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.

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.”

New gTLDs continue growth trend, but can it last?

New gTLDs continued to bounce back following a year-long slump in registration volumes, according to Verisign data.
The company’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, covering the third quarter, shows new gTLDs growing from 21.8 million names to 23.4 million names, a 1.6 million name increase.
New gTLDs also saw a 1.6 million-name sequential increase in the second quarter, which reversed five quarters of declines.
The sector has yet to surpass its peak of 25.6 million, which it reached in the fourth quarter of 2016.
It think it will take some time to get there, and that we’ll may well see a decline in next couple quarters.
The mid-point of the third quarter marked the end of deep discounting across the former Famous Four Media (now GRS Domains) portfolio (.men, .science, .loan, etc), but the expected downward pressure on volumes wasn’t greatly felt by the end of the period.
With GRS’s portfolio generally on the decline so far in Q4, we might expect it to have a tempering effect on gains elsewhere when the next DNIB is published.
Verisign’s data showed also that ccTLDs shrunk for the first time in a couple years, down by half a million names to 149.3 million. Both .uk and .de suffered six-figure losses.
Its own .net was flat at 14.1 million, showing no signs of recovery after several quarters of shrinkage, while .com increased by two million names to finish September with 137.6 under management.

First chance to have your say on the future of Whois

RIP: the Whois Admin.
Standard Whois output is set to get slimmed down further under newly published policy proposals.
The community working group looking at post-GDPR Whois has decided that the Admin Contact is no longer necessary, so it’s likely to get scrapped next year.
This is among several recommendations of the Expedited Policy Development Process working group on Whois, which published its initial report for public comment late Wednesday.
As expected, the report stops short of addressing the key question of how third-parties such as intellectual property interests, domain investors, security researchers and the media could get streamlined access to private Whois data.
Indeed, despite over 5,000 person-hours of teleconferences and face-to-face meetings and about 1,000 mailing list messages since work began in early August, the EPDP’s 50 members have yet to reach consensus on many areas of debate.
What they have reached is “tentative agreement” on 22 recommendations on how to bring current ICANN Whois policy into line with EU privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.
The work is designed to replace the current Temporary Specification, a Band-Aid imposed by the ICANN board of directors, which is due to expire next May.
The EPDP initial report proposes a few significant changes to what data is collected and publicly displayed by the Whois system.
The most notable change is the complete elimination of the Admin Contact fields.
Currently, Whois contains contact information for the registrant, admin contact and technical contact. It’s often the same data replicated across all three records, and under the Temp Spec the large majority of the data is redacted.
Under the EPDP’s proposal, the Admin Contact is superfluous and should be abandoned altogether. Not only would it not be displayed, but registrars would not even collect the data.
The Tech Contact is also getting a haircut. Registrars would now only be able to collect name, phone and email address, and it would be optional for the registrant whether to provide this data at all. In any event, all three fields would be redacted from public Whois output.
For the registrant, all contact information except state/province and country would be redacted.
There’s no agreement yet on whether the optional “organization” field would be redacted, but the group has agreed that registrars should provide better guidance to registrants about whether they need to provide that data.
While data on legal persons such as companies is not protected by GDPR, some fear that natural person registrants may just naively type their own name into that box when registering a name, inadvertently revealing their identities to the public.
Those providing Whois output would be obliged, as they are under the Temp Spec, to publish an anonymized email address or web-based contact form to allow users to contact registrants without personal information being disclosed.
That German lawsuit
The recommendation to slash what data is collected could have an impact on ICANN’s lawsuit against Tucows’ German subsidiary, EPAG.
ICANN is suing EPAG after the registrar decided that collecting admin and tech contact info was not compliant with GPDR. It’s been looking, unsuccessfully, for a ruling forcing the company to carry on collecting this data.
Tucows is of the view that if the admin and tech contacts are third parties to the registration agreement, it has no right to collect data about them under the GDPR.
If ICANN’s own community policy development process is siding with Tucows, this could guide ICANN’s future legal strategy, but not, it appears, until it becomes firm consensus policy.
I asked ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey about whether the EPDP’s work could affect the lawsuit during an interview October 5, shortly after it became clear that the admin/tech contact days might be numbered.
“Maybe,” he said. “If it becomes part of the policy we’ll have to assess that. Until there’s a new policy though, what we’re working with is the Temp Spec. The Temp Spec we believe is enforceable, we believe have the legal support for that, and we’ll continue down that path.”
(It might be worth noting that Thomas Rickert, whose law firm represents EPAG in this case, is on the EPDP working group in his capacity of head of domains for German trade group eco. He is, of course, just one of the 31 EPDP members developing these recommendations at any given time.)
IP wheel-spinning
The main reason it’s taken the EPDP so long to reach the initial report stage — the report was originally due during the ICANN 63 Barcelona meeting a month ago — has been the incessant bickering between those advocating for, and opposing, the rights of intellectual property interests to access private Whois data.
EPDP members from the IP Constituency and Business Constituency have been attempting to future-proof the work by getting as many references to IP issues inserted into the recommendations as they can, before the group has turned its attention to addressing them specifically.
But they’ve been opposed every step of the way by the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which is concerned the IP lobby is trying to policy its way around GDPR as it relates to Whois.
Many hours have been consumed by these often-heated debates.
My feeling is that the NCSG has been generally winning, but probably mainly because the working group’s charter forbade discussion about access until other issues had been addressed.
As it stands today, the initial report contains this language in Recommendation #2:

Per the EPDP Team Charter, the EPDP Team is committed to considering a system for Standardized Access to non-public Registration Data once the gating questions in the charter have been answered. This will include addressing questions such as:
• What are the legitimate purposes for third parties to access registration data?
• What are the eligibility criteria for access to non-public Registration data?
• Do those parties/groups consist of different types of third-party requestors?
• What data elements should each user/party have access to?
In this context, amongst others, disclosure in the course of intellectual property infringement and DNS abuse cases will be considered

This is basically a placeholder to assure the IP crowd that their wishes are still on the table for future debate — which I don’t think was ever in any doubt — but even this basic recommendation took hours to agree to.
The EPDP’s final report is due February 1, so it has just 70 days to discuss this hypothetical “Standardized Access” model. That’s assuming it started talks today, which it hasn’t.
It’s just nine weeks if we assume not a lot is going to happen over the Christmas/New Year week (most of the working group come from countries that celebrate these holidays).
For context, it’s taken the working group about 115 days just to get to the position it is in today.
Even if Standardized Access was the only issue being discussed — and it’s not, the group is also simultaneously going to be considering the public comment on its initial report, for starters — this is an absurdly aggressive deadline.
I feel fairly confident in predicting that, come February 1, there will be no agreement on a Standardized Access framework, at least not one that would be close to implementable.
Have your say
All 22 recommendations, along with a long list of questions, have now been put out for public comment.
The working group is keen to point out that all comments should provide rationales, and consider whether what they’re asking for would be GDPR-compliant, so comments along the lines of “Waaah! Whois should be open!” will likely be rapidly filed to the recycle bin.
It’s a big ask, considering that most people have just a slim grasp of what GDPR compliance actually means.
Complicating matters, ICANN is testing out a new way to process public comments this time around.
Instead of sending comments in by email, which has been the norm for two decades, a nine-page Google form has been created. This is intended to make it easier to link comments to specific recommendations. There’s also a Word version of the form that can be emailed.
Given the time constraints, it seems like an odd moment to be testing out new processes, but perhaps it will streamline things as hoped. We’ll see.

Uniregistry working on bulk trademark blocking service

Uniregistry is planning to launch a bulk trademark block service, along the same lines as Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List.
But it’s going to be roughly 50% more expensive than DPML, on a per-TLD basis.
The company has applied to ICANN to run what it calls “Uni EP” across its whole portfolio of 26 gTLDs.
Uni EP would be “largely identical” to DPML, according to Uniregistry’s Registry Service Evaluation Requests.
This means that anyone who has their trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to block the matching string in all of Uniregistry’s TLDs.
Nobody else would be able to register that mark unless they also had a TMCH-validated trademark for the same string.
The pricing would be lower than if the brand owner individually defensively registered in each of the 26 TLDs.
With Donuts, which manages a portfolio almost 10 times as large, DPML tends to be priced around the $6,000 mark retail for a five-year block. That works to about $5 per TLD per year.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said Uni EP could be priced as low as $200 per year. That would work out to about $7.70 per TLD.
The relatively higher pricing might make sense when you consider the larger variation in regular pricing for Uniregistry TLDs, compared to Donuts.
It has several that retail for around $100 a year, and three — .cars, .car and .auto — that sell for close to $3,000 a year.
Still, the Uni EP price is obviously going to be a lot cheaper than regular defensive registrations.
Companies that have already purchased defensively would get to add their domains to the block service after the current registration expires, the RSEP states.
Like DPML, Uni EP would also have a “Plus” version, in which confusingly similar strings in eight scripts would also be blocked.
Uniregistry says it consulted with three brand protection registrars — CSC, MarkMonitor and Safenames — about the service and that their reactions were “favorable”.
Uniregistry’s current portfolio comprises .country, .audio, .car, .blackFriday, .auto, .cars, .christmas, .click, .diet, .flowers, .game, .gift, .guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy, and .tattoo.

Incel hate site jumps to Iceland after doMEn suspends .me domain

Incels.me, a web forum that hosts misogynist rants by “involuntarily celibate” men, has found a new home after .me registry doMEn suspended its domain.
The web site has reappeared, apparently unscathed, under Iceland’s .is domain, at incels.is.
doMEn said in a blog post yesterday that it had suspended incels.me at the registry level due to the owner “allowing part of its members to continuously promote violence and hate speech”.
The suspension happened October 15, and the site reappeared in .is not long after. It’s not entirely clear why doMEn chose to explain its decision over a month later. It said:

The decision to suspend the domain was made after the .ME Registry exhausted all other possibilities that could assure us that the registrant of incels.me domain and the owner of i
incels.me forum was able to remove the subject content and prevent the same or similar content from appearing on the forum again.

An “incel” is a man who has decided that he is too ugly, charmless, short, stupid or otherwise unattractive, and is therefore permanently unfuckable.
While that may provoke sympathetic thoughts, a great many of the incels frequenting sites like incels.me choose to channel their frustration into cartoonish misogyny ranging from the laughable to the extremely disturbing.
While the registry didn’t mention it, the site also has many threads that appear to encourage suicide.
doMEn seems to have turned off the domain because certain threads crossed the line from misogyny to incitement to violence against women.
The Montenegro-based company said it had been monitoring the site since May, after being told that “certain members” of the forum “might have been involved in or associated with” an attack in Toronto that killed 10 people in April, a charge the incels.is admin denies.
The second reason given — preventing content appearing in future — may be the crux here.
The site’s administrator said in a post on the new site that he had personally removed all of the threads highlighted by doMEN as being in violation of its registry policies.
He also posted a partial email thread between himself and his former registrar, China-based NiceNIC.net, in which he explains how difficult it is to monitor all the content posted by his users. He wrote on the forum:

They obviously weren’t going to give us a fair shake either way, and we’re not going to search through 1.6 MILLION posts nor do we have the technological capabilities to check to see if any of them are against their vague anti-abuse policy.
…
Domain registries have no place in enforcing arbitrary rules against domains that go against their ideology.

It seems from the thread that Afilias, 37%-owner of doMEn and .me back-end provider, had a hands-on role in the suspension.
Incels certainly isn’t the first controversial site to have to resort to TLD-hopping to stay alive.
The most notable example is piracy site KickAssTorrents, which bounced from ccTLD to ccTLD for years before finally being shut down by the US Feds.
The incels.is admin said he had confidence in Iceland’s registry due to “their stance as pro free-speech enforcers”.
But ISNIC is not above suspending domains when the associated sites break Icelandic law. Four years ago it took down some domains associated with ISIS.
The takedown comes not long after GoDaddy attracted attention for suspending the domain of far-right Twitter clone Gab.com, again due to claims of incitement to violence related to an act of domestic terrorism.

Afilias bought .io for $70 million

Did you know Afilias owns .io? I didn’t, but it paid $70 million for the popular alternative TLD 18 months ago.
A recently published financial statement in Ireland shows that the company spent $70.17 million cash — a 10x revenue multiple — for 100% of Internet Computer Bureau Ltd in April 2017.
ICB runs .io, .ac and .sh, the ccTLDs for the British Indian Ocean Territories (.io), Ascension Island (.ac), and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan Da Cunha (.sh).
Afilias has never publicly announced the deal, and I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere, so I thought it was worth blogging up here.
At the time, the deal was characterized to registrars as a back-end contract win.
But it seems that Afilias actually purchased the back-end provider, then migrated (not as smoothly as it usually does) the TLDs over to its own infrastructure.
That would have opened up .io to all the registrars already plugged in to Afilias’ TLDs, potentially greatly increasing its reach.
But it’s probably not just the back-end Afilias has acquired.
Would a registry service provider spend 10 times annual revenue on a ccTLD back-end contractor, unless it had a damn good reason to believe that it would be able to at least recoup its investment, either through a long-term contract or some other mechanism?
It’s quite possible Afilias actually bought the .io ccTLD Manager.
The ccTLD Manager listed by ICANN in the IANA database is “IO Top Level Domain Registry”, but “c/o Sure (Diego Garcia) Limited”. That changed a week or so ago from “IO Top Level Domain Registry, Cable & Wireless”
Sure is the arm of telecommunications firm Cable & Wireless that provides internet access to remote islands in various parts of the world.
I don’t know what “IO Top Level Domain Registry” is.
Afilias tells me confidentiality arrangements are in place.
.io has proven popular as a TLD for technology startup companies that couldn’t get the .com they wanted.
Across its small portfolio, ICB was a $6.9 million business last year, but .io, with a reported 270,000 domains, must account for the large majority of that.
Due to the timing of the deal, ICB contributed $5.3 million to Afilias’ top line and was the main reason its revenue grew last year, its 2017 accounts reveal.
In 2017, Afilias saw revenue grow from $106.7 million to $113.6 million. Profit before tax was down slightly, from $38.6 million to $36 million
Again, that was due largely to ICB, which contributed $1.4 million of red ink to the bottom line.
Afilias is a private company, by the way, which is why these numbers all refer to 2017. It’s the final full year of it being based in Ireland, before its move to the US for tax reasons.
The disclosure also reveals that Afilias took a 45% stake in Dot Global, manager of the .global gTLD registry, in December 2017.
Dot Global had revenue of $1.9 million and a $320,000 loss last year, the report states.
doMEn, the Montenegro ccTLD (.me) operator in which Afilias has a 36.85% share, made a profit of $2.59 million on revenue of $7.39 million, it says. Both of those numbers were down slightly on 2016.
Afilias also says in the filing that it expects revenue to be down in 2018, due to the renegotiation of back-end contracts. I gather the contract with Public Interest Registry, which reportedly could cost about $10 million a year, is the main problem.
Given the accounts were signed off in May this year, it seems that this decline is expected despite the lucrative .au ccTLD contract, which Afilias signed at the end of 2017.

ICANN says it can spend quarter-billion-dollar auction fund however it likes

ICANN can tap into its $236 million new gTLD auction fund whenever it wants, and there’s nothing the community can do about it, according to its board of directors.
The board this week said it has a “legal and fiduciary responsibility” over the money, and would be obliged to spend the cash to meet ICANN’s obligations if it ever needed to.
The statement came in a letter to the leaders of a community working group that this week published a set of preliminary recommendations (pdf) for how the money should be distributed.
The group — a cross-community working group or CCWG — laid out a few options for how the money should be administered, either by ICANN alone or in conjunction with a charitable third party, and distributed.
The money was collected from new gTLD applicants that participated in ICANN’s “last-resort” auctions to settle their contention sets. Over half of the money came from Verisign’s winning bid for .web, which is still being contested.
The CCWG said that the money should be used to:

• Benefit the development, distribution, evolution and structures/projects that support the Internet’s unique identifier systems;
• Benefit capacity building and underserved populations, and;
• Benefit the open and interoperable Internet

But the CCWG could not agree among itself whether ICANN Org or community groups such as the GNSO or GAC should be able to grab some of the cash, which is currently held in a special fund, separated from ICANN’s operational budget.
The group asked the board for its opinion, and the board responded (pdf):

ICANN maintains legal and fiduciary responsibility over the funds, and the directors and officers have an obligation to protect the organization through the use of available resources. In such a case, while ICANN would not be required to apply for the proceeds, the directors and officers would have a fiduciary obligation to use the funds to meet the organization’s obligations.

In other words: it doesn’t matter what rules you put in place, it’s our money and we’re duty-bound to spend it if we have to.
The board added, however, that ICANN Org “currently does not foresee a situation where it would need to apply for the proceeds”.
ICANN is pretty well-funded. It would have to hit hard times indeed before it needed to crack open the auction nest egg.
The board also said that supporting organizations and advisory committees would not be able to apply for funding because they’re not legal entities and wouldn’t pass the due diligence.
The CCWG’s initial report is now open for public comment until November 27.

Nominet to donate over $260,000 to Children In Need

UK ccTLD registry Nominet said today that it will donate £1 ($1.31) for every domain registered to the charity Children In Need.
The initiative, which runs from today until November 19, is being backed up with a £200,000 ($261,000) minimum donation commitment.
Every paid-for domain in .co.uk, .uk, .me.uk and .org.uk will count.
The .uk space typically has been doing about 125,000 to 130,000 new regs per month recently, across all subdomains and direct .uk, so we’re looking at a potentially substantial donation here.
The money raised will help fund technology-related youth projects across the UK, Nominet said.
Judging by today’s press release, non-profit Nominet is calling itself a “profit with a purpose” company nowadays.
Children In Need is a charity run by the BBC. It broadcasts a fundraising telethon every year, typically raising tens of millions of pounds.
This year’s show is being broadcast November 16.

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.