auDA chair defends $9 million windfall as no-confidence vote looms

The chair of .au registry auDA has appealed to its membership for calm ahead of a vote of no confidence in himself, the CEO, and two of his fellow directors.
Chris Leptos yesterday defended the AUD 12 million ($9 million) windfall the organization has received as a result of its transition from long-term registry back-end Neustar to rival Afilias.
By opening the back-end contract to competition, and going with a bid far cheaper than the incumbent’s historical pricing, auDA saved itself a tonne of cash.
Some members reckon the money, which has been placed in a “marketing and innovation fund”, should have instead be returned to registrants via far lower prices for .au domains.
Leptos said the money was better used to promote .au rather than disappearing to the coffers of the back-end provider, writing;

What is most surprising to me is that a small number of members are criticising the new $12 million Marketing and Innovation Fund that will be used to grow the .au namespace. The fact is that auDA now has more funds, and those funds are being ploughed back into lower wholesale prices, and programs that will benefit participants in the .au namespace, rather than benefiting the private owners of the former registry operator. On any reasoned analysis, this is a good thing.

He assured disgruntled members that their concerns about this and other matters are being listened to, but noted the diversity of views among the membership.

Some members say auDA is not listening to their concerns. I can assure you that auDA is listening to its members and stakeholders at both management level and board level. The reality, however, is that auDA needs to balance the requirements of many members and stakeholders who disagree among themselves.

Leptos and two other directors are facing a vote to fire them from the board on July 27. CEO Cameron Boardman faces a no-confidence vote the same day,
The meeting was scheduled following a petition of members orchestrated at Grumpier.com.au, which managed to get signatures from over 5% of auDA’s then 320-odd members.
The Grumpies are currently trying to crowd-fund AUD 4,650 to pay for legal and other fees associated with this meeting. At time of writing, they’re about half-way there.
They’re also unhappy with auDA’s transparency, and with moves such as the currently delayed plan to sell direct second-level .au domains.
Leptos yesterday urged members to vote against the four resolutions, saying that the organization should not be “distracted” from implementing reforms recently mandated by the Australian government following a review.
auDA recently received 955 new membership applications — a four-fold increase in its member base — largely as a result of hundreds of sign-ups from staff at Afilias and the largest .au registrars. These people will not be approved in time to vote at the July 27 meeting.

1 Comment Tagged: afilias, auda, ausregistry, grumpier.com.au, neustar

Swiss registry gets more traffic than Google, kinda

Switch, the Swiss ccTLD registry, has started publishing a monthly list of the .ch domains with the most DNS traffic, a list that Switch itself currently tops.
The list ranks the top 1,000 .ch domains by the number of DNS resolvers that have queried them over the course of a calendar month.
By that measure, switch.ch is the runaway number one, with 792,958 resolvers. That’s a long way ahead of Google’s google.ch, which comes in at #4 with 529,846 resolvers.
It seems pretty clear that it’s traffic to Switch’s name servers that is likely responsible for its comprehensive lead.
That’s underlined by the composition of the rest of the top end of the list, which is dominated by registrars and hosting companies.
At #2 is the brand-protection registrar Com Laude, a rank seemingly earned due to the fact that the registrar hosts many of its clients’ high-traffic domains (most of which are .com names) on, among others, a comlaude.ch name server.
Switch said its data is collected from its two primary nic.ch name servers and covers all types of traffic. Other such rankings, such as Alexa, measure only web traffic.
By counting the number of unique IP addresses doing DNS queries over the course of a month, Switch said it avoids pitfalls associated with low time-to-live (TTL) settings that could occur if it was counting the number of queries.
More details on its methodology can be found here. The data itself, which goes back 12 months, can be freely downloaded as CSV files here.

Comment Tagged: .ch, alexa, com laude, google, switch

Pritz to be named chair of Whois group

Former ICANN senior vice president Kurt Pritz is expected to be named chair of the group tasked with reforming Whois in the post-GDPR world.
Sources familiar with the situation tell DI that Pritz was selected from three candidates who put themselves forward for the grueling policy-making task.
I’m told that choice was made by GNSO Council’s leadership and selection committee (minus Pritz’s wife, Donna Austin, who recused herself) and will have to be confirmed by the full Council when it meets this Thursday.
Pritz would chair the GNSO’s first-ever Expedited Policy Development Process working group, which is expected to provide an ICANN community response to ICANN org’s recent, top-down Temporary Specification for Whois.
The Temp Spec, written by ICANN in response to the GDPR privacy law, is the thing that is contractually forcing all gTLD registries and registrars to redact personal information from their public Whois records.
Because it’s temporary, it will expire May 24 next year, one year after it came into effect.
The EPDP will put the force of community consensus behind the policy that replaces it, but it’s unlikely to differ a great deal from the Temp Spec, so it would be unwise to get your hopes up that Whois will return to pre-GDPR levels of accessibility — ICANN policy cannot overrule the law.
The EPDP chair’s job is expected to be extremely taxing. During the recent ICANN meeting in Panama, it was said that regular, non-chair working group members could be expected to commit as much as 30 hours a week to the project.
ICANN expects that the EPDP’s core work should be complete before ICANN 63, which begins October 20, with its final report due next February.
Given that the ICANN community has failed to come to much consensus on anything Whois related for two decades, these are extremely aggressive targets.
To maintain focus, the EPDP group is going to be kept relatively small, but there’s still bickering about the make-up of the group, with non-commercial interests upset the commercial side of house is getting more representation.
The chair’s role was therefore potentially controversial — neutrality was seen as a key quality when ICANN advertised the gig a couple of weeks ago.
Pritz currently works for the .art new gTLD registry operator UK Creative Ideas, so technically he would be in the Registries Stakeholder Group.
But he’s also one of the key architects of the new gTLD program, ICANN’s point man on the application process before his resignation in late 2012, so he has extensive experience herding cats in a relatively neutral way.
Since then, he’s had stints as a consultant and as executive director of the Domain Name Association.

1 Comment Tagged: epdp, gdpr, gnso, ICANN, privacy, whois

Donuts confirms six-figure .news buyer used a fake name

Mike Texas is in fact noted conspiracy theorist Mike Adams.
New gTLD registry Donuts confirmed with DI over the weekend that the buyer of six figures worth of “platinum” .news domain names used a fake name.
The company last week said that a company called WebSeed bought registry-reserved names including science.news, climate.news, medicine.news, health.news and pollution.news.
After a small amount of digging, I discovered that these sites were affiliated with a controversial site called Natural News, which is regularly criticized for spreading bogus, anti-science content.
I suspected that “Mike Texas”, the WebSeed CEO quoted railing against “fake news” in Donuts’ press release, was very probably a pseudonym for Natural News owner Mike Adams, who calls himself the “Health Ranger” but peddles theories often characterized as dangerous.
Yesterday, Donuts told us that, following DI’s coverage, it has managed to confirm with Texas that he is in fact Adams. The company has changed its press release accordingly.
I will note that the most compelling piece of evidence connecting Texas to Adams was a pre-GDPR Whois record.

2 Comments Tagged: .news, donuts, fake news, natural news, new gTLDs, webseed

KeyDrive reverses into CentralNic in $55 million deal

CentralNic this morning confirmed that it has signed a deal to merge with KeyDrive to dramatically grow its market share in the registrar and registry markets.
The deal, technically a reverse takeover, is worth up to $55 million, $10.5 million of which is performance-related.
KeyDrive is the holding company for brands including the registrars Key-Systems, Moniker and BrandShelter and the registries OpenRegistry and KSRegistry.
It is by far the bigger player in the registrar space. The combined company will have 7.1 million domains under management, 5.8 million of which will come from the Luxembourg-based firm.
“The acquisition of KeyDrive is transformative for CentralNic, significantly increasing the Company’s scale and giving it significant extra firepower in the domain name industry to rival the traditional major players,” CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford said in a statement.
CentralNic says the deal will make it the 11th-largest registrar in terms of gTLD domains under management and the fifth-largest registry back-end in terms of TLDs managed (which will hit 118).
KeyDrive had 2017 revenue of $58.26 million and adjusted EBITDA of $5.87 million. Operating profit was $4.3 million.
CentralNic had 2017 revenue of £24.3 million ($32.2 million), adjusted EBITDA of £6.6 million ($8.7 million) and operating profit of £1.8 million ($2.4 million). These numbers do not include the £3.2 million-a-year SKNIC business, which CentralNic acquired right at the end of last year.
KeyDrive CEO Alexander Siffrin will become COO of CentralNic and one of its largest shareholders, owning 16.4% of the combined company’s shares.
The acquisition itself is fairly complex.
CentralNic will raise $16.5 million cash in a share placement and it will issue $19.3 million of shares to a holding company majority-owned by Siffrin. The remaining $10.5 million is performance related and may be paid in a combination of cash and shares, mostly shares.
It’s all subject to shareholder approval at an August 1 general meeting.
Assuming the deal closes, CentralNic says its plan is to become the “GoDaddy of Emerging Markets”, though what this means in practice is not immediately clear.
It does seem that there will be some job losses as the company rationalizes staffing across its various locations.
As far as technical integration goes, CentralNic’s registrars will migrate to KeyDrive’s platform and KeyDrive’s registries will migrate to CentralNic’s registry platform.
The potential for a deal was first revealed in March, after a leak. Trading in its shares was halted as a result, but resumed this morning.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, centralnic, keydrive

.pharmacy TLD faces action after losing complaint over Canadian drug peddler

ICANN has hit the .pharmacy gTLD registry with a breach notice after a complaint from a Canadian web site that was refused a .pharmacy domain.
The US National Association of Boards of Pharmacy failed to operate the TLD “in a transparent manner”, contrary to the Public Interest Commitments in its registry agreement, ICANN says.
It’s only the second time, to my knowledge, that a registry has been told it has broken its contract after losing a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Process decision.
NABP runs .pharmacy as a restricted TLD that can only be used by licensed pharmacies.
A year ago, a company called Canadawide Pharmacy Ltd, which currently uses a .org domain, applied for canadawidepharmacy.pharmacy but, last December, was rejected due to claims that it was “until recently” affiliated with unlicensed cross-border drug sellers.
The sale of medications into the US, where patients are gouged mercilessly by pharmaceuticals companies, from Canada, where common drugs are sold at a fraction of the price, is controversial, with NABP previously being accused of applying for .pharmacy for protectionist reasons.
(The price of generic Viagra on Canadawide’s web site goes as low as $2.15 per dose. In the US, you’re looking at about $66 per dose for the branded version, which doesn’t even include the price of dinner.)
Earlier this year, Canadawide filed a PICDRP, accusing .pharmacy of breaching its own contractual commitment to transparency.
And it won. The PICDRP standing panel ruled 3-0 this month (pdf) that NABP lacked transparency on three counts when it rejected Canadawide’s registration.
The registry failed to provide enough evidence linking Canadawide to unlicensed affiliates, the panel ruled. It also seemed to acknowledge that the alleged affiliates were historical.
As a result of the panel’s finding, ICANN has made a public breach notice that gives NABP until August 11 to:

Provide ICANN with corrective and preventative action(s), including implementation dates and milestones, to address the PIC Reporter’s complaint, the PIC Standing Panel’s findings and ensure that NABP will operate the TLD pharmacy in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and non-discrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies

None of this seems to suggest that Canadawide will definitely get its domain. If NABP has sufficient evidence to continue to deny the application, it looks like it could come into compliance by merely being transparent about this evidence.

2 Comments Tagged: .pharamacy, canadawide, nabp, national association of boards of pharmacy, new gTLDs, pcdrp, pics

Donuts makes six-figure .news sale to dangerous conspiracy theorist

Donuts has sold a package of “platinum” .news domains to a network of dubious news sites peddling what many describe as dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense.
A company called WebSeed acquired science.news, food.news, health.news, medicine.news, pollution.news, cancer.news and climate.news from the registry for an undisclosed sum in the six-figure range last December, Donuts said.
It appears that the same buyer has acquired several other presumably non-platinum .news domains, including vaccines.news, nutrients.news, menshealth.news and emergencymedicine.news
The sites have already been developed, incorporating a back catalog of “news” content from other sites under the same ownership, and Donuts reckons searches for “climate news” and “science news” already return the matching domains prominently (they don’t for me, but Google can be fickle).
Unfortunately, the domains seem to have been sold to a leading purveyor of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
That’s right, climate.news now belongs to a climate change denier, vaccines.news belongs to an anti-vaxxer, and medicine.news belongs to somebody who values alternative remedies over science-based medicine.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the content on the network of .news domains comes from Natural News, the controversial site owned by “Health Ranger” Mike Adams.
Natural News has been fingered as an “empire of misinformation” and a leading contributor to the “fake news” crisis that has been blighting society for the last few years.
Check out climate.news today to be treated to Adams’ theory that climate change is nothing but a conspiracy peddled by the UN and the mainstream media.
Over on vaccines.news, you’ll find a scaremongering story about how the measles vaccine has killed more people than measles over the last decade.
(Gee, I wonder why measles isn’t killing anyone any more? Could it be that we have a fucking vaccine?).
On medicine.news, Adams himself writes of “PROOF that vaccines target blacks for depopulation”.
And at pollution.news, you’ll find any number of articles discussing the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not scientifically literate enough to debunk most of the content on these sites, but I know quackery when I see it.
Donuts’ press release goes to suspicious pains to point out that the sites’ content is “thoroughly researched” and advertising is “limited and relevant to the sites’ content”.
In fact, the advertising seems in most if not all cases to lead back to Adams’ own stores, where he sells stuff like water purifiers, dietary supplements and alternative medicines.
The Donuts press release also quotes the founder and CEO of WebSeed, one “Mike Texas”.
Now, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Mr Texas is not a real person.
But.
Whois records (remember those?) show that the original registrant of science.news was one Mike Adams of WebSeed LLC, and WebSeed.com, while under privacy for some years, was originally registered to Adams’ Taiwan-based company.
It goes without saying that Donuts, as a neutral registry, is under no obligation whatsoever to police content on the domains it sells. That would be a Bad Thing.
But I can’t help but feel that .news has the potential to take a big credibility hit due to the content of these sites.
Imagine a fox, buying up all the good .henhouse domains. It’s a bit like that.

30 Comments Tagged: .health, .news, .science, climate, donuts, mike adams, natural news, new gTLDs, premiums, vaccines

MMX gets four more gTLDs approved for China use

MMX’s Chinese subsidiary has received the government nod for four more of its new gTLDs to operate in the country.
The approved strings are the lifestyle-oriented .fashion, .luxe, .yoga and .fit.
Getting the nod from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology means Chinese registrants will be able to use domains in the the four gTLDs, albeit subject to China’s much more stringent censorship regime.
MIIT this week also approved .时尚, which is the Chinese version of .fashion, managed by Rise Victory, a subsidiary of Yuwei Registry.
.fashion, .fit and .yoga have about 40,000 domains in their zone files, combined, while .luxe does not yet have a launch date.
MMX has had some success in China with its flagship .vip TLD, which had over 884,000 domains under management at the last public count. It recently said preliminary second-quarter renewals there were a very respectable 75%.
It also recently that that .购物 (.shopping) and .law both went on sale in China, and “will be marketed by in-country specialists as high-value domain names”. Investors were advised not to expect high volumes.

1 Comment Tagged: .fashion, .fit, .luxe, .yoga, .时尚, china, miit, mmx

Four more dot-brands call it quits

Four more dot-brand gTLDs are to disappear after their operators decided they don’t want them any more.
These are the latest victims of the voluntary cull:

• High-priced bling-maker Richemont, an enthusiastic new gTLD early adopter, is dumping .panerai (a watch brand) and .jlc (for Jaeger-LeCoultre, another watch brand), the sixth and seventh of its fourteen originally applied-for gTLDs to be abandoned.
• Norwegian energy company Equinor, which changed its name from Statoil a few months ago, is getting rid of .statoil for obvious reasons. Will it bother to apply for .equinor next time around? We’ll have to wait (and wait) and see.
• Online printing outfit Vistaprint no longer wants .vista, one of its two delegated TLDs. It still has .vistaprint, and is in contracting with ICANN for its bitterly-won .webs, which matches its Webs.com brand.

The three companies informed ICANN of their intention to scrap their registry agreements between May 14 and June 14, but ICANN only published their requests on its web site in the last few hours.
Needless to say, none of the four TLDs had any live sites beyond their contractually mandated minimum.
The number of delegated new gTLD registries to voluntarily terminate their contracts now stands at 36, all dot-brands.
Under ICANN procedures, the termination requests and ICANN’s decision not to re-delegate the strings to other registries are now open for public comment.

2 Comments Tagged: .flc, .panerai, .vista, dot-brands, equinor, ICANN, new gTLDs, richemont, statoil, termination, vistaprint

Plural gTLDs to be banned over confusion concerns

Singular and plural versions of the same word are likely to be banned as coexisting gTLDs in future.
The ICANN community working group looking at rules for subsequent application rounds reckons having both versions of the same word online — something that is happening with more than 30 gTLDs currently — leads to “consumer confusion” and should not be permitted.
It’s one of the surprisingly few firm recommendations in the Initial Report on the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process, which says:

If there is an application for the singular version of a word and an application for a plural version of the same word in the same language during the same application window, these applications would be placed in a contention set, because they are confusingly similar. An application for a single/plural variation of an existing TLD would not be permitted.

It adds that the mere addition of an S should not be disqualifying; .news would not be considered the plural of .new, for example.
Interestingly, the recommendation is based on advice received from existing registries, many of which fought for singular/plural coexistence during the 2012 round and already operate many such string pairs.
According to my database, these are the 15 plural/singular English string pairs (there are more if you include other languages) currently live in the DNS root:

.careers/.career
.photo/.photos
.work/.works
.cruise/.cruises
.review/.reviews
.accountant/.accountants
.loan/.loans
.auto/.autos
.deal/.deals
.gift/.gifts
.fan/.fans
.market/.markets
.car/.cars
.coupon/.coupons
.game/.games

Some of them are being managed by the same registries; others by competitors.
It’s tempting to wonder whether the newfound consensus that these pairs are confusing represents an attempt by 2012-round registries to slam the door behind them, if for no other reason than to avoid chancers trying to extort money from them by applying for plural or singular versions of other strings they currently manage.
But at an ICANN policy level, the plurals issue was indeed a gaping hole in the 2012 round.
All such clashes were resolved by String Confusion Objections, but only if one of the applicants chose to file such an objection.
These rulings mostly came down on the side of coexistence, but sometimes did not — .kid, .pet and .web were among those placed in direct contention with plural equivalents following aberrant SCO decisions.

5 Comments Tagged: confusion, ICANN, new gTLDs, plural, singular, string confusion objection, subsequent procedures