“Please send women!” ICANN board urges

The ICANN board of directors wants more women around the table, according to recent correspondence to the independent Nominating Committee.
The recommendation to balance the genders further was among several made in a letter (pdf) to NomCom from ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby last week. He wrote:

There has been increasing sensitivity within the Board regarding gender balance, probably reflecting comparable sensitivity throughout the community. Without compromising the fundamental requirement to have Board members with the necessary integrity, skills, experience, the Board would find it helpful to have more women on the Board.

It is not specified why a greater number of women would be considered “helpful”.
Of the current 20 directors, six are women. That’s 30%, only slightly less than the proportion of women that usually attend ICANN’s public meetings.
However, two of the six are non-voting committee liaisons. The female portion of the 16 voting members is therefore a rather lower 12.5%.
Of the eight directors selected by NomCom, three are currently female.
The 2018 NomCom had 33 female and 76 male applicants, though these were for more positions than just the board of directors.
Chalaby’s letter, which “strongly encourages” NomCom to follow the board’s guidance for director selection, also shows a clear preference for incumbents.
The board is concerned that it takes new directors “a year or two to come up to speed” and that too-fast board churn could lead to a loss of “institutional knowledge”.
Combined, these two recommendations may be good news for the two first-term female NomCom appointees: Sarah Deutsch and Avri Doria, whose terms expire in November 2020.
Three male NomCom-appointed directors have terms due to expire at this year’s Annual General Meeting: Khaled Koubaa, Maarten Botterman, and Chalaby himself. Koubaa and Botterman are currently on their first three-year terms, while Chalaby is term-limited after nine years of service.
Chalaby’s letter also urges the NomCom to consider personal qualities such as intelligence, technical knowledge, management experience, domain industry independence and communication skills during their deliberations.
“While it will be a rare candidate who ticks all of the boxes on the list of additional characteristics and skill sets, the Board as a whole should do so,” Chalaby wrote.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

NamesCon names con speakers

With NamesCon’s swansong Las Vegas show just a few weeks away, its agenda and speaker list is well on the way to being finalized.
Organizers recently announced Bhavin Turakhia, Haseeb Tariq and Richard Lau as speakers.
Turakhia, founder of Radix and several registrars, is perhaps best-known for selling Media.net for $900 million and for being one of India’s richest entrepreneurs. His Monday keynote has the tagline “Insights and Inspiration”.
Tariq recently join Fox, but his bread-and-butter has been founding and selling tech startups and high-end domain names. He’s speaking on portfolio pricing strategies.
Overall, the agenda seems to be heavy on speakers from .GLOBAL and affiliated business intelligence service provider RegistryOffice, which are sponsoring the conference.
I won’t be attending, sadly, this year, but these other sessions caught my eye on the agenda:

• Akram Atallah is part of a panel discussion on data analysis on Tuesday. I believe it’s his first speaking engagement since leaving ICANN’s top brass to become Donuts CEO in mid-November. He’s outnumbered by the .GLOBAL/RegistryOffice posse, so if he has anything interesting to say it may be lost in the sales pitches. Turakhia is also on the panel.
• Andrew Allemann (Domain Name Wire), Elliot Noss (Tucows) and Zak Muscovitch (Internet Commerce Association) are spending an hour discussing the forthcoming .com price increases after lunch on Tuesday. With no Verisign rep on stage, I’m not sure how balanced the discussion will be, but all three men are engaging speakers and the session may be worth a look.
• Sessions on emerging technologies include a discussion of Domain Connect with speakers from GoDaddy, WP Engine and Microsoft, and a solo talk on the intersection of blockchain and DNS fromm MMX CEO Toby Hall.
• Allemann is also hosting a yet-to-be-announced panel of domainers who chose to invest in new gTLDs, entitled “What Were They Thinking?” which may be worth a look-see.

NamesCon runs from Sunday January 26 to Wednesday January 30. Standard ticket prices are $999 or $1,349 for the VIP treatment, though I believe discounts are still available for pre-orders.
It’s the conference’s final year at the cheap-and-cheerful Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas. The organization announced last year that NamesCon Global, its annual North American event, would be moving cities.
While many regular attendees seem to think somewhere warm would be preferable — Florida or California, perhaps — I’ve also heard whispers that a Canadian relocation has not been ruled out.
Canada. In January. Time to buy shares in manufacturers of tuques, perhaps?

2 Comments Tagged: namescon

Dark horse NameSilo doubles size in 2018

Domain name registrar NameSilo says it managed to double its size in terms of cash bookings and domains under management in 2018.
The Vancouver-based company said that in 2018 it added 1.27 net new domains, an increase of 106%.
Bookings were $20.1 million, up from the $11.1 million it reported in 2017, according to the company.
NameSilo now says it has 2.49 million domains under management.
That would be a whopping 500,000 increase on the end of September, judging by the latest gTLD registry transaction reports.
The registrar is now the 17th-largest gTLD registrar by DUM, bigger than old hands such as Register.com and Name.com.
And yet I think it’s fair to say the company is a bit of a dark horse. It’s certainly managed to stay under my radar until now.
You’d be hard pressed from its web site to figure out who runs the company or where to find them, despite what ICANN registrar contracts require.
But press releases show it went public, kinda, when it backed into Canadian investment vehicle Brisio Innovations Inc last year, in a deal worth $9.5 million.
It’s now listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, an alternative investment market, with the rather catchy ticker “URL”.
Given the rapid DUM growth, one might suspect an over-reliance on bargain-bucket new gTLDs, but that does not appear to be the case. About three quarters of its names in September were in .com.
The company credits word of mouth for its recent growth successes, and there may be some truth in that.
NameSilo performed well each month last year in terms of net transfers, often in the five-figure range. It ranked fifth in those terms in September across all gTLDs, beating the likes of Google, NameCheap and AliBaba, with almost 15% of its 90,000 net new DUM coming from transfers.
Given the much larger number of attempted adds and grace period deletes NameSilo experiences every month compared to its similarly sized peers, I rather suspect a lot of its new business is coming in via drop-catching.
The company offers customers API-only access to its platform for drop-catching deleting domains, among other purposes.

1 Comment Tagged: dum, earnings, namesilo

UK tells .eu registrants to lawyer up as no-deal Brexit looms

British .eu registrants have been urged to consider another top-level domain or seek legal advice due to the risk of losing their names if a no-deal Brexit happens.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport issued guidance shortly before Christmas, encouraging UK individuals and businesses to talk to their registrars about their .eu eligibility after March 29, currently the date we’re scheduled to leave the EU.
“[Y]ou may wish to discuss transferring your registration to another top level domain,” the guidance states. “Examples of other top level domains include .com, .co.uk, .net or .org.”
I’m sure Nominet will be delighted to see the UK government apparently prefers .com to .uk.
The guidance points to the European Commission’s own notice of March 2018, which informs Brits that they won’t be eligible to register or renew .eu domains after Brexit, and that the registry will be able to turn off those names at will.
That’s assuming a no-deal Brexit, it seems. The new UK guidance suggests that a Brexit with a transition plan is likely to give registrants a bit more breathing space, and possible future rights to retain their names.
Even though .eu is not a TLD you’ll typically see on a billboard or TV commercial in the UK — I’m fairly confident I’ve never seen one in the wild here — it seems that Brits are responsible for a big chunk of the namespace.
There were 273,000 .eu domains registered in the UK at the end of the third quarter 2018, according to EURid (pdf), down 10% on the same period 2017, a decline squarely attributed to Brexit.
There were 3.75 million .eu domains in total, with the UK being the fourth-largest source of registrations.
If you haven’t been following the Brexit saga recently, lucky you! I’ll quickly explain what’s going on.
The British parliament is currently on the verge of deciding whether to leave the EU with a negotiated deal that nobody likes — the equivalent of sawing off a perfectly healthy testicle with a rusty blade for no reason — or to leave the EU with no deal — the equivalent of sawing off both perfectly healthy testicles with a rusty blade for no reason.
The option of keeping both testicles intact and attached is unlikely to be put to the British people because two years ago we were all assured that amateur backstreet castration was fricking awesome and we’re now being warned that the almost 52% of the population who believed the horseshit, and are almost certainly too stupid to have changed their minds in the meantime, will riot in the streets rather than recast their votes.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Come April 1, don’t be surprised if DI is being brought to you from a country with fewer idiots. I’m open to suggestions. Somewhere warm, preferably.

1 Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, eurid

Radix now has China approval for whole TLD stable

Radix’s entire portfolio of new gTLDs is now approved for sale and use in China, according to the company.

The company said today that .host, .press, .space and .website recently received the nod from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates the domain name space in China.

.fun, .site, .online, .tech and .store have all previously received approval.

Across the three-million-domain portfolio, over 700,000 are registered in China, according to Radix.

It saw growth in China over over 30% in 2018 in terms of new domain adds, the company said in a press release.

CEO Sandeep Ramchandani said that Radix has partnered with local registrar Xinnet to give free domains to university students to “host their academic projects and business prototypes.”

Comment Tagged: miit, radix, xinnet

The most-read stories of 2018

Happy 2019!

As we crawl, dark-eyed and slurring, from our festive hibernation, I thought now would be a good time to do a quick reminder of 2018, in the form of a top-10 list of the most-read stories published by DI over the last 12 months.

If not today, then when?

I’ve excluded, as usual, articles that seem to show up prominently in my traffic logs every single day simply because Google seems to think they’ve got porn in them.

Stéphane Van Gelder dies after motorcycle accident

Stéphane Van Gelder was a registrar industry pioneer and long-time ICANN community leader, and his untimely death in a vehicle accident in March came as a great shock to many. The fact that this post was the most-read of the year is not surprising. He is missed by many, and was subsequently posthumously awarded ICANN’s Multistakeholder Ethos Award.

Has the world’s biggest new gTLD registry gone bankrupt?

This speculative post from June came about after I discovered that a court-appointed administrator had taken over ownership of all TLDs in the Famous Four Media portfolio. It later turned out that FFM had in fact been removed by investors in true portfolio owner Domain Venture Partners, which created a new company, GRS Domains, to take over. The full details of this evidently bitter boardroom fight have yet to emerge.

Donuts freezes .place gTLD ahead of new geofencing rules

Perhaps a surprising entry on the list, this story detailed how Donuts had essentially taken .place off the market in preparation for a planned repurposing of the gTLD to tie into the emerging “geofencing” infrastructure. The freeze happened in May, and as far as I can tell .place is still in limbo as the technology back-end is finalized, which may account for this post’s popularity.

ICANN number two Atallah is new CEO of Donuts

Not long after Donuts was acquired by a private equity fund partly controlled by former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, I received a tip-off that his former number two, Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah, had been headhunted to be the registry’s new CEO. It was officially confirmed a few hours later, but not before the unwashed hordes (that’s you) had given the DI server something to think about. The perception of a revolving door between ICANN and industry raised eyebrows, including from the US government.

Google’s .app gTLD beats .porn to biggest sunrise yet

Google’s eagerly anticipated .app gTLD hit the market mid-year, and got off to a strong start with a sunrise period beaten only by defensive-heavy .porn. It’s very likely the strongest sunrise period of the 2012 round so far. The TLD has something like 350,000 domains under management today, which for new gTLDs is pretty much a success story.

GoDaddy and DomainTools scrap over Whois access

This story about GoDaddy and DomainTools fighting about whether the latter could get unmitigated access to the former’s Whois database was published in January, long before the full impact of GDPR on Whois privacy was known, and therefore now, with the benefit of hindsight, feels hopelessly naive.

How all 33 European ccTLDs are handling GDPR

Good grief, did I write a “listicle”? To mark the day GDPR came into full effect, I trawled through the web sites, news releases and policy documents of 33 European ccTLDs to see how each registry was planning to comply with the strict new privacy legislation, so you didn’t have to. The results were surprisingly diverse.

Google’s $25 million .app domain finally has a launch date

Remember how I said .app was “eagerly anticipated”? The fact that this post, merely noting the TLD’s launch timetable, hit the top 10 most-read stories for the year is perhaps proof of that.

Facebook clashes with registrars after massive private data request

Many big brands were unhappy with how ICANN and the industry turned off their unfettered Whois access following GDPR, none more so than Facebook, which has been piling pressure on ICANN to force registrars to acquiesce to its data requests. This July story revealed how it had started using a close intermediary called AppDetex to bombard registrars with over-broad disclosure requests. Registrars subsequently fought back, and AppDetex later gave me a demo of its early-stage software. The fight, no doubt, continues.

These 33 people will decide the future of Whois

Another GDPR listicle? In this July post I prepared brief bios of the volunteers selected to work on ICANN’s first Expedited Policy Development Process working group, which is challenged with coming up with a permanent policy solution to GDPR, amenable to all sections of the community. Needless to say, they’re still working on it…

That’s the top 10 most-read articles on DI in 2018. Honorable mentions go to Fight breaks out as Afilias eats Neustar’s Aussie baby, How a single Whois complaint got this registrar shitcanned and Some men at ICANN meetings really are assholes, simply because I like the headlines.

Happy new year to all DI readers. I don’t tell you this nearly regularly enough, but I really do love you all more than words could possibly describe.

5 Comments Tagged: .place, Famous Four Media, grs domains, whois

Another bundle of joy for XYZ as Johnson & Johnson throws out the .baby

XYZ.com seems to have acquired the .baby gTLD from Johnson & Johnson.

ICANN records show that the .baby registry contract was assigned to the growing portfolio registry November 19.

The news, which has yet to be announced by buyer or seller, arrives four years after J&J paid $3,088,888 for .baby at an ICANN last-resort auction, beating off five other applicants.

.baby is not what you’d call a roaring success. It has about 600 domains under management after almost two years of general availability.

It typically retails for about $80.

While the plan for .baby was to keep it quite tightly controlled, with J&J giving itself broad rights to refuse registration of any domain that did not appear to fit within its family-friendly mission, it does not seem that regime was strictly enforced.

Explain realdonaldtrump.baby

I would expect XYZ, with its come-all attitude to domains, to be even more relaxed about the namespace.

IANA records show that the gTLD under J&J was (and still is) managed by FairWinds, with a Neustar back-end. Neither are typical partners for XYZ, which tends to use CentralNic.

I think this makes it 12 gTLDs for the XYZ stable, including those it runs in partnership. It has 10 listed on its web site and it picked up former dot-brand .monster from Monster.com a couple months back.

J&J also owns the dot-brand .jnj, which has about 100 domains in its zone but no publicly facing web sites to speak of.

5 Comments Tagged: .xyz, ICANN, xyz.com

Now even parked domains will have GDPR notices

Sedo will soon start showing privacy notices and cookie warnings on parked domains using its service.

The company told users today that it has updated its terms of service to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. It said:

As a domain owner parking your domains on Sedo’s platform, within the scope of tracking website visitors to monetize your domain(s), Sedo collects and processes personal data on your behalf. The GDPR requires, among other things, that the person responsible, in this case you, the domain owner, display a data protection declaration and a cookie on your parked page. 

Sedo said this is a “complimentary feature”, but that it makes no assurances that the notices it displays on its users’ behalf are actually compliant with the regulation.

The terms have been changed such that the user agrees to be “solely responsible” for their own GDPR compliance. 

Users have two weeks to object to the changes, but if they do it seems Sedo will terminate their service.

The changes come into effect January 1.

Comment Tagged: privacy, sedo

ICANN budget predicts small new gTLD recovery and slowing legacy growth

The new gTLD market will improve very slightly over the next year or so, according to ICANN’s latest budget predictions.

The organization is now forecasting that it will see $5.2 million of funding from new gTLD registry transaction fees in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, up from the $5.1 million it predicted when it past the FY19 budget in May.

That’s based on expected transactions being 24 million, compared to the previous estimate of 23.9 million.

It’s the first time ICANN has revised its new gTLD transaction revenue estimates upwards in a couple years.

ICANN is also now estimating that FY20 transaction fees from new gTLDs will come in at $5.5 million.

That’s still a few hundred grand less than it was predicting for FY17, back in 2016.

Transaction fees, typically $0.25, are paid by registries with over 50,000 names whenever a domain is created, renewed, or transferred.

The FY19 forecast for new gTLD registrar transaction fees has not been changed from the $4.3 million predicted back in May, but ICANN expects it to increase to $4.6 million in FY20.

ICANN’s budget forecasts are based on activity it’s seeing and conversations with the industry.

It’s previously had to revise new gTLD revenue predictions down in May 2018 and January 2018. 

ICANN is also predicting a bounceback in the number of accredited registrars, an increase of 15 per quarter in FY20 to end the year at 2,564. That would see accreditation fees increase from an estimated $9.9 million to $10.7 million.

The budget is also less than optimistic when it comes to legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs, which includes the likes of .com and .net.

ICANN is now predicting FY19 legacy transaction fees of $49.8 million. That’s compared to its May estimate of $48.6 million.

For FY20, it expects that to go up to $50.5 million, reflecting growth of 2.1%, lower than the 2.6% it predicted last year.

Overall, ICANN expects its funding for FY19 to be $137.1 million, $600,000 less than it was predicting in May.

For FY20, it expects funding to increase to $140.1 million. That’s still lower than the $143 million ICANN had in mind for FY18, before its belt-tightening initiatives kicked off a year ago.

The budget documents are published here for public comment until February 8.

ICANN will also hold a public webinar today at 1700 UTC to discuss the plans. Details of the Adobe Connect room can be found here.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, new gTLDs

Verisign says Afilias tried to “rig” $135 million .web auction

Verisign has jumped back into the fight for the .web gTLD, all guns blazing, with a claim that Afilias offered millions in an attempt to “rig” a private auction for the string.

The .com behemoth accused Afilias last week of “collusive and anti-competitive efforts to rig the [.web] auction in its favor”.

It claims that Afilias offered rival bidder — and secret Verisign stooge — Nu Dot Co up to $17 million if it would participate in a private auction, and then tried to contact NDC during the auction’s “Blackout Period”.

The claims came in an amicus brief (pdf) filed by Verisign as part of Afilias’ Independent Review Process proceeding against ICANN.

The IRP is Afilias’ attempt to overturn the result of the July 2016 .web auction, in which NDC paid ICANN $135 million of Verisign’s money in exchange for the exclusive rights to .web

While neither Verisign nor NDC are parties to the IRP, they’re both attempting to become amicus curiae — “friends of the court” — giving them the right to provide evidence and arguments to the IRP panel.

Verisign argues that its rights would be seriously impacted by the proceeding — Afilias is looking for an emergency ruling preventing .web being delegated — because it won’t be able to bring .web to market.

But it’s also attempting to have the IRP thrown out altogether, on the basis of claims that Afilias broke the auction rules and has “unclean hands”.

Verisign’s brief states:

Afilias and other bidders proposed that a private auction be performed pursuant to collusive and potentially illegal terms about who could win and who would lose the auction, including guarantees of auction proceeds to certain losers of the auction.

NDC CFO Jose Rasco provides as evidence screenshots (pdf) of a text-message conversation he had with Afilias VP of sales Steve Heflin on June 7, 2016, in which Heflin attempts to persuade NDC to go to a private auction.

Every other member of the contention set at that point had agreed to a private auction, in which the winning bid would be shared out among the losers.

NDC was refusing to play along, because it had long ago secretly agreed to bid on behalf of Verisign, and was forcing a last-resort ICANN auction in which ICANN would receive the full sum of the winning bid. 

In that SMS conversation, Heflin says: “Can’t give up…how about I guarantee you score at least 16 mil if you go to private auction and lose?” followed by three money-bag emojis that I refuse to quote here on general principle.

Rasco responds with an offer to sell Afilias the .health gTLD, then just weeks away from launch, for $25 million.

Heflin ignores the offer and ups his .web offer to $17.02 million.

Given that it was a contention set of seven applicants, that suggests Afilias reckoned .web was going to sell for at least $100 million.

Verisign claims: “Afilias’s offers to ‘guarantee’ the amount of a payment to NDC as a losing bidder are an explicit offer to pay off NDC to not compete with Afilias in bidding on .web.”

Rasco also provides evidence that Schlund, another .web applicant, attempted to persuade NDC to join what it called an “Alternative Private Auction”.

This process would have divided bidders into “strong” and “weak” categories, with “strong” losing bidders walking away with a greater portion of the winning bid than the “weak” ones.

Verisign and NDC also claims that Afilias broke ICANN’s auction rules when VP John Kane texted Rasco to say: “If ICANN delays the auction next week would you again consider a private auction?”

That text was received July 22, four days before the auction and one day into the so-called “Blackout Period”, during which ICANN auction rules (pdf)  prohibit bidders from “cooperating or collaborating” with each other.

At that time, .web applicants Schlund and Radix already suspected Verisign was bankrolling NDC, and they were trying to get the auction delayed.

According to Verisign, Kane’s text means Afilias violated the Blackout rules and therefore it should lose its .web application entirely.  

The fact that these rules proscribe “collaborating” during the Blackout suggests that collaborating at other times was actually envisaged, which in turn suggests that Heflin’s texts may not be as naughty as Verisign claims.

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say the gloves, were they ever on, have come off.

Weighing in at over 1,000 pages, the combined amicus briefs and attached exhibits reveal some interesting additional facts that I don’t believe were in the public domain before now and may be worth noting here.

The Verisign filing reveals, I believe for the first time, that the final Verisign bid for .web was $142 million. It only paid $135 million because that was runner-up Afilias’ final bid.

It also reveals that Verisign and NDC signed their “executory agreement” — basically, NDC’s promise to sign over .web if Verisign bankrolled its bid — in August 2015, nearly a year before the auction took place. NDC evidently kept its secret for a long time before rivals got suspicious.

The IRP panelist is scheduled to rule on Afilias’ request for a “stay of all ICANN actions that further the delegation of the .WEB gTLD” on January 28.

3 Comments Tagged: irp, ndc, nu dot co, radix