is chosen, Nominet also wants to make drop times more predictable, by publishing a daily drop-list available to all.

Nominet knows there’s a pretty good chance it’s going to be accused of profiteering, and says in the paper:

If either of the options proposed are implemented, we envisage that any profits derived from the auction or economically controlled access models will be directed towards public benefit activity and/or ringfenced to provide specific services to registrars e.g. a training fund. However, we are also seeking ideas on how any profits would be best spent to benefit the .UK namespace in this consultation.

The consultation can be found here. Interested parties have until August 14 to submit comments.

5 Comments Tagged: .uk, auctions, cctlds, drop catching, expired, nominet

Right to reply: new gTLD applicant hits back at my “delusional” comments

You may recall that I recently referred to Nameshop, a rejected new gTLD applicant, as “delusional” for attempting to get ICANN to grant it .internet to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.

I’ve not really pulled my punches reporting on the company’s attempts to get its rejected applied-for string, .idn, converted to .internet over the last few years. Nameshop is fighting a losing battle, I believe, and would be best served by pulling its application and getting a full refund.

Nameshop owner Sivasubramanian Muthusamy recently asked for a right to reply, and as that seemed like an easier option than getting into a pointless decade-long argument, I obliged.

Below the break, he tries to convince me and you that I’m wrong. Other than formatting, I’ve not edited it. Read it, and draw your own conclusions. Leave a comment if you wish.

By Sivasubramanian M

This brief article is primarily in response to the Domain Incite article about the Nameshop application for the .Internet Top Level Domain, titled World’s most deluded new gTLD applicant makes coronavirus pitch, and “Just give up!” ICANN tells its most stubborn new gTLD applicant, — but it is also in response to ICANN’s treatment of the Nameshop application.

Domain Incite has graciously allowed me the space here to respond, for which I am very thankful.

In reporting on the Nameshop proposal to delegate .internet in a way that can be used as a trusted communications space during the global pandemic, Domain Incite posits:

I don’t know whether Nameshop is motivated by a genuine desire to do good — as so many are during the pandemic crisis — or a sneaky strategy to shame ICANN into giving it its string change. Either way, the plan is pure delusion.

It is difficult for me to answer your question, because that would require a self-proclamation of merit, which by definition is something conferred, not claimed. However, I must seek in some way to dispel the doubts that you have expressed.

As Domain Incite has indicated in previous articles, Nameshop’s original application was for .IDN (more about that later). Although not finalized, the “IDN” moniker included a significant
element of usefulness and some sense of purpose with regard to making the Internet more accessible to all. There was always a sense of doing good. This goal was expanded and clarified in 2012 when the application was changed to .Internet and included Public Interest Commitments (that were ahead of the PIC process).

The inspiration for the original good and the idea to serve the Covid-fighting community is derived directly from my interactions with several good men and women who live purposeful
lives unseen and unknown, some of whom are involved in the Internet Governance processes.

A “sneaky strategy” would be the last thing to move them.

At this time of the COVID pandemic, some readings that came my way and my consultations encouraged the idea of a good deed to defer the business aspects of the .Internet application
and offer to utilise the TLD space with a near total focus on being of use in managing the crisis and to further use the TLD space for collaboration on renewal, with ample involvement from the ICANN Community. This is what Nameshop has offered. There is no delusion here.

Nameshop is not making a “pitch”; this is an idea to utilise the DNS for global benefit, one of the stated, yet unrealised goals of the new gTLD program.

As to Domain Incite’s characterisations of me as “most deluded” and “most stubborn”: I might be accepted to accept those descriptions if by “deluded,” you mean that I continue to believe
in the ICANN model and its propensity for doing good, and if you mean by stubborn, it is my persistence in not letting the idea of a purposeful TLD fall by the wayside.

Does my letter (pdf) reads like one that shames ICANN or instead like one that expresses a very high opinion of ICANN and deep trust in the ICANN Community? When Domain Incite and others next consider the Nameshop application, please understand that:

• While Nameshop’s original application for .idn (disqualifiable because it is Indonesia’s country code) might be considered a mistake, consider that Google and Donuts made the same error (although it was not an existential mistake for them). This shows that the process was Byzantine even to the intellectual elites of our space – yet harmful only to
  entities the size of Nameshop.
• While ICANN could have easily, immediately and appropriately informed me that .idn appeared on a list, ICANN took months to do so – timely response would have enabled Nameshop to correct the error at or almost at the time the application; Nameshop learnt about .idn being an alpha3 country code from others and informed ICANN, and requested to be allowed to change the string by the “Change Request” process which became an extended part of the application process.
• After all the delays related processes of evaluation, and gaps in review processes that stymied substantive review, ICANN invited Nameshop to enter into an IRP, a review process prohibitively expensive and burdensome to be exercised by the type of applicant the new gTLD program supposedly encouraged; we have so far engaged in the cooperative engagement process. It is not our desire to engage in adversarial litigation on this matter.
• A few other TLD applicants were permitted to change their string, after the “reveal day”. So, this issue is not black and white, it is a situation of ICANN being fair to many others but being selectively unfair concerning the string .Internet.

Where Domain Incite cites ICANN that there was, “careful review of the application,” that review was to verify if process routines were followed on paper, but with a firm resistance to
review the substance of the issue placed before ICANN. This is made clear in the various reports ICANN submitted where the reviewing parties did not perform a substantive review
either in its Board Reconsideration or even in the Ombudsman processes.

ICANN contends that it followed the due process, but following “a process” for the sake of documentation does not mean that “due process” was accorded. As observed by the Board
Governance Committee, “the reconsideration process does not allow for a full-scale review of a new gTLD application.” All of this amounts to a process severely limited by design, severely
limited in independence, and with limited notions of accountability.

Nameshop, as the applicant for the TLD .Internet, is not a large business corporation of a size typical of ICANN’s new application process. Nonetheless, Nameshop continues to contend that
it is well within ICANN’s processes to address these very process gaps to delegate .Internet; this has been an ongoing and amicable conversation.

One of the goals of the new gTLD program was to facilitate DNS usage and DNS usage for good in new areas of the globe. Delegating .Internet to Nameshop would achieve a significant milestone in ICANN’s new gTLD program. The current global health crisis amplifies ICANN’s role several fold, and in this context, Nameshop offers this proposal to present a clean TLD namespace to address multiple issues arising out of the pandemic situation, to use the space with a focus on being of help in managing the crisis, and more in causing ideas for renewal, not by Nameshop’s own strengths, but by the collective strengths and merits of the ICANN community.

4 Comments Tagged: .internet, ICANN, idn, nameshop, new gTLDs

One.com takes big chunk of Danish market with third acquisition this year

European registrar One.com says it is now the biggest player in the Danish market after acquiring rival Larsen Data, which does business as GratisDNS, for an undisclosed sum.

One.com says that the deal means it now sponsors over 400,000 of the 1.3 million extant .dk domains, making it the largest local registrar.

GratisDNS has been around since 2001. It’s not a big player in gTLDs, with only 550 names under management at the last count.

It’s the third announced acquisition by One.com this year. It also bought Dutch hosting provider Hostnet and Norwegian registrar SYSE.

The company also recently said that, like so many other registrars, business has been booming during the coronavirus pandemic as bricks-and-mortar businesses relocate online.

Interestingly, sales were up 55% year-on-year in locked-down Denmark, but only up 7% in quarantine-free Sweden.

One.com also runs the .one gTLD, which has almost 78,000 names in its zone file right now. The registrar has been offering first-year regs for free recently.

GratisDNS had planned to apply for a city gTLD for Copenhagen back in 2012, but failed to secure governmental interest.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, consolidation, coronavirus, gratisdns, larsen, one.com

Web.com acquires another of the original five registrars

Consolidation in the domain industry continues apace, with Web.com bringing one of the remaining original five competitive registrars into its stable for AUD 12.2 million ($8.3 million) in cash.

It’s acquiring an Australian company called Webcentral Group, which until last month was known as ARQ Group and before that as Melbourne IT.

Webcentral also runs the retail registrars Netregistry and, in New Zealand, Domainz. It has about 330,000 customers, though not all are registrants.

Web.com says the deal gives it a deeper footprint in the Aussie, Kiwi and Southeast Asian markets.

My records show that Webcentral had about 130,000 domains under management at the end of March on its Melbourne IT tag, down by about 6,000 year over year. That’s not counting regs in ccTLDs such as .au.

Netregistry had another 113,000 gTLD domains, down from 129,000 a year earlier.

After the deal closes, Web.com will own the three oldest active registrars as measured by IANA ID — Network Solutions, Register.com and now Melbourne IT. The latter two were among the first five to go live after ICANN introduced competition at the registrar level in 1999.

For Webcentral, the deal marks the conclusion of a three-stage sell-off that started over a year ago when it sold its TPP Wholesale business to UK consolidator CentralNic.

Then, this February, it announced the sale of its enterprise unit to private equity for AUD 36 million ($25 million). It had been publicly looking for a buyer for its remaining SMB registrar business for many months.

The root cause of the sell-offs appears to be the company’s crippling debt.

Webcentral had expected to be hit unfavorably by the coronavirus pandemic, but that was largely due to its exposure to the digital marketing market, via its WME brand, rather than dwindling domain sales.

GoDaddy blamed the same problem for its recently announced layoffs.

Webcentral is currently listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Web.com itself fell into private equity hands in a $2 billion deal in 2018.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, arq, consolidation, domainz, melbourne it, netregistry, netsol, web.com, webcentral

Mucho weirdness as Google “forgets” to renew major domain

Google has lost control of a key domain name, breaking millions of URLs used by its customers.

It emerged today that the domain blogspot.in expired in May and was deleted around June 24.

It was promptly re-registered via a non-ICANN registrar based in India called Domainming and put up for sale on Sedo for $5,999.

Blogspot is the brand used by people using Google’s Blogger platform. While the .com is the primary domain, the company localizes URLs to the ccTLD of the visitor’s home country in most cases.

There are currently over four million blogspot.in URLs listed in Google’s index.

Most of the reports I’ve read today chalk the loss of the domain down to corporate forgetfulness, but it appears to be weirder than that.

Google uses MarkMonitor to manage its portfolio, so if it is a case of the registrar forgetting to renew a client’s domain, it would be hugely embarrassing for whoever looks after Google over there.

However, historical Whois records archived by DomainTools suggests something odder is going on. It looks like MarkMonitor would have been prevented from renewing the domain by the .in registry.

These records show that from June 1, 2018, blogspot.in has had a serverRenewProhibited status applied, basically meaning the registry won’t allow the registrar to renew the domain.

ICANN describes the code like this:

This status code indicates your domain’s Registry Operator will not allow your registrar to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion.

Often, this status indicates an issue with your domain that needs to be addressed promptly. You should contact your registrar to request more information and resolve the issue. If your domain does not have any issues, and you simply want to renew it, you must first contact your registrar and request that they work with the Registry Operator to remove this status code. This process can take longer than it does for clientRenewProhibited because your registrar has to forward your request to your domain’s registry and wait for them to lift the restriction.

The domain was placed into clientDeleteProhibited, clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, serverDeleteProhibited, serverTransferProhibited, and serverUpdateProhibited statuses at the same time.

Basically, it was fully locked down at both registrar and registry levels.

All of those status codes apart from serverRenewProhibited were removed in the first week of May this year, after almost two years.

The registry for .in is government-affiliated NIXI, but the back-end provider is Neustar.

At the time the domain was locked down, Afilias ran the back end, and there was a somewhat fractious battle going on between the two companies for the .in contract.

Judging by the changing status codes, it appears that two years ago somebody — Google, MarkMonitor, NIXI or Afilias — put the domain into a state in which it could not be renewed, transferred or deleted.

For some reason, the domain stayed like that until just a couple of weeks before it expired, when the prohibitions on deletion and transfer were removed.

I’ve been unable to find any information about legal trouble Google had in India two years ago that would have led to this unusual state of affairs.

It doesn’t seem to be a simple case of forgetfulness, however.

Comment Tagged: blogger, blogspot, domainming, expiration, google, markmonitor

First deadbeat dot-brand ripped from the root

ICANN has terminated a dot-brand gTLD contract for non-payment of fees for the first time.

The unlucky recipient of the termination notice is aigo, a privately held Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer.

ICANN first hit the company with a breach of contract notice in March 2018, noting its non-payment and a litany of other infractions.

The two parties have been in mediation and arbitration ever since, but the arbitrator found aigo was in fact in breach in late May.

ICANN issued its termination notice June 25 and IANA yanked .aigo from the DNS root servers a couple of days later.

While aigo is not the first dot-brand registry to be hit with a non-payment breach notice, it is the first to have it escalated all the way to involuntary termination.

Also recently, .intel and .metlife — run by the chipmaker and insurance company respectively — both decided to voluntarily their dot-brand registry agreements.

The total number of voluntary terminations is now 78.

4 Comments Tagged: aigo, breach, dot-brands, ICANN, intel, metlife, termination

Coronavirus helps .nl beat 6 million regs

Dutch ccTLD .nl passed the six-million-domains milestone recently due in part to a surge in registrations during coronavirus lockdown.

According to SIDN, the registry, the six millionth domain was deyogiclub.nl and it was registered June 18.

According to my data, .nl has grown by about 100,000 domains since the start of 2020, and by about 80,000 names in the second quarter.

SIDN said (Google-translated from the original Dutch):

The number of registrations rose so rapidly during the corona crisis in recent months that the 6 million .nl domain registrations were reached much earlier than expected on the basis of the growth development.

The Netherlands entered its strongest period of lockdown March 15 and started easing restrictions in mid-May.

Comment Tagged: .nl, coronavirus, sidn