Did Roussos pull off the impossible? Google, Donuts, Radix all drop out of .music race

Google won’t be the registry for the .music gTLD.
The company, along with pure-play registries Donuts and Radix, late last week withdrew their respective applications from the .music contention set, leaving just three possible winners in the running.
Those are Amazon, MMX, and DotMusic, the company run by long-time .music fanboy Constantinos Roussos.
As I blogged last week, applications from Domain Venture Partners and Far Further have also been withdrawn.
I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that the contention was settled with a private deal, likely an auction, recently.
The logical guess for a winner would be Amazon, if only because of the nexus of its business to the music industry and the amount of money it could throw at an auction.
But I’m beginning to suspect that DotMusic might have prevailed.
The company appears to have recently revamped its web site, almost as if it’s gearing up for a launch.
Comparing the current version of music.us to versions in Google’s cache, it appears that the site has been recently given a new look, new copy and even a new logo.
It’s even added a prominent header link inviting prospective resellers to sign up, using a form that also appears to have been added in the last few weeks.
These changes all seem to have been made after the crucial ICANN vote that threw out the last of DotMusic’s appeals, March 14.
Are those the actions of an applicant resigned to defeat, or has Roussos pulled off the apparently impossible, defeating two of the internet’s biggest companies to one of the industry’s most coveted and controversial strings?
Participants in gTLD auctions typically sign NDAs, so we’re going to have to wait a bit longer (probably no more than a few days) to find out which of the remaining three applicants actually won.

4 Comments Tagged: .music, amazon, auctions, dotmusic, far further, google, ICANN, mmx, new gTLDs, radix

“Stringent” new online censorship law could affect domain companies

Blame Zuck.
The UK government is planning to introduce what it calls “stringent” new laws to tackle abusive behavior online, and there’s a chance it could wind up capturing domain name registries and registrars in its net.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport this morning published what it calls the Online Harms White Paper, an initial 12-week consultation document that could lead to legislation being drafted at a later date.
The paper calls for the creation of a new independent regulator, charged with overseeing social media companies’ efforts to reduce the availability of content such as incitements to violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, “hate crime” and even “fake news”.
It basically would increase the amount of liability that companies have for user-generated content hosted on their services, even when that content is not necessarily illegal but is nevertheless considered “harmful”.
The regulator would have to create a code of conduct for companies the legislation covers to abide by.
When the code is breached, the regulator would have the authority to issue fines — possibly comparable to the 4% of profits that can be fined under GDPR — against not only the companies themselves but also their senior management.
The paper seems to most directly address ongoing tabloid scandals related to Facebook and its ilk, such as the suicide of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old who viewed material related to self-harm on Instagram before her death.
While it does not mention domain names once, the government clearly anticipates casting a wide net. The paper states:

The scope will include companies from a range of sectors, including social media companies, public discussion forums, retailers that allow users to review products online, along with non-profit organisations, file sharing sites and cloud hosting providers.

That’s a broad enough definition such that it could even cover blogs, including this one, that allow users to post comments.
The paper also discusses asking search engines to remove sites from their indexes, and compelling ISPs to block abusive sites as a “last resort” measure.
There’s a short mental hop from ISP blocking to domain name takedowns, in my view.
The paper also discusses steps the regulator could take to ensure companies with no UK legal presence are still covered by the rules.
While the paper, as I say, does not mention the domain name industry once, subsidiary services provided by registrars, such as hosting, could be directly affected.
There’s no guarantee that the paper will become a bill. There’s already a backlash from those who believe it constitutes unacceptable censorship, comparable to regimes such as in China.
There’s also no guarantee such a bill would eventually become law. The UK government is arguably currently the weakest it has ever been, with a propped-up minority in Parliament and many MPs in open revolt over Brexit.
With talk of an early general election incessant recently, it’s also possible the government may not last long enough to bring its plans to fruition.
Still, it’s probably something the domain industry, including ICANN, should probably keep an eye on.
The full 100-page white paper can be found here (pdf) and an executive summary can be read here.

Comment Tagged: .uk, abuse, censorship, facebook, online harms white paper

Looks like .music is finally on its way

The hard-fought battle for .music appears to be over.
I’m not yet in a position to tell you which of the eight applicants for the new gTLD has been successful, but I can tell you some of those who were not.
Two applicants have this week withdrawn their bids, an almost certain sign that the contention set has been privately settled.
The first applicant to ditch its bid was dot Music Ltd, an application vehicle of Domain Venture Partners (we used to call this outfit Famous Four Media, but that’s changed).
The other is .music LLC, also known as Far Further.
We can almost certainly expect all but one of the remaining applicants to withdraw their applications over the coming days.
Applicants typically sign NDAs when they settle contention privately, usually via an auction.
Far Further was one of two unsuccessful “community” applicants for .music. It had the backing of dozens of music trade groups, including the influential Recording Industry Association of America. Even Radiohead’s guitarist chipped in with his support.
Evidently, none of these groups were prepared to fund Far Further to the extent it could win the .music contention set.
The .music contention set has been held up by the continuing protestations of the other community applicant, DotMusic Limited, the company run by long-time .music cheerleader Constantinos Roussos.
After DotMusic lost its Community Priority Evaluation in 2016, on the basis that the “community” was pretty much illusory under ICANN rules, it started to complain that the process was unfair.
The applicant immediately filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN.
.music then found itself one of several proposed gTLDs frozen while ICANN conducted an outside review of alleged irregularities in the CPE process.
That review found no impropriety in early 2018, a verdict DotMusic’s lawyer dismissed as a “whitewash”.
It has since stalled the process several times with requests for information under ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy, and more RfRs when those requests were denied.
But this series of appeals finally came to an end March 14, when ICANN’s board of directors finally ruled against DotMusic’s 2016 RfR.
That appears to have opened up the .music set for private resolution.
So who won? I don’t know yet, but the remaining applicants are: DotMusic itself, Google, Amazon, MMX, Donuts and Radix.
There are certainly two very deep-pocketed companies on that list. Could we be looking at Google or Amazon as the new proprietors of .music?
If either of those companies has won, prospective registrants might find they have a long wait before they can pick up a .music domain. Neither of these giants has a track record of rushing its new gTLDs to market.
If the victor is a conventional gTLD registry, we’d very probably be looking at a launch in 2019.

Comment Tagged: .music, cpe, domain venture partners, dotmusic, far further, ICANN, new gTLDs, rfr

.blog tops 200,000 regs due to WordPress partnership

Knock Knock Whois There, the WordPress-affiliated .blog registry, said today that it has topped 200,000 names for the first time.
The milestone comes after about 28 months of general availability, during which growth has been slow but stable.
The company said it has a respectable renewal rate of 72.74%, which is only a couple of points behind .com.
KKWT’s relationship with its parent company, Automattic, owner of WordPress.com and an accredited registrar in its own right, has been crucial to .blog’s growth.
According to registry transaction reports, two-thirds of all .blog domains are sold via Automattic, which had over 128,000 .blog domains under management at the end of 2018.
Tucows is a distant second, with about 10,000 names.
Automattic promotes .blog prominently on its registrar site, selling for $18.95 a year.
But it’s still sold more .com domains, over half a million so far, at the slightly cheaper price of $15 per year.

2 Comments Tagged: .blog, automattic, kkwt, knock knock whois there, wordpress.com

.london disaster leads to mixed 2018 for MMX

New gTLD registry MMX, aka Minds + Machines, suffered a huge net loss in 2018, largely due to its disastrous .london contract, even while its operating fundamentals improved.
For the year, MMX reported a net loss of $12.6 million, compared to a 2017 profits of $3.8 million, on revenue up 5% to $15.1 million.
The loss was almost entirely attributable to charges related to an “onerous contract” with one of its partners.
MMX has never disclosed the identity of this partner, but the only outfit that fits the profile is London & Partners, the agency with which MMX partnered to launch .london several years ago.
The registry, expecting big things from the geo-TLD, promised to pay L&P millions over the term of the contract, which expires in 2021.
But it’s been a bit of a damp squib compared to former management’s expectations, peaking at about 86,000 regs last year and shrinking ever since.
MMX says the estimated gap between the minimum revenue guarantee payable to L&P and the expected revenue is expected to bring in before 2021, is $7.2 million.
It’s recorded this as a charge on its income statement accordingly, along with another $4.2 million impairment charge related to the same contract.
The company recorded a $7.7 million accounting charge related to this contract in 2016, too.
The company says that to date it has lost about $13.7 million on the deal.
These charges, along with a few other smaller one-off expenses, were enough to push the company into the black for 2018.
But other key performance indicators showed more promise, helped along by the acquisition last year of porn-themed registry operator ICM Register, best-known for .xxx.
Notably, renewal revenue almost doubled, up 97% to $9.4 million.
Domains under management was up 37% to 1.81 million.
Operating EBITDA was $3.6 million, up 12.5%.
Looking ahead, MMX said billings for the first quarter are expected to be up 246%, due to the first impact of the ICM acquisition.
It also said it closed $500,000 of sales in .law in China in March. That would work out to over 5,000 domains, based on the retail price of about $100 a year, but those domains have yet to show up in the .law zone file, which only grew by about 200 domains last month.
MMX said it is planning to launch “a high-value defensive registration product” for corporate registrars by the third quarter.
If I had to guess, I’d say that is probably a clone of Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List service, which offers trademark owners deep discounts when they defensively block strings across the whole Donuts gTLD portfolio.
It’s a model copied by other registries, including recently Uniregistry.

1 Comment Tagged: .law, .london, donuts, dpml, earnings, financials, l&p, london & partners, Minds + Machines, mmx, new gTLDs, uniregistry

ICANN waves goodbye to Adobe Connect over security, pricing

ICANN has decided to dump its longstanding web conferencing service provider, Adobe Connect, in favor of rival Zoom.
The organization reckons it could save as much as $100,000 a year, and mitigate some security fears, by making the switch.
Adobe has been the standard remote participation tool for not only ICANN’s public meetings, but also its policy-development working groups, for at least seven or eight years.
It enables video, audio, screen-sharing, public and private chat, voting and so on. ICANN says that Zoom has “nearly all of the same features”.
But some of ICANN’s more secretive bodies — including the Security and Stability Advisory Committee and Board Operations — have been using Zoom for a little over a year, after an SSAC member discovered a vulnerability in Adobe that allowed potentially sensitive information to be stolen.
A clincher appears to be Zoom’s voice over IP functionality, which ICANN says will enable it to drop Premiere Global Services Inc (PGi), its current, $500,000-a-year teleconferencing provider, which participants use if they dial in from on the road.
“Based on feedback, Zoom’s voice connectivity and overall experience seem to be superior to equivalent Adobe Connect experiences,” ICANN said.
As somebody who has lurked on more than his fair share of Adobe Connect rooms, I’ve noticed that people losing their voice connection is a very common occurrence, which can delay and break the flow of discussions, though it’s not usually clear where the blame lies.
According to a Zoom feature list (pdf) provided by ICANN, Zoom currently lacks many features on its web client, but updates are expected to bring the feature set in line with the mobile apps and PC/Mac executables by the end of the year.
ICANN expects to use Zoom exclusively by ICANN 65, in Marrakech this June. In the meantime, it will provide training to community members.
The cynic in me wants to say “expect teething troubles”, but the ICANN meetings team runs a pretty tight ship. The switch might be surprisingly smooth.

Comment Tagged: adobe, adobe connect, ICANN, icann 65, zoom

Donuts raises prices on most TLDs by up to 9%

Portfolio registry Donuts is to jack up prices on most of its 241 gTLDs by up to 9% later this year.
Base-rate price increases of between 6% and 9% will his 220 TLDs, while 16 will remain at their current pricing.
The increases, which do not affect registry-reserved “premium” domains, will likely mean an increase of a few dollars in most cases.
(UPDATE: Donuts says the average price increase is about $1.75.)
Five gTLDs will see their prices reduced. Donuts said .group will see a 35% price reduction. It currently sells for about $30 a year at GoDaddy.
The prices were announced to registrars yesterday and, due to ICANN rules, will not come into effect until October 1.
Registrants are able to lock in their current pricing for up to 10 years by renewing before that deadline.

Comment Tagged: donuts, new gTLDs, prices

.com outsells new gTLDs by 2:1 in 2018

The number of registered .com domains increased by more than double the growth of all new gTLDs last year, according to figures from Verisign.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief reports that .com grew by 7.1 million names in 2018, while new gTLDs grew by 3.2 million names.
.com ended the year with 139 million registered names, while the whole new gTLD industry finished with 23.8 million.
It wasn’t all good news for Verisign, however. Its .net gTLD shrunk by 500,000 names over the period, likely due to the ongoing impact of the new gTLD program.
New gTLDs now account for 6.8% of all registered domains, compared to 6.2% at the end of 2017, Verisign’s numbers state.
Country codes fared better than .com in terms of raw regs, growing by 8.2 million domains to finish 2018 with 154.3 million names.
But that’s including .tk, the free ccTLD where dropping or abusive domains are reclaimed and parked by the registry and never expire.
Excluding .tk, ccTLDs were up by 6.6 million names in the year. Verisign estimates .tk as having a modest 21.5 million names.
The latest DNIB, and quarterly archives, can be downloaded from here.

Comment Tagged: .com, cctlds, dnib, domain name industry brief, new gTLDs, verisign

CentralNic gets 680,000 AlpNames domains for free, kinda

CentralNic has emerged as the gaining registrar for AlpNames’ entire portfolio of gTLD domains.
The company announced late last week that three registrars in its stable — Moniker, Key-Systems LLC and Key-Systems GmbH — will take over roughly 680,000 domains that were left stranded when AlpNames management went AWOL.
US-based Key-Systems LLC appears to be the biggest gainer. It will be taking over domains in every gTLD except .biz, .com, .info, .net, .org, which are going to Moniker, and .pro, which are going to the German Key-Systems division.
While most registrars see their domains under management concentrated in these legacy gTLDs, by volume AlpNames had far more registrations in new 2012-round gTLDs.
It had just 19,000 .com DUM at the last count, compared to hundreds of thousands in new gTLDs such as .top and .gdn.
CentralNic said in a press release that ICANN selected its registrars after a competitive bidding process, which I’ve previously outlined here, but that it did not pay for the names. So AlpNames, presumably, won’t be getting the payday it could have received under the rules.
The transfer won’t be entirely cost-free, of course. CentralNic is going to have to provide support to its incoming customers — who will all be emailed with the details of their new Moniker accounts — for starters.
There’s also the issue of abuse. AlpNames was notorious as a haven for spammers and the like, due to its cheap prices and bulk-registration tools, so CentralNic may find itself having to deal with this legacy.
But CentralNic said it expects these incidental costs to be “minimal”.
The transfers are a big boost for CentralNic’s registrar volume, at least in the short term. The three selected registrars had a combined total of roughly two million gTLD domains at the last count. CentralNic says it acts as registrar for over seven million domains across its 13 accreditations.
For every AlpNames domain that gets renewed, CentralNic gets paid. But if AlpNames’ own track record is any guide, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of drops over the coming year.
UPDATE August 12 2020: AlpNames former CEO Iain Roache recently wrote to DI and stated the following:

Alpnames itself worked closely with ICANN for months to arrange for its exit from the Registrar business and with a number of Registrars to arrange for the transfer of the customers. Your article does not reflect the detail of what transpired and is inaccurate.

Comment Tagged: alpnames, centralnic, ICANN, key-systems, moniker

NameSilo nets $1.5 million profit

Fast-growing registrar NameSilo yesterday reported its financial results for 2018.
The Canadian company reported revenue of CDN 17.2 million ($13.3 million) for the year, up from CDN 10.4 million ($8.1 million) in 2017.
Net income was CDN 1.92 million ($1.48 million), compared to CDN 565,000 ($435,000).
Bookings were CDN 28.78 million ($21.45 million), up from CDN 14.04 million ($10.81 million) in 2017.
These are the results of NameSilo LLC, the operating registrar subsidiary of the listed entity, NameSilo Technologies Corp, which is listed on the Canadian pink sheets. The former reversed into the latter in August.
NameSilo says it has added 850,000 new domains under management since then, and now has about 2.7 million names.
According to the most-recent registry transaction reports, NameSilo was the second-fastest growing gTLD registrar in November and the 16th-largest by DUM. It ranks higher if you group registrar accreditations into families.

2 Comments Tagged: earnings, financials, namesilio