Time for some more ICANN salary porn

ICANN has filed its tax return for its fiscal 2018, so it’s once again that time of the year in which the community gets to salivate over how much its top staffers get paid.
The latest form 990, covering the 12 months to June 30, 2018, shows that the top 21 ICANN employees were compensated to the tune of $10.3 million, an average of $492,718 each.
That’s up about 4% from $9.9 million in the previous year, an average across the top 21 staffers of $474,396 apiece.
These numbers include base salary, bonuses, and benefits such as pension contributions.
Employee compensation overall increased from $60 million to $73.1 million.
The biggest earner was of course CEO Göran Marby, who is now earning more than his immediate predecessor Fadi Chehadé but a bit less than last-but-one boss Rod Beckstrom.
Marby’s total compensation was $936,585, having received a bonus of almost $200,000 during the year. His base salary was $673,133.
The number of staffers receiving six-figure salaries increased from 159 in fiscal 2017 to 183 — about 44% of its estimated end-of-year headcount.
Towards the end of the reported year, as ICANN faced a budget crunch, many members of the ICANN community had called on the organization to rein in its spending on staff.
ICANN says it targets compensation in the 50th to 75th percentile range for the relevant industry.
The top five outside contractors in the year were:

• Jones Day, ICANN’s go-to law firm. It received $5.4 million, down from $8.7 million in 2017.
• Zensar Technologies, the IT consultancy that develops and supports ICANN software. It received $3.7 million.
• IIS, the Swedish ccTLD registry, which does pre-delegation testing for new gTLDs. It received $1.3 million.
• Iron Mountain, the data escrow provider. It received $1.1 million.
• Infovity, which provides Oracle software support. It received $1 million.

The return shows that ICANN made a loss of $23.9 million in the year, on revenue that was down from $302.6 million to $136.7 million.
The primary reason for this massive decrease in revenue was the $135 million Verisign paid for the rights to run .web, at an ICANN last-resort auction, in ICANN’s fiscal 2017.
The tax form for 2018 can be found here (pdf) and 2017’s can be found here (pdf).

1 Comment Tagged: 990, budget, earnings, financials, ICANN, tax

Smaller registrars say .uk release is biased towards the Big Boys

A group of small .uk registrars have complained to Nominet that the imminent release of three million second-level .uk domain names is biased towards their deep-pocketed rivals.
So far, 33 registrars have signed a petition, penned by Netistrar’s Andrew Bennett, against Nominet’s rules.
On July 1, the registry plans to start releasing .uk 2LDs that are currently reserved under its five-year-long grandfathering program.
These are domains that match existing third-level domains in .co.uk, .org.uk, etc.
The 3LD registrants have until 0500 UTC on June 25 to claim their 2LD matches. A week later, Nominet will start releasing them in alphabetical batches of 600,000 per day, over five days, to the available pool.
It’s going to be a little like “the drop” in gTLDs such as .com, with registrars all vying to pick up the most-valuable names as soon as they are released.
In the gTLD space, each registrar is given an equal number of connections, which is why drop-catch specialists such as SnapNames own hundreds of registrar accreditations.
Nominet’s doing it a little different, instead throttling connections based on how much credit registrars have with the registry, which the petitioners believe rigs the system towards the registrars with the most money.
According to the Nominet, registrars with £450 of credit get six connections per minute, rising to nine per minute for those with £4,500, 60 per minute for £45,000 and, at the top end, 150 per minute for registrars with £90,000 stashed in the Bank of Nominet.
Larger registrars with multiple Nominet accreditations, known as “tags” in the .uk space, will be able to stack their connections for an even greater chance at grabbing the best names.
Registrars such as GoDaddy are already taking pre-orders and will auction off the domains they catch to the highest bidder, if there are multiple pre-orders for the same names, so there’s potentially a fair bit of money to be made.
The small registrars say these credit-based rules are “disproportionately unfair” to their business models.
They point out that it doesn’t make much sense to rate-limit connections based on their proven ability to pay, given that there’s no link between how many they plan to register in the crucial first minute after the drop and how many they intend to register overall.
Nominet says on its web site that the tiers as described are provisional and will be firmed up the week of June 24.
The petitioners are also bothered that Nominet has not made any EPP code available to help the smaller guys, which have fewer engineering resources, to adjust to this temporary, time-sensitive registration system, and that the release plan was not communicated well to registrars.
They further claim that Nominet has not conducted enough outreach to .uk registrants to let them know their grandfathered rights will soon expire.
Many well-known brands have yet to claim their trademark.uk names, they claim.
Nominet has previously told DI that it planned to advertise the end of grandfathering in the press and on radio in the run-up to the release.

3 Comments Tagged: .uk, 2lds, direct.uk, dropcatching, netristrar, nominet, second-level, trademarks

New gTLDs slip again in Q1

The number of domains registered in new gTLDs slipped again in the first quarter, but it was not as bad as it could have been.
Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, out today, reports that new gTLD domains dropped by 800,000 sequentially to end March at a round 23.0 million.
It could have been worse.
New gTLD regs in Q1 were actually up compared to the same period last year, by 2.8 million.
That’s despite the fact that GRS Domains, the old Famous Four portfolio, has lost about three million domains since last August.
Verisign’s own .com was up sequentially by two million domains and at 141 million, up by 7.1 million compared to Q1 2018. But .net’s decline continued. It was down from 14 million in December to 13.8 million in March.
Here’s a chart (click to enlarge) that may help visualize the respective growth of new gTLDs and .com over the last three years. The Y axes are in the millions of domains.

New gTLDs have shrunk sequentially in six of the last 12 quarters, while .com has grown in all but two.
The ccTLD world, despite the woes reported by many European registries, was the strongest growth segment. It was up by 2.5 million sequentially and 10 million compared to a year ago to finish the period with 156.8 million.
But once you factor out .tk, the free TLD that does not delete expired or abusive names, ccTLDs were up by 1.4 million sequentially and 7.8 million on last year.

Comment Tagged: .com, .net, cctlds, dnib, domain name industry brief, Famous Four Media, ffm, grs domains, new gTLDs, verisign

Second-level .au domains ARE coming soon

Australian ccTLD manager auDA has given itself approval to start selling .au domains at the second level for the first time.
auDA said today that it plans to lift its third-level-only rule in the fourth quarter this year.
The date of October 1 has been penciled in, but auDA said it will release more details as the time approaches.
There will be a grandfathering policy in place for existing registrants of 3LDs under the likes of .com.au and .org.au, but its deadlines are much tighter than the policies in, for example, .uk.
Under the published rules (pdf), registrants who owned 3LDs in .au before a cut-off date will get first dibs on the matching 2LD.
That priority period will end April 1, 2020.
After that, registrants who bought their .au names between the cut-off date and now will get also get priority, until August 1, 2020.
The cut-off date has yet to be determined by the auDA board of directors.
After the priority period is over, all unclaimed domains will be available to register by anyone.
You’re basically looking at six to 10 months of grandfathering rights, compared to the five years Nominet offered in when it made direct 2LD registration possible in .uk.
The 2LD policy has been four years in the making, and has courted controversy along the way.
Domain investors in particular have complained, worried that 2LDs will cause confusion and dilute the value of their 3LD investments.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, auda, direct, second-level

.icu gets China nod as it tops 900,000 regs

Chinese regulators have approved .icu for sale and use in China, according to the registry.
ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas told DI today that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved its year-old gTLD for mainland use.
The company plans to launch .icu there formally June 12, he said.
Kopas also said that .icu has recently topped 900,000 registrations.
It’s a remarkable growth achievement for a gTLD with barely a year on the clock, given that SpamHaus stats show that its level of spam abuse is still comparable to .com.
But with prices at around $1.50 at its largest registrars and very little semantic value, one has to assume that a lot of its registrations are speculative. Its first junk drop could be brutal.
MIIT approval may help it continue its growth trend. To date, China-based registrars have recorded no .icu sales.

3 Comments Tagged: .icu, china, miit, new gTLDs, shortdot

These 27 companies have ditched the .com for their dot-brand

Earlier today, I listed what I believe might be the top 10 dot-brand gTLDs with the most active web sites, but noted that it was probably a rubbish way to gauge the success of the dot-brand concept.
As a follow-up, I thought I’d figure out which brands have taken the bold step of ditching the .com and made their dot-brand their primary web destination.
I found 27 TLDs, which is simultaneously not a lot and easily twice as many as I was expecting.
The most-popular second-level string was “home”, with 12 examples. The string “global” occurs five times on the list.
I did this research manually with Google and a list of 275 dot-brands — anything with Spec 13 in its contract and more than two domains in its zone file — culled from my database.
To get on this list, at least one of the following had to be true:

• The dot-brand was the top hit on Google when searching for the brand in question.
• The .com redirects to the dot-brand.

Sometimes I had to factor out Google’s enormously irritating habit of localizing results, which would prioritize a .uk domain, particularly in the case of automotive brands.
On a few occasions, if I could not be certain whether the “official” primary site was in a ccTLD or the dot-brand, I used the brand’s Wikipedia page as a tie-breaker.
Some entries on the list may be a bit debatable.
I’m not sure whether .barclays should be there, for example. There’s little doubt in my mind that barclays.co.uk is the site that the majority of Barclays’ banking customers use, but barclays.com redirects visitors to home.barclays, so it fits my criteria.
In general, I’ve erred on the side of caution. If the top search result was for the brand’s .com, it was immediately ruled out, no matter how enthusiastic a dot-brand user the company otherwise appeared to be.
Here’s the list. Please let me know if you think I’ve missed any.
[table id=57 /]
Twenty-seven gTLDs is not a great many, of course, considering that some dot-brands have been delegated for half a decade already.
It’s about half as many as have already torn up their ICANN registry agreements, and it represents less than 6% of the new gTLDs that my database says have Spec 13 in their contracts.
But I reiterate that this is not a list of companies using their dot-brands but rather of those apparently putting their .com firmly in the back seat to their dot-brand.

13 Comments Tagged: .com, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

These are the 10 most-used dot-brands

This article was deleted October 1, 2019 after numerous errors were discovered.

4 Comments Tagged: .aquarelle, .bnpparibas, .bradesco, .fage, .lamborghini, .leclerc, .seat, .weber, abbott, bmw, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

GRS has lost three million domains since Famous Four died

The old Famous Four Media gTLD portfolio has shrunk by roughly 60% since old management were kicked out.
At the same time, the new registry is selling less than one percent of the domains it used to add each month.
The 16 TLDs, now managed by GRS Domains, have a total of approximately 2 million domains in their zone files today, compared to about 5 million at the end of August 2018.
Last August was when GRS, which seems to have taken over the portfolio about a year ago, announced that it was introducing “much more transparent and sensible pricing strategy” of $9.98 per domain per year across the board.
Its 16 TLDs include the likes of .loan, .win and .bid. Many had been offered in the sub-$1 range, largely via former affiliate AlpNames, attracting huge volumes of registrations but low renewals and a lot of spammers.
I compared the zone file counts at the end of August 2018 to yesterday’s numbers, rounding to the nearest thousand, and came up with this:
[table id=55 /]
Don’t think for a second that the correction is over. The story of the old FFM portfolio’s decline will roll for many more months. Each TLD is still seeing monthly deletes in the thousands.
The number of new regs across the portfolio every month has dropped off a cliff — a big cliff with jagged rocks and sharks circling at the bottom — since the August price changes.
Whereas in January 2018 the 16 gTLDs saw a combined total of over 400,000 adds, by January 2019 this had dropped to fewer than 1,700, a 99.59% decline.
[table id=56 /]
In each case, the drop-off in adds started in August last year. Each TLD went almost immediately from thousands of new regs per month, to under 100.
I compared Januaries because January 2019 is the date of the most-recent registry transaction data. January 2018 was not an atypically strong month for sales for any of the TLDs; for many, it was on the slow side.
Famous Four was replaced by GRS about a year ago after investors in Domain Venture Partners, the ultimate owner of the portfolio, fell out with FFM management.
The registrar AlpNames, which was responsible for a huge share of FFM’s sales and was managed by the same people, has also since gone out of business.

13 Comments Tagged: domain venture partners, Famous Four Media, ffm, grs domains, new gTLDs

Four presidents slam .amazon decision

The leaders of four of the eight governments of the Amazon region of South America have formally condemned ICANN’s decision to move ahead with the .amazon gTLD.
In a joint statement over the weekend, the presidents of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, said they have agreed to “to join efforts to protect the interests of our countries related to geographical or cultural names and the right to cultural identity of indigenous peoples”.
These four countries comprise the Andean Community, an economic cooperation group covering the nations through which the Andes pass, which has just concluded a summit on a broad range of issues.
The presidents said they have “deep concerns” about ICANN’s decision to proceed towards delegating .amazon to Amazon the company, over the objections of the eight-nation Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.
ICANN is “setting a serious precedent by prioritizing private commercial interests over public policy considerations of the States, such as the rights of indigenous peoples and the preservation of the Amazon in favor of humanity and against global warming”, they said (via Google Translate).
ACTO had been prepared to agree to Amazon running .amazon, but it wanted effective veto power on the TLD’s policy-setting committee and a number of other concessions that Amazon thought would interfere with its commercial interests.
As it stands, Amazon has offered to block thousands of culturally sensitive domains and to give the ACTO nations a minority voice in its policy-making activities.
ICANN will soon open these proposed commitments to public comment, and will likely decide to put .amazon into the root not too long thereafter.

2 Comments Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, andean community, dot-brands, geographic, ICANN, new gTLDs, tradermarks

MMX makes $100,000 .luxe premium sale

MMX says it has sold a package of premium .luxe domain names for $100,000.
The registry announced this week that it has sold “a small number of .luxe names for a combined value of $100,000 in a single trade”.
Depending on what that “small number” is, the individual per-domain value may not be all that much.
MMX CEO Toby Hall would only tell DI that the package comprises fewer than 100 domains.
That would still put at least a four-figure price on each domain, which I’m sure many domainers would regard as near-miraculous for a string such as .luxe.
.luxe was originally intended to have a connection to luxury goods, but MMX has repurposed it as its inroad to the blockchain space.
Domains are being primarily sold to address cryptocurrency wallets, primarily in Asia, in the Ethereum blockchain.
There are currently over 5,700 domains in the .luxe zone file.

4 Comments Tagged: .luxe, blockchain, cryptocurrency, ethereum, mmx, premium