Brazil dancing around four million reg milestone

The Brazilian ccTLD, .br, last week topped four million registrations for the first time, then promptly dropped back below the milestone.
The TLD was at 4,000,260 domains on Monday September 24, prompting a press release from Nic.br, dropping back below four mill the next day, then hit 4,002,574 this Monday.
The TLD stands at 3,996,604 today, according to statistics Nic.br publishes on its web site.
It’s taken about six years to grow from three million names. The leap from two million to three million took about two and a half years.
Brazil operates on a three-level structure, with dozens of second-level domain options available to registrants.
The large majority of registered names — 3,645,073 — are in the .com.br space.

1 Comment Tagged: .br, brazil, nic.br

Donuts says DPML now covers “millions” of trademark variants as price rockets again

Donuts has added more than a third to the price of its Domain Protected Marks List service, as it adds a new feature it says vastly increases the number of domains trademark owners can block.
The company has added homograph attack protection to DPML, so trademark-owning worrywarts can block variations of their brand that contain confusing non-Latin characters in addition to all the domain variants DPML already takes out of the available pool.
An example of a homograph, offered by Donuts, would be the domain xn--ggle-0nda.com, which can display as “gοοgle.com” and which contains two Cyrillic o-looking characters but is pretty much indistinguishable from “google.com”.
Donuts reckons this could mean “millions” of domains could be blocked, potentially preventing all kinds of phishing attacks, but one suspects the actual number per customer rather depends on how many potentially confusable Latin characters appear in the brands they want to protect.
DPML is a block service that prevents others from registering domains matching or closely matching customers’ trademarks. Previous additions to the service have included typo protection.
The new feature supports Cyrillic and Greek scripts, the two that Donuts says most homograph attacks use.
The company explained it to its registrars like this:

The Donuts system will analyze the content of each SLD identified in a DPML subscription, breaking it down to its individual characters. Each character is then “spun” against Unicode’s list of confusable characters and replaced with all viable IDN “glyphs” supported by Donuts TLDs. This spinning results in potentially millions of IDN permutations of a brand’s trademark which may be considered easily confusable to an end user. Each permutation is then blocked (removed from generally available inventory) just like other DPML labels, meaning it can only be registered via an “Override” by a party holding a trademark on the same label.

While this feature comes at no additional cost, Donuts is increasing its prices from January 1, the second big increase since DPML went live five years ago.
Donuts declined to disclose its wholesale price when asked, but I’ve seen registrars today disclose new pricing of $6,000 to $6,600 for a five-year block.
That compares to retail pricing in the $2,500 to $3,000 range back in 2013.
Hexonet said it will now charge its top-flight resellers $6,426 per create, compared to the $4,400 it started charging when DPML prices last went up at the start of last year. OpenProvider has also added two grand to its prices.
Donuts said the price increase also reflects the growth of its portfolio of gTLDs over the last few years. It now has 241, 25% more than at the last price increase.

3 Comments Tagged: .brands, cybersquatting, domain protected marks list, donuts, dpml, hexonet, homographs, openprovider, phishing, trademarks

Chinese registrars on the decline

Having been on a growth trajectory for some years, the number of ICANN-accredited registrars based in China appears to be on the decline.
According to my records, so far this year 26 registrar contracts have been terminated, voluntarily or otherwise, 11 of which were Chinese. I’m excluding the mass drop of Pheenix accreditations from these numbers.
The country with the next-highest number of terminations was the USA, with three.
ICANN has terminated nine registrars for breaches of the RAA this year, six of which were Chinese.
All the Chinese notices included non-payment of ICANN fees as a reason for termination, though it appears that most of them had a negligible number of gTLD domains under management.
ICANN Compliance tells me there’s no particular focus of China at the moment, this is all a result of regular day-to-day enforcement.
ICANN has sent breach notices to 28 companies this year, seven of which were to Chinese registrars.
Meanwhile, 22.cn has moved 13 of its accredited shell registrars to Hong Kong. Another registrar moved its base from China to Australia.
Seven Chinese registrars have been newly accredited this year,
Net, this has all reduced the number of accredited registrars based in China to 91.
The country still has the second-most registrars ahead of the US, with its almost 2,000 registrars, and a clear 31 registrars ahead of third-place India.

Comment Tagged: accreditation, china, compliance, ICANN, termination

$3.2 million-a-year registrar up for grabs

Swedish ccTLD registry IIS is to sell off its registrar business, .SE Direkt, which is expected to bring in some $3.2 million in revenue this year.
The foundation said today that .SE Direkt has 121,836 .se domains under management and 87,852 customers, 66,819 of which are corporate.
That represents about 7% of the total .se market by domains.
IIS created the registrar in 2009 as part of its transition to a competitive two-tier sales model.
The registry explained in a note to press:

The idea was that it would work as a transition solution and that domain name holders would gradually transfer to other registrars. The number of customers has not fallen at the expected rate, but after 10 years it is on a level where IIS believes that the time is right to no longer continue with the registrar operations.

The buyer, which will have to be or become an IIS-accredited .se registrar, will get the customer base, domain database and two-year brand license, but none of the staff or other assets of the unit.
.SE Direkt sells .se names for 270 SEK ($30.27) per year.
Its revenue for 2017 was SEK 29.8 million ($3.3 million) and is expected to decline to SEK 28.3 million ($3.2 million) in 2018. The buyer would take over from the start of 2019.
There’s obviously a risk here that revenue is on a downward trajectory due to IIS’s aforementioned strategy of deliberately shedding customers.
Some effort to reverse this trend may be required by whoever takes over.
Stats on churn, usage, transfers and so on can be found in this IIS RFP (pdf).
IIS said that bids from interested parties must be submitted by October 17 and the foundation expects to select the winner by November 1.

2 Comments Tagged: .se, .se direkt, acquisition, iis, rfp

It’s Drazek vs Dammak for GNSO Council chair

The chair of ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization Council is contested this year, with a registry veep facing off against a software engineer.
The nomination from the contracted parties house is US-based Keith Drazek, Verisign’s VP of policy and government relations.
He’ll be opposed by non-contracted parties nominee and current vice-chair Rafik Dammak, a Tunisian working as a software engineer for NTT Communications (which is technically a contracted party due its dot-brand gTLD) in Japan.
Both men are long-time, active members of the ICANN community and GNSO.
The Council will pick its new chair about a month from now at the ICANN 63 meeting in Barcelona.
The winner will replace lawyer Heather Forrest, the non-contracted party who took the seat after an unopposed vote a year ago.

Comment Tagged: elections, gnso, gnso council, ICANN

Cloudflare selling all domains at cost: “All we’re doing is pinging an API”

Content delivery network provider Cloudflare has promised to sell domains in all TLDs at the wholesale cost, with no markup, forever.
The company made the commitment yesterday as it announced its intention to get into the registrar business.
Founder Matthew Price used the announcement to launch a blistering attack on the current registrar market, which he said is charging “crazy” prices and endlessly upselling their customers with unwanted, worthless products. He blogged:

why should registrars charge any markup over what the TLDs charge? That seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math. When we see a broken market on the Internet we like to do something about it.
…
we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges. That’s true the first year and it’s true every subsequent year. If you register your domain with Cloudflare Registrar you’ll always pay the wholesale price with no markup.
For instance, Verisign, which administers the .com TLD, currently charges $7.85 per year to register a .com domain. ICANN imposes a $0.18 per year fee on top of that for every domain registered. Today, if you transfer your .com domain to Cloudflare, that’s what we’ll charge you per year: $8.03/year. No markup. All we’re doing is pinging an API, there’s no incremental cost to us, so why should you have to pay more than wholesale?

There are catches, of course.
For starters, the service is not available yet.
Price wrote that Cloudflare will roll it out gradually — for inbound transfers only — to its “most loyal” customers over an unspecified period. Even customers on its cheapest plans will get access to the queue, he wrote.
Eventually, he said, it will be available “more broadly”.
It will be interesting to see if the no-markup pricing could become available to non-customers too, and whether it sticks to its business model when its support lines start ringing and it becomes apparent the business is actually big ole cash vampire.
Cloudflare has been ICANN-accredited for several years, but it’s only been offering registrations to high-value enterprise customers so far.
My records show that it has not much more than 800 domains under management, all in .com, .net, .org and .info.
The announcement was made, perhaps not coincidentally, a couple days after CRM software provider Zoho made headlines when its 40 million customers were taken offline because its former registrar suspended zoho.com over a trivial level of abuse. In response to the screw-up, Zoho transferred the domain to Cloudflare.

11 Comments Tagged: cloudflare, ICANN, pricing, tierra, zoho

MMX waving goodbye to .london? Boss puts focus on renewal profits, China

MMX’s revenue from domain renewals could cover all of its expenses within the next 24 months, if everything goes to plan, according to CEO Toby Hall.
Hall was speaking to DI this evening after the company reported its first-half financial results, which saw revenue up 22% to $6.4 million and a net loss of $14.7 million, which compared to a loss of $526,000 a year earlier.
MMX’s huge loss for the period was largely — to the tune of $11.8 million — attributable to the restructuring of an “onerous” contract with one of its gTLD partners.
Hall refuses point blank to name that partner, but for reasons I discussed last year, I believe it is .london sponsor London & Partners, which is affiliated with the office of the Mayor of London.
When L&P selected MMX to be its registry partner for .london back in 2012, I understand a key reason was MMX’s promise to pay L&P a fixed annual fee and commit to a certain amount of marketing spend.
But two years ago, after it became clear that .london sales were coming in waaaay below previous management’s expectations, MMX renegotiated the deal.
Under the new deal, instead of committing to spend $10.8 million on marketing the TLD itself, MMX agreed to give half that amount to L&P for L&P to do its own marketing.
It appears that L&P has already spunked much of that cash ineffectively, or, as MMX put it:

a significant portion of that marketing budget has been spent by the partner with minimal impact on revenues in the current year and no expectation of any material uplift in future periods

MMX seems to have basically written off the .london deal as a bad call, and now that MMX is no longer in the registry back-end or registrar businesses, it seems unlikely that the .london partnership will be extended when it expires in three years.
Again, Hall would not confirm this bad contract was for .london — I’m making an informed guess — but the alternatives are limited. The only other TLDs MMX runs in partnership currently are .review and .country, and not even 2012 MMX management would have bet the farm on those turkeys.
Another $2.1 million of the company’s H1 net loss is for “bad debt provisions” relating the possibility that certain US-based registrar partners may not pay their dues, but this provision is apparently related to a new accounting standard rather than known deadbeats threatening to withhold payments.
If you throw aside all of this accountancy and look at the “operating EBITDA” line, profit was up 176% to $661,000 compared to H1 2017.
While the loss may have cast a cloud over the first half, Hall is upbeat about MMX’s prospects, and it’s all about the renewals.
“Renewal revenue will be more than all the costs of business within 24 months,” he said. To get there, it needs to cross the $12 million mark.
He told DI tonight that “an increasing percentage of our business is based on renewals… just on renewal revenue alone we’ll be over $10 million this year”.
Renewal revenue was $4.7 million in 2017 and $2.4 million in 2016, he said. In the first half, it was was up 40% to $3.4 million.
MMX’s acquisition of porn domain specialist ICM Registry, which has renewal fees of over $60 per year, will certainly help the company towards its 2018 goal in the second half. ICM only contributed two weeks of revenue — $250,000 — in H1.
Remarkably, and somewhat counter-intuitively, the company is also seeing renewal strength in China.
Its .vip gTLD, which sells almost exclusively in China, saw extremely respectable renewals of 76% in the first half, which runs against the conventional wisdom that China is a volatile market
Hall said that .vip renewals run in the $5 to $10 range, so apparently TLD volume is not being propped up by cheap wholesale renewal fees. The TLD accounts for about 30% of MMX’s renewal revenue, Hall said.
About 60% of .vip’s domains under management are with Chinese registrar Alibaba. The biggest non-Chinese registrar is GoDaddy, with about 3% of the namespace.
More exposure to China, and specifically Alibaba, is expected to come soon due to MMX’s repurposing of the 2012-logic gTLD .luxe, which is being integrated into the Ethereum blockchain.
MMX said last week that some six million (mostly Chinese) users of the imToken Ethereum wallet will in November get the ability to register .luxe domains via imToken and easily integrate them with their Ethereum assets.
The announcement was made at the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference in China last week, so you can probably guess imToken’s registrar of choice.

Comment Tagged: .london, .vip, china, earnings, financials, icm registry, Minds + Machines, mmx, new gTLDs, renewals

Emoji domains now easier to use

Emoji domains have become marginally easier to navigate to in the last month, following an update to Google’s Chrome browser.
Google has added “Emoji” to the context menu that appears when users right-click in any editable text field — including the address/search bar.
Clicking the option brings up a searchable list of common emojis that can be inserted into the address bar for either search or, with the addition of a typed-in TLD, navigation.
TLDs currently supporting emojis include .ws, .fm and .to. ICANN has ruled out support for emojis in the gTLDs for security reasons.
When the domain is resolved, the emojis render in the address bar as Punycode-converted Latin characters beginning with the usual “xn--” prefix, at least under my default configuration.
The whole process is still a bit fiddly, so I wouldn’t all rush out to build your businesses on emoji domains just yet.
The context menu feature appears to have been on the experimental track in Chrome for at least a month, but was more recently turned on by default, at least on all the Chrome 69 installs I’ve tested.
If you don’t get the emoji option in your context menu, you should be able to turn it on by navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-emoji-context-menu and selecting the Enabled option.

2 Comments Tagged: .fm., .to, .ws, chrome, emojis, google

Chutzpah alert! DotKids wants ICANN handout to fight gTLD auction

New gTLD applicant DotKids Foundation has asked ICANN for money to help it fight for .kids in an auction against Amazon and Google.
The not-for-profit was the only new gTLD applicant back in 2012 to meet the criteria for ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, meaning its application fee was reduced by $138,000 to just $47,000.
Now, DotKids reckons ICANN has a duty to carry on financially supporting it through the “later stages of the process” — namely, an auction with two of the world’s top three most-valuable companies.
The organization even suggests that ICANN dip into its original $2 million allocation to support the program to help fund its bids.
Because .kids is slated for a “last resort” auction, an ICANN-funded winning bid would be immediately returned to ICANN, minus auction provider fees.
It’s a ludicrously, hilariously ballsy move by the applicant, which is headed by DotAsia CEO Edmon Chung.
It’s difficult to see it as anything other than a delaying tactic.
DotKids is currently scheduled to go to auction against Google’s .kid and Amazon’s .kids application on October 10.
But after ICANN denied its request for funding last month, DotKids last week filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf), which may wind up delaying the auction yet again.
According to DotKids, the original intent of the Applicant Support Program was to provide support for worthy applicants not just in terms of application fees, but throughout the application process.
It points to the recommendations of the Joint Applicant Support working group of the GNSO, which came up with the rules for the support program, as evidence of this intent.
It says ICANN needs to address the JAS recommendations it ignored in 2012 — something that could time quite some time — and put the .kids auction on hold until then.

1 Comment Tagged: .kid, .kids, amazon, applicant support, auction, dotkids, google, ICANN, last resort, new gTLDs

Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration

Afilias has got its recent takeover of .au recognized by Guinness as an official world record.
The company was given the title of “Largest Migration of an Internet Top-Level Domain in a Single Transition” at an event in New York today, according to a company press release.
It relates to its migration of .au from former registry provider Neustar to its own back-end a few months ago.
Australia’s .au ccTLD had about 3.1 million names under management at the time, about 400,000 names more than the previous record — the 2003 .org transition Afilias also handled.
I understand there’s a licensing fee due to Guinness for this kind of (let’s face it) shameless-but-effective PR stunt, but no guarantee the record will actually be printed in future editions of the annual Guinness Book of World Records.
I hope the fresh salt in Neustar’s wounds isn’t stinging too badly this evening.

Comment Tagged: .au, afilias, auda, guinness, migration, neustar