Ironic eight-figure deal marks more Euro-registrar consolidation

Slovakian registrar WebSupport, which is run by a local politician, has been acquired in a reported eight-figure deal.
The acquirer is Loopia, a Swedish registrar backed by Danish private equity firm Axcel.
The deal seems to have closed around the same time as Loopia’s acquisition of .SE Direkt from Swedish registry IIS, though news only broke today.
WebSupport reportedly hosts around 173,000 domains, though it’s not clear whether it acts as registrar for all. It’s not ICANN-accredited, but it does resell domains in a wide range of gTLDs.
It reportedly has annual revenue approaching €4 million and sold for “a two-digit figure in millions of euros”.
According to Vladimir Vano, Slovakian comms chief at CentralNic, which acquired .sk registry SK-NIC last year, WebSupport is the largest .sk registrar.
There’s a certain irony with WebSupport being sold into foreign hands.
The co-founder and majority owner of the company is Michel Truban, an entrepreneur-turned-politician who was closely associated with a campaign to have UK-based CentralNic’s acquisition of .sk blocked.
It was alleged (and denied) at the time that the campaign was party-political, though its main concern appeared to be that CentralNic would bastardize .sk into some kind of horrible domain hack.
Today, Truban wrote on his blog “I’m selling WebSupport and I’m going into politics”. In 2017, he co-founded the liberal Progressive Slovakia party.
He said the money from the deal would free him from inappropriate influence by “oligarchs and patrons”.
Google Translate says Truban wrote: “I had an offer that was about a million euros higher, but I declined it. Because it was from people with bad history and at the same time I wanted WS to get an international story.”

Comment Tagged: .sk, acquisition, axcel, centralnic, loopia, progressive slovakia, sk-nic, slovakia, websupport

Court rules generic dictionary domains CAN be trademarked

A US appeals court has ruled that generic, dictionary domain names can be trademarked.
The hotel-booking web site Booking.com was told last week that it is in fact eligible to have “Booking.com” registered as a trademark, over the objections of the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The ruling could have a chilling effect on domain name choices in the hotel-booking market.
USPTO had denied the company’s trademark application in 2012 because “Booking.com” was considered too generic.
Under US trademark law, you can’t register a trademark if it merely generically describes the product or service you offer rather than its source.
You couldn’t register “Beer” as a brand of beer, for example, though you might be able to register “Beer” as a brand of shoes.
Booking.com sued to have the USPTO ruling overturned in 2016, and in 2017 a district court judge ruled that “although ‘booking’ was a generic term for the services identified, BOOKING.COM as a whole was nevertheless a descriptive mark”.
USPTO appealed, saying that “Booking.com” is too generic to be trademarked, but last week it lost.
In a 2-1 majority decision, the appeals court ruled:

We hold that the district court, in weighing the evidence before it, did not err in finding that the USPTO failed to satisfy its burden of proving that the relevant public understood BOOKING.COM, taken as a whole, to refer to general online hotel reservation services rather than Booking.com the company… we reject the USPTO’s contention that adding the
top-level domain (a “TLD”) .com to a generic second-level domain (an “SLD”) like booking can never yield a non-generic mark.

Key evidence was a survey Booking.com had submitted that indicated that almost three quarters of consumers understood “Booking.com” to be a brand name, rather than a generic term to describe hotel-booking web sites.
Here are some other extracts of the appeals court majority’s thinking, as they relate to domain names:

Merely appending .com to an SLD does not render the resulting domain name non-generic because the inquiry is whether the public primarily understands the term as a whole to refer to the source or the proffered service.
…
We… conclude that when “.com” is combined with an SLD, even a generic SLD, the resulting composite may be non-generic where evidence demonstrates that the mark’s primary significance to the public as a whole is the source, not the product
…
because trademarks only protect the relevant service — here, the district court granted protection as to hotel reservation services but not travel agency services — protection over BOOKING.COM would not necessarily preclude another company from using, for example, carbooking.com or flightbooking.com
…
In sum, adding “.com” to an SLD can result in a non-generic, descriptive mark upon a showing of primary significance to the relevant public. This is one such case.

The ruling does not appear to protect all uses of a generic dictionary word combined with a TLD, but rather only “rare circumstances” where there’s evidence of a secondary, non-generic meaning.
One judge on the case, James Wynn, was not convinced by the majority’s thinking. He warned that the ruling goes against years of legal precedent and could enable Booking.com to subject competitors to expensive litigation.
In his dissenting opinion, he wrote:

BOOKING.COM is a run-of-the-mill combination of a generic term with a Top Level Domain that creates a composite mark concerning the subject or business encompassed by the generic term—precisely the type of mark that the courts in Hotels.com, Reed Elsevier Properties, 1800Mattress.com, and Advertise.com found did not amount to the “rare circumstance” that warranted affording the domain name trademark protection.
…
Presumptively allowing protection of domain names composed of a generic Secondary Level Domain and Top Level Domain conflicts with the law’s longstanding refusal to permit registration of generic terms as trademark

Wynn added that he was “not convinced” that Booking.com’s competitors that use the word “booking” in their domains will be protected by the “fair use” defense, and that the existence of such a defense will not prevent Booking.com from suing them out of business regardless.

Put simply, putative competitors may — and likely will — choose not to operate under domain names that include the word “booking” — even if that term best describes the service they offer — because they do not want to incur the expense and risk of defending an infringement action.

The full ruling can be read here (pdf).

13 Comments Tagged: .com, trademarks

ICANN director Burr leaving Neustar

Neustar is losing its chief privacy officer, Becky Burr, who also sits on ICANN’s board of directors.
Burr, a lawyer, said last week that she’s decided to return to private practice after almost seven years at the registry.
Her last day will be March 1, but she’ll continue to advise the company as outside counsel on issues such as privacy and .us policy.
Lips are sealed on her exact destination, but it’s apparently small, Washington, DC-based, and focused on data protection.
Prior to Neustar, Burr worked for the law firm Wilmer Hale. Prior to that, she was in the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she helped create ICANN 20 years ago.
Despite no longer being directly employed by a registry or registrar, Burr said she’s hoping to be reelected to the ICANN board, where she represents the Contracted Parties House, when her current term expires at the end of the year.
In addition to .us, Neustar runs .co, .biz and acts as back-end for dozens of other TLDs.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, neustar, privacy

Right of the colon? IDN getting killed over dot confusion

An internationalized domain name ccTLD is reportedly getting buried because of a confusion about how many dots should appear.
Armenia’s .հայ (.xn--y9a3aq) today has fewer than 300 registered domains, well under 1% of the volume enjoyed by the Latin-script .am, apparently due to a unique quirk of the Armenian language.
According to a report in the local tech press, sourcing a registry VP, .հայ domains are not working because of how the Armenian script uses punctuation.
In Armenian, a full-stop or period is represented by two vertically aligned dots called a verjaket that looks pretty much identical to a colon in English and other Latin-based languages.
A single dot, looking and positioned exactly like a Latin period, is called a mijaket and is used in the same way English and other languages use a colon.
It’s not entirely clear whether the problem lies with the user, the keyboards, the browsers, or elsewhere, but it’s plain to see how confusion could arise when you have Armenian-script characters on both sides of a Latin-script dot.
The registry, ISOC Armenia, is today reporting just 298 .հայ domains, compared to 34,354 .am domains.
The Latin-script ccTLD has benefited in the past from its association elsewhere with AM radio. It’s also sometimes used as a domain hack, including by Instagram’s URL shortener.
It’s probably worth noting that while Armenia seems to have a unique problem, it’s far from unusual for an IDN ccTLD to perform poorly against its Latin stablemate.
.հայ, which transliterates to “.hay”, is an abbreviation of the Armenian name for Armenia, Հայաստան or “Hayastan”. It was delegated by ICANN in 2015 as part of its IDN ccTLD fast-track program.
Armenian has fewer than seven million speakers worldwide. Armenia has roughly three million inhabitants.

Comment Tagged: .am, .xn--y9a3aq, .հայ, armenia, cctlds, idns

Despite Afilias lawsuit, Neustar names date for Indian takeaway

Neustar has named the date for the transition of the .in registry away from incumbent Afilias..
It’s due to happen February 28, according to a new web site the company has set up to publicize the handover.
The registry will be down for up to 48 hours, starting from 1830 UTC, February 17, as a result.
There will be no new adds, and registrants won’t be able to update their domains, during the downtime. DNS will not be affected, so domains should still resolve.
Neustar won the back-end contract from .in manager NIXI last year, out from under Afilias, after reportedly undercutting Afilias’ $1.10 per-domain-per-year bid with a $0.70 bid of its own.
Given the 2.2 million domains in .in, that makes the contract worth about $7.7 million over its five-year duration.
The transition appears to be going ahead despite a lawsuit filed by Afilias against the Indian government last August, which sought to block the deal.
According to Neustar, the contract was awarded, regardless, last September.
But the lawsuit seems to be still active, judging by the latest filings published on the Delhi High Court web site, which show no judgement has yet been filed.

Comment Tagged: .in, afilias, neustar, nixi, transition

Endurance domain revenue dips

Endurance International put in a poor show when it came to domains name sales in 2018.
Revenue and average revenue per registrant were both down in the fourth quarter and full-year results, which were announced this morning.
Endurance’s registrar business includes BigRock, Domain.com, FastDomain, PublicDomainRegistry.com and others.
Combined, those four brands account for almost 10 million gTLD domains under management, but that number has also been heading south recently.
The company said today that its fourth-quarter domain revenue was $31.3 million, down from $33 million a year earlier. It had 666,000 domain subscribers at the end of the quarter, down from 683,000.
Average revenue per subscriber for the quarter was also down, from $16.63 to $15.63.
For the full year, revenue was down from $133.6 million to $129.9 million and average revenue per subscriber was down from $16.98 to $16.05.
The shrinkage is reflected in the latest transaction reports filed with ICANN, too.
In October, the most recently reported month, all four of Endurance’s biggest registrar brands shrunk in terms of DUM.
PDR was the biggest loser — actually topping the list of shrinking registrars — shedding over 76,000 gTLD domains, over 10,000 of which was from net transfers.

Comment Tagged: bigrock, domain.com, earnings, endurance, fastdomain, pdr

After ICANN knockback, Amazon countries agree to .amazon talks

Talks that could lead to Amazon finally getting its long-sought .amazon gTLD are back on, after a dispute between ICANN and eight South American governments.
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization last week invited ICANN CEO Goran Marby to meet ACTO members in Brasilia, any day next week.
It’s not clear whether Amazon representatives have also been invited.
The outreach came despite, or possibly because of, ICANN’s recent rejection of an ACTO demand that the .amazon gTLD applications be returned to their old “Will Not Proceed” status.
In rejecting ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration, ICANN’s board of directors had stressed that putting .amazon back in the evaluation stream was necessary in order to negotiate contractual concessions that would benefit ACTO.
Amazon is said to have agreed to some Public Interest Commitments that ACTO would be able to enforce via ICANN’s PIC Dispute Resolution Process.
The e-commerce giant is also known to have offered ACTO cultural safeguards and financial sweeteners.
ACTO’s decision to return to the negotiating table may have been made politically less uncomfortable due to a recent change in its leadership.
Secretary-general Jacqueline Mendoza, who had held the pen on a series of hard-line letters to Marby, was in January replaced by Bolivian politician Alexandra Moreira after her three-year term naturally came to an end.
ICANN’s board has said it will look at .amazon again at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, in March.

Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, dot-brands, geographic, ICANN, new gTLDs, public interest commitments

Operation September Thrust leads to another million-domain Radix gTLD

Radix has become the first new gTLD portfolio registry to hit over one million domains in more than one TLD.
It said today that .site has crossed the seven-digit threshold, joining .online, which hit a million names in 2018.
It’s huge recent growth for .site, which had around 561,000 domains under management at the end of September.
Radix CEO Sandeep Ramchandani told DI today that the rapid uptick comes as a result of a marketing program internally code-named “September Thrust”.
This involved promotional pricing — Ramchandani said the cheapest a .site could have been obtained would be about $0.99 — and joint-marketing efforts with multiple registrars.
This mostly involved plugs on registrar home pages, email shots, and promotion in the “check availability” part of registrar storefronts, he said.
The latest transaction reports filed with ICANN show .site grew by about 120,000 DUM in October, with West.cn, NameCheap and Network Solutions (Web.com) the biggest beneficiaries.
NetSol’s .site DUM actually grew by about 10x in the month.
The $1 retail pricing was apparently available at some registrars prior to September, and continues to exist on storefronts today.

Comment Tagged: .online, .site, network solutions, new gTLDs, radix, web.com

Brexit blamed as .eu hits six-year low

EURid’s .eu top-level domain has hit a six-year low in terms of total registrations, and Brexit is to blame.
The registry has just announced that it had 3,684,750 domains under management at the end of 2018, down 63,129 domains compared to the 3,747,879 it had at the end of September.
That’s the lowest end-of-quarter number since September 2012, when it had 3,665,525 domains.
EURid said in a statement that the decline can be attributed to its “ramped up efforts towards tackling domain name abuse” and “uncertainty surrounding Brexit”.
The registry recently announced that UK-based .eu registrants can expect to lose their names by May, should the country crash out of the EU with no transition deal on March 29.
EU citizens living in the UK could also risk having their names temporarily suspended.
The number of .eu domains registered to the UK addresses dropped from 273,060 at the end of Q3 to 240,887 at the end of Q4, a 32,173 decline.
EURid said it also suspended 36,520 domains for abuse during the period.
Factoring out both of these drops, registrations would have otherwise been up by about 5,000.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, cctlds, eurid

CentralNic expects flat profit as revenue almost doubles

London-listed domain firm CentralNic today gave investors a sneak preview of its 2018 financial performance.
The company expects its profits at the adjusted EBITDA level to be up only slightly — from £6.6 million ($8.62 million) to £6.7 million ($8.75) — compared to 2017.
But revenue is expected to soar from £24.3 million ($31.7 million) to £42.5 million ($55.5 million), largely due to the impact of its merger with KeyDrive, which completed in August.
KeyDrive was the holding company for brands including the registrars Key-Systems, Moniker and BrandShelter, and the registry providers OpenRegistry and KSRegistry.
The Luxembourgish firm reversed into AIM-listed CentralNic in a deal, described as “transformative” for CentralNic, valued at up to $55 million.
Most of the company’s revenue now comes from the registrar part of the business, though the registry division is the more profitable.
CentralNic said today that “subscription products” are now roughly 90% of total revenue.
The company expects to save £1 million ($1.3 million) this year by migrating its old registrars over to the KeyDrive platform and migrating its new registries onto the CentralNic platform.
It has also appointed KeyDrive’s former CFO as CentralNic CFO, replacing Don Baladasan. Michael Riedl has also joined the board of directors, while Baladasan remains on the board as group managing director.
Full, audited financial results will be announced in May.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, centralnic, earnings, financials, keydrive