Got a spare three grand? For a limited period, you can buy a .th domain name

The Thailand ccTLD registry’s unusual, and unusually expensive, approach to selling second-level domains has seen .th open up for another limited-period application window.
Until June 30, anyone can pay THNIC Foundation a THB 10,000 ($313) fee to “apply for” a 2LD.
Each application will be manually reviewed, and successful registrants will be notified July 8.
But be warned: the fee for the first year and subsequent annual renewals is an eye-watering THB 100,000 ($3,130).
Trademark owners and owners of matching .co.th domains will get priority in the event of clashes with regular would-be registrants.
THNIC has been using this strange approach to second-level domain allocation — which looks more like a series of sunrise periods that never culminate in general availability — in sporadic, brief rounds for the last five years.
Most ccTLD registries with a legacy three-level structure — such as .uk, .jp and .nz — have opted to instead make 2LDs available in much the same way as 3LDs.

Comment Tagged: .th, second-level, sunrise, thnic, trademarks

Amazon wins! ICANN on verge of approving .amazon despite government outrage

Amazon has one foot over the finish line in its seemingly endless battle for the .amazon gTLD.
ICANN last week nudged its application along to probably its final hurdle and gave the strongest indication yet that the controversial dot-brand will soon be delegated in the root.
Amazon has essentially won, beating off objections from the eight South American nations of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.
In a May 15 resolution, published late Friday, the ICANN board of directors resolved that there is “no public policy reason for why the .AMAZON applications should not be allowed to proceed”.
It now plans to approve the application for .amazon, along with the Chinese and Japanese translations, after Amazon’s “Public Interest Commitments” — enforceable voluntary commitments that would be incorporated into its registry contract — have been subject to 30-day public comment period.
These PICs would require Amazon to give each of the eight nations, and ACTO itself, one domain name under .amazon that they could use to provide non-commercial information about the region whose name the company shares.
Amazon would also have to block up to 1,500 culturally sensitive terms in each of the TLDs, so that nobody could use them.
There’d be a steering committee comprising Amazon and the ACTO members, which would get to decide which domains are blocked. Amazon would have the ultimate veto, but ACTO states could appeal by filing PIC Dispute Resolution Procedure complaint with ICANN.
The text of Amazon’s proposed PICs can be found in an April 17 letter to ICANN (pdf).
As far as I can tell, the public comment period has not yet been opened. If it has, it’s so well-hidden on the ICANN web site that even my voodoo powers have been ineffective in unearthing it.
It seems likely that it will attract comment from ACTO and its members, along with others with an interest in protecting the Amazon region.
Whether their comments will be enough to make ICANN change its mind about eventually delegating .amazon seems highly unlikely.
Amazon, in my view, has basically won at this point.
The victory comes over seven years after the original application was filed.
Amazon fought off a Community Objection from the Independent Objector in 2013, but its applications were rejected by ICANN after receiving consensus advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee.
The GAC reached consensus against Amazon only after the United States, which had been protecting what is one of its largest technology companies’ interests, caved to pressure from the rest of the committee.
But Amazon filed an Independent Review Process complaint, which in July 2017 came back in the company’s favor. The IRP panel ruled that the GAC’s advice had been flimsy and baseless, and that ICANN should un-reject the .amazon applications.
Since then, it’s been a fight between Amazon and ACTO, with ICANN trapped in the middle.
As far as ICANN is concerned, the GAC had only advised it to “facilitate” a resolution between the two parties. It does not appear to believe it was under an obligation to assure that both parties were happy with the outcome.
ACTO had wanted much stronger protections from Amazon including majority control of the policy steering committee and, hilariously, a button on every single .amazon web page linking to an ACTO site promoting the Amazon region.
The company rejected those requests, and instead put its own unilateral proposal to ICANN.
Following ICANN’s approval, it’s now very possible that Amazon could start using .amazon this year.
However, given the usual speed at which the company launches its delegated gTLDs, some time in the 2030s is just as likely.

3 Comments Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, gac, geographic, ICANN, new gTLDs, pics

WordPress-linked .blog dumps Nominet for CentralNic

Knock Knock Whois There, the .blog registry, has announced its decision to switch back-end registry providers.
The company, which is owned by WordPress.com owner Automattic, said that it has dropped Nominet in favor of fellow British rival CentralNic.
It announced the news in a blog post tonight.
The migration is expected to happen in late August or early September, pending ICANN approval (which is likely just a formality).
KKWT said in a blog post:

Deciding to change backend providers was a difficult decision and not one that we take lightly. We understand the time and effort it takes during the migration process, both on behalf of registrars, as well as everyone else involved. We strongly believe that this new partnership will enhance the .blog experience for our registrar, reseller partners, and registrants. We’re fortunate to have Nominet’s continued support to make this transition as smooth as possible.

It’s bad news for Nominet, because .blog is a quite high-profile TLD, at least in terms of new gTLDs.
.blog had just shy of 200,000 domains under management at the last count. Not much on the grand scheme of things, but enough to put it in the top 25 gTLDs from the 2012 round.
Nominet recently got some good news when Amazon switched the large majority of its largely unused gTLDs from Neustar.

Comment

Brand-blocking service plotted for porn gTLDs

MMX wants to offer a new service for trademark owners worried about cybersquatting in its four porn-themed gTLDs.
The proposed Adult Block Services would be similar to Donuts’ groundbreaking Domain Protected Marks List and the recent Trademark Sentry offering from .CLUB Domains.
The service would enable big brands to block their marks from registration across all four TLDs for less than the price of individual defensive registrations.
Prices have not been disclosed, but a more-expensive “Plus” version would also allow the blocking of variants such as typos. The registry told ICANN:

The Adult Block Services will be offered as a chance for trademark owners to quickly and easily make labels unavailable for registration in our TLDs. For those trademark owners registering domain names as a defensive measure only, the Adult Block Services offer an easy, definitive, and cost-effective method for achieving their goals by offering at-a-stroke protection for TLDs included in the program. The Adult Block Services are similar to the Donuts’ DPML, Uniregistry’s EP and EP Plus and the .Club UNBS and should be immediately understood and accepted by the trademark community.
The Adult Block will allow trademark owners to block unregistered labels in our TLDs that directly match their trademarks. The Adult Block Plus will allow trademark owners to block unregistered, confusingly similar variations of their trademarks in our TLDs.

It seems more akin to DPML, and Uniregistry’s recently launched clone, than to .CLUB’s forthcoming single-TLD offering.
The Registry Service Evaluation Process request was filed by ICM Registry, which was acquired by MMX last year.
It only covers the four porn gTLDs that ICM originally ran, and not any of the other 22 gTLDs managed by MMX (aka Minds + Machines).
This will certainly make the service appear less attractive to the IP community than something like DPML, which covers Donuts stable of 242 TLDs.
While there’s no public data about how successful blocking services have been, anecdotally I’m told they’re quite popular.
What we do have data on is how popular the ICM gTLDs have been in sunrise periods, where trademark owners showed up in higher-than-usual numbers to defensively register their marks.
.porn, .adult and .sex garnered about 2,000 sunrise regs each, more than 20 times the average for a new gTLD, making them three of the top four most-subscribed sunrise periods.
Almost one in five of the currently registered domains in each of these TLDs is likely to be a sunrise defensive.
Now that sunrise is long gone, there may be an appetite in the trademark community for less-expensive blocks.
But there have been calls for the industry to unify and offer blocking services to cover all gTLDs.
The brand-protection registrar Com Laude recently wrote:

What brands really need is for registry operators to come together and offer a universal, truly global block that applies across all the open registries and at a reasonable price that a trademark owner with multiple brands can afford.

Quite how that would happen across over 1,200 gTLDs is a bit of a mystery, unless ICANN forced such a service upon them.

5 Comments Tagged: .adult, .club domains, .sex, adult block, adult block services, cybersquatting, donuts, dpml, ICANN, Minds + Machines, mmx, porn, rsep, trademarks, uniregstry, xxx

Five more gTLD deadbeats fingered by ICANN

The company that tried unsuccessfully to get the .islam new gTLD has been slammed by ICANN for failing to pay its dues on five different gTLDs.
Asia Green IT System, based in Turkey, has been considered “past due” on its registry fees since at least January, according to an ICANN breach notice sent yesterday.
The company runs .nowruz (Iranian New Year), .pars (refers to Persia/Iran), .shia (a branch of Islam), .tci (a closed dot-brand) and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd, appears to mean something like “comrade” in Persian).
The only one of these to actually launch is .nowruz. It came to market March last year — bizarrely, it didn’t leave sunrise until a week after Nowruz was over — and has scraped just over 40 registrations. It does not appear to have any active web sites.
With little to no revenue, one can imagine why it might have difficulty paying ICANN’s $25,000 annual per-TLD registry fee, which it will have been paying for almost four years before lapsing.
None of its mandatory “nic.example” sites resolve for me today, though its “whois.nic.example” sites can be reached once you click through an SSL security warning.
The primary registry web site for AGIT, agitsys.com, also does not resolve for me.
ICANN’s breach notice claims that it has been unable to contact anyone at the registry, despite many outreach attempts, since January. It believes it has outdated contact data for the company.
AGIT is perhaps best-known to DI readers for its unsuccessful attempts to apply for .islam and .halal.
ICANN rejected these applications last October after an outcry from governments of Muslim-majority nations and the Organization for Islamic Cooperation.
Given AGIT’s apparent difficulties, perhaps that was a good call.
If the registry doesn’t cough up by June 13, ICANN may start termination proceedings.
It’s the 19th published breach notice ICANN has sent to a gTLD registry. In most cases, even the handful of cases that have escalated to termination, the registry has managed to resolve the issue before losing their contracts.
The only gTLD to actually get terminated to date I believe is .wed, which is currently being wound down by Nominet in its role as Emergency Back-End Registry Operator.
The most-recent registry breach notice, filed against .whoswho in January, is still “under review” by ICANN.

1 Comment Tagged: .nowruz, .pars, .shia, .tci, .xn--mgbt3dhd, .همراه, agit, asia green it system, breach, compliance, ebero, ICANN, termination

Future of .io domains has become party-political issue in the UK

The future of the Chagos Islands and therefore the longevity of .io domain names may well depend on which party holds the reins of power in the UK.
The current Conservative government under Theresa May has this month rejected an international court ruling calling for the British Indian Ocean Territory — currently the official name of the archipelago — to be wound down and the lands returned to the exiled Chagossians.
But the leader of the official opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, has reportedly slammed the government’s position and said Labour is “committed to respecting the advisory opinion in full, so as to ensure that Chagossians are able to return to their homes”.
In February, the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK had kept control of the islands unlawfully when Mauritius, which had the prior claim, gained its independence in 1968.
The couple thousand natives were kicked out of the country a few years later to make way for a US naval base, and have been living in Mauritius and the Seychelles with no ability to return ever since.
Were the UK to follow the ICJ ruling, it would quite possibly mean the end of BIOT as the name of the islands and therefore the demise of its two-letter country code, IO, and therefore the eventual retirement of the popular .io domain name.
.io, which is believed to have around 270,000 domains, is run by London-based Internet Computer Bureau Ltd, which Afilias bought for $70 million two years ago.
It’s popular with tech startups as a kind of domain hack for “input/output”.
Now that the UK government has officially come out against the ICJ ruling, and Labour has supported it, it appears the future of the Chagossians and .io registrants alike will depend rather on who is occupying 10 Downing Street in future.

8 Comments Tagged: afilias, british indian ocean territory, chagos, io

ICANN to host first-ever high-stakes dot-brand auction

Two companies that own trademark rights to the same brand are to fight it out at an ICANN auction for the first time.
Germany-based Merck Group will fight it out for .merck with American rival Merck & Co at an auction scheduled to take place July 17.
Because it’s an ICANN “last-resort” auction, the value of the winning bid will be disclosed and all the money will flow to ICANN.
It will be the first ICANN gTLD auction for three years, when a Verisign proxy agreed to pay $135 million for .web.
The two Mercks could still avoid the ICANN auction by resolving their contention set privately.
The German Merck is a chemicals company founded in 1668 (not a typo) and the US Merck was founded as its subsidiary in the late 19th century.
That division was seized by the US government during World War I and subsequently became independent.
The German company uses merckgroup.com as its primary domain today. The US firm, which with 2018 revenue of over $42 billion is by far the larger company, uses merck.com.
Both companies applied for .merck as “community” applicants and went through the Community Priority Evaluation process.
Neither company scored enough points to avoid an auction, but the German company had the edge in terms of points scored.
Both applications then found themselves frozen while ICANN reviewed whether its CPE process was fair. That’s the same process that tied up the likes of .gay and .music for so many years.
While the July auction will be the first all-brand ICANN auction, at least one trademark owner has had to go to auction before.
Vistaprint, which owns a trademark on the term “webs” was forced to participate in the .web auction after a String Confusion Objection loss, but due to the technicalities of the process only had to pay $1 for .webs.

2 Comments Tagged: dot-brands. auction, ICANN, last resort, merck, new gTLDs, trademarks

Dead dot-brands hit 50

Two more dot-brands are on their way out, bringing the total to fall on their swords to date to a nice round 50.
Both of the new departures appear to be brands belonging to the Saudi telecommunications company Etihad Etisalat, which does business as Mobily and has annual revenue approaching $1.8 billion.
The gTLDs in question are .mobily and موبايلي., the Arabic version of the brand, which sits in the root as .xn--mgbb9fbpob.
As is usual in cases of dot-brand self-termination, neither TLD had actually been put to any use beyond the obligatory nic. site.
Despite Mobily being based in Saudi Arabia, the registry is actually a Bahrain company, Greentech Consulting, apparently being run by a US-based new gTLD consultancy called WiseDots.
I’ve never heard of this outfit or its point man before today and its social media activity seems to have dried up shortly after the new gTLD application window closed in 2012.
The registry was hit by a breach of contract notice in December 2016 after it apparently forgot to pay its ICANN fees for a while, but it managed to resolve the issue without further action.

3 Comments Tagged: .mobily, .xn--mgbb9fbpob, dot-brands, new gTLDs, termination, tradermarks, موبايلي.

Turkish government takes over ccTLD

Turkey’s ccTLD has been transferred into government hands.
ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend formally approved a redelegation request from the country to its IANA division.
The new official ccTLD manager is Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu (BTK), which translates as Information and Communication Technologies Authority.
That’s Turkey’s telecommunications regulator, part of the government.
The original manager, since the delegation in 1990, was Middle East Technical University, an Ankara-based university that caters to over 30,000 students.
As is usual with ccTLD redelegations, all the discussions happened behind closed doors. Typically, the losing manager has to agreed to the transfer.
IANA will release a report at some point explaining the process leading up to the handover.

2 Comments Tagged: .tr, Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu, Middle East Technical University, redelegation

Pricey .inc does quite well in sunrise

The new gTLD .inc, which goes into general availability today, had a better-than-average number of sales in its sunrise period.
Intercap Registry, which runs .inc, said today that it had “over 270” sunrise registrations.
It’s not a massive amount, but it’s probably enough to put the TLD into the top 50 sunrises to date.
There had been 491 sunrise periods as of December 2018, according to ICANN data. The average number of sunrise regs was 137. The median was 77.
The largest sunrise to date was Google’s .app, which sold 2,908 domains during its sunrise last year.
Only five new gTLDs have racked up more than 1,000 sunrise sales, and three of those were porn-related. The fifth was .shop.
Based on 270 domains .inc would rank alongside similarly themed .llc, but also the likes of .solutions, .world and .team, where the case for a defensive reg is less clear.
While one can see a clear risk for companies whose names end in “Inc”, the expected retail price of .inc will be around $2,000, which Intercap says will deter cybersquatters.
Sunrise registrants will have paid a substantial markup on this regular price.
For those without zone file access, Intercap is actually posting the names and logos of the companies that have registered on its web site.

Comment Tagged: .inc, cybersquatting, defensive, intercap, sunrise, trademarks