ICANN plays tough over Amazon dot-brands

ICANN has given Amazon and the governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization less than a month to sort out their long-running dispute over the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors voted on Sunday to give ACTO and the e-commerce leviathan until April 7 to get their shit together or risk not getting what they want.
But both parties are going to have to come to an agreement without ICANN’s help, with the board noting that it “does not think that any further facilitation efforts by ICANN org will be fruitful”.
Attempts by ICANN to meet with ACTO over the last several months have been agreed to and then cancelled by ACTO on at least two separate occasions.
The eight ACTO governments think the string “Amazon” more rightfully belongs to them, due to it being the English name for the rain forest region they share.
Amazon the company has promised to safeguard culturally sensitive terms in .amazon, to assist with future efforts to secure .amazonas or similar for the Amazonian peoples, and to donate services and devices to the nations concerned.
Now, the two parties are going to have to bilaterally decide whether this deal is enough, whether it should be sweetened or rejected outright.
If they can’t come to a deal by ICANN’s deadline (which could be extended if Amazon and ACTO both ask for more time), ICANN will base its decision on whether to approve .amazon based on how Amazon unilaterally proposes to address ACTO’s concerns.
While a rejection of the .amazon application is still on the table, my read is that this is a bigger win for Amazon than it is for ACTO.

Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, dot-brands, geographic, ICANN, icann 64, kobe, new gTLDs

Data beats Merdinger to head universal acceptance group

Email entrepreneur and internationalized domain name expert Ajay Data has been named as the new chair of the group that is struggling to promote the universal acceptance of top-level domains across the internet.
Data, who replaces Afilias COO Ram Mohan after a four-year term, beat GoDaddy’s VP of domains Rich Merdinger in a secret ballot of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group this week.
The number of votes each candidate received were not disclosed.
India-based Data is founder and CEO of Xgenplus, a developer of enterprise email servers with a focus on support for non-Latin scripts and internationalized domain names.
He’s been intimately involved in all things IDN for many years.
The UASG is an independent group, which receives funding from ICANN, dedicated to reaching out to software and web site developers to ensure their systems can support domain names in all scripts, including IDNs, as well as raise awareness of new gTLDs.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, idns, uasg

Radix sees revenue up 30%

New gTLD registry Radix said today that its revenue increased by 30% in 2018, largely due to an end-of-year boost.
The company, which runs nine gTLDs including .online and .site, said that gross revenue was $16.95 million last year.
It added that net profit was up 45.6%, but the privately held company does not actually disclose the dollar value of its bottom line.
Radix said that the fourth quarter of the year, which presumably saw the benefits of Operation September Thrust, was its strongest quarter.
The company said that 27% of its revenue came from standard-price new registrations and 60% from renewals.
Its premiums brought in $1.9 million, 56% of which were premium renewals.

Comment Tagged: earnings, financials, new gTLDs, radix

Verisign gets approval to sell O.com for $7.85

ICANN is to grant Verisign the right to sell a single-character .com domain name for the first time in over 25 years.
The organization’s board of directors is due to vote next Thursday to approve a complex proposal that would see Verisign auction off o.com, with almost all of the proceeds going to good causes.
“Approval of Amendment to Implement the Registry Service Request from Verisign to Authorize the Release for Registration of the Single-Character, Second-Level Domain, O.COM” is on the consent agenda for the board’s meeting at the conclusion of ICANN 64, which begins Saturday in Kobe, Japan.
Consent agenda placement means that there will likely be no further discussion — and no public discussion — before the board votes to approve the deal.
Verisign plans to auction the domain to the highest bidder, and then charge premium renewal fees that would essentially double the purchase price over a period of 25 years.
But the registry, already under scrutiny over its money-printing .com machine, would be banned from profiting from the sale.
Instead, Verisign would only receive its base registry fee — currently $7.85 per year — with the rest being held by an independent third party that would distribute the funds to worthy non-profit causes.
ICANN had referred the Verisign proposal, first put forward in December 2016, to the US government, and the Department of Justice gave it the nod in December 2017.
There was also a public comment period last May.
The request almost certainly came about due to Overstock.com’s incessant lobbying. The retailer has been obsessed with obtaining o.com for well over a decade, but was hamstrung by the legacy policy, enshrined in the .com registry agreement, that forbids the sale of single-character domains.
Whoever else wants to buy o.com, they’ll be bidding against Overstock, which has a trademark.
It’s quite possible nobody else will bid.
When Overstock briefly rebranded as O.co several years ago — it paid $350,000 for that domain — it said it saw 61% of its traffic going to o.com instead.
All single-character .com names that had not already been registered were reserved by IANA for technical reasons in 1993, well before ICANN took over DNS policy.
Today, only q.com, z.com and x.com are registered. Billionaire Elon Musk, who used x.com to launch PayPal, reacquired that domain for an undisclosed sum in 2017. GMO Internet bought z.com for $6.8 million in 2014.
With the sale of o.com now a near certainty, it is perhaps only a matter of time before more single-character .com names are also released.
No gTLD approved after 2012 has a restriction on single-character domains.
As a matter of disclosure: several years ago I briefly provided some consulting/writing services to a third party in support of the Verisign and Overstock positions on the release of single-character domain names, but I have no current financial interest in the matter.

36 Comments Tagged: .com, ICANN, o.co.o.com, overstock.com, scdn, single-character, verisign

At eleventh hour, most .uk registrants still don’t own their .uk names

Less than a quarter of all third-level .uk registrants have taken up the opportunity to buy their matching second-level domain, just a few months before the deadline.
According to February stats from registry Nominet, 9.76 million domains were registered under the likes of .co.uk and .org.uk, but only 2.27 million domains were registered directly under .uk, which works out at about 23%.
Nominet’s controversial Direct.uk policy was introduced in June 2014, with a grandfathering clause that gave all third-level registrants five years to grab their matching .uk domain before it returns to the pool of available names.
So if you own example.co.uk, you have until June 25 this year, 110 days from now, to exercise your exclusive rights to example.uk.
Registrants of .co.uk domains have priority over registrants of matching .org.uk and .me.uk domains. Nominet’s Whois tool can be used to figure out who has first dibs on any given string.
At least two brand protection registrars warned their clients this week that they will be at risk of cybersquatting if they don’t pick up their direct matches in time. But there’s potential for confusion here, after the deadline, whether or not you own a trademark.
I expect we could see a spike in complaints under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (the .uk equivalent of UDRP) in the back half of the year.
Nominet told DI in a statement today:

The take up right now is roughly in line with what we envisaged. We knew from the outset that some of the original 10 million with rights would not renew their domain, some would decide they did not want the equivalent .UK and some would leave it to the last minute to decide or take action. The feedback from both registrants and registrars, and the registration data, bears this out.

The statement added that the registry has started “ramping up” its outreach, and that in May it will launch “an advertising and awareness campaign” that will include newspapers, radio and trade publications.

5 Comments Tagged: .uk, cybersquatting, direct.uk, nominet, second-level, trademarks

Mohan takes the reins at Afilias

Ram Mohan appears to have taken over the C-suite at Afilias.
The long-time chief technology officer was also yesterday named to the newly created role of chief operating officer, with the suggestion that he’s also taken over much of the work of CEO Hal Lubsen.
Afilias said Mohan will continue to report to Lubsen, but that “most all of Mr. Lubsen’s previous direct reports will now report to Mr. Mohan”.
Lubsen, who has been listed on the Afilias web site as “72 years old” for at least four years, will “continue to be responsible for and oversee finance, mergers and acquisitions and most legal matters.”
Mohan has been with the company as CTO since the very outset, when it was awarded .info back in 2001. He wrapped up a 10-year term on ICANN’s board of directors last October.
He’s going to carry on with the CTO’s job “initially”, Afilias said, but it sounds like a replacement will be sought.

Comment Tagged: afilias

Trademark posse fails to block Whois privacy policy

The ICANN community’s move to enshrine Whois privacy into formal consensus policy is moving forward, despite votes to block it by intellectual property interests.
During a special meeting yesterday, the GNSO Council voted to approve a set of recommendations that would (probably) bring ICANN’s Whois policy into compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
But four councilors — Paul McGrady and Flip Petillion of the Intellectual Property Constituency and Marie Pattullo and Scott McCormick of the Business Constituency — voted against the compromise deal.
Their downvotes were not enough to block it from passing, however. It has now been opened for a month of public comments before being handed to the ICANN board of directors for final approval, whereupon it will become ICANN’s newest consensus policy and binding on all contracted parties.
McGrady, an lawyer with Winston Strawn, claimed that the Expedited Policy Development Process working group that came up with the recommendations failed to reach the level of consensus that it had claimed.
“The consensus call was broken,” he said, adding that the EPDP’s final report “reflects consensus where there really wasn’t any.”
The GNSO was due to vote 10 days ago, but deferred the vote at the request of the IPC and BC. McGrady said that both groups had tried to muster up support in their communities for a “yes” vote in the meantime, but “just couldn’t get there”.
Speaking for the BC from a prepared statement, Pattullo (who works for European brand protection group AIM) told the Council:

The report is a step backwards for BC members’ interests compared to the Temp Spec, especially as the legitimate purposes for collecting and processing data are insufficiently precise, and do not include consumer protection, cybercrime, DNS abuse and IP protection.

The Temp Spec is the Temporary Specification currently governing how registries and registrars collect and publish Whois data. It was created as an emergency measure by the ICANN board and is due to expire in May, where it will very probably be replaced by something based on the EPDP recommendations.
In response to the IPC/BC votes, Michele Neylon of the Registrars Constituency and Ayden Férdeline of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group read statements claiming that trademark interests had been given substantial concessions during the EPDP talks.
Neylon in particular had some harsh words for the holdout constituencies, accusing them of “bad faith” and pointing out that the EPDP spent thousands of hours discussing its recommendations.
“Our members would want any number of obligations this report contains to be removed, but despite the objections we voiced our support for the final product as a sign of compromise and support for the entire multistakeholder model,” he said.
“Given the objections of certain parts of the community it’s unclear how we can ask this group to carry on with the next phase of its work at the same pace,” he said. “Given the unwillingness of others to participate and negotiate in good faith, how can we ask our reps to spend hours compromising on this work when it’s clear others will simply wait until the last minute and withdraw their consent for hard-fought compromise.”
The EPDP had a hard deadline due to the imminent expiration of the Temp Spec, but that’s not true of its “phase two” work, which will explore possible ways trademark enforcers could get access to redacted private Whois data.
Unfortunately for the IP lobby, there’s a very good chance that this work is going to proceed at a much slower pace than phase one, which wrapped up in basically six months.
During yesterday’s Council call, both Neylon and NCSG rep Tatiana Tropina said that the dedication required of volunteers in phase one — four to five hours of teleconferences a week and intensive mailing list discussions — will not be sustainable over phase two.
They simply won’t be able to round up enough people with enough time to spare, they said.
Coincidentally, neither the registrars nor the non-coms have any strong desire to see a unified access solution developed any time soon, so a more leisurely pace suits them politically too.
It will be up to the EPDP working group, and whoever turns out to be its new chair, to figure out the timetable for the phase two work.

3 Comments Tagged: bc, epdp, gdpr, gnso, gnso council, ICANN, ipc, privacy, whois

Nevett headhunts top execs from three rivals

Public Interest Registry has filled out its executive team by poaching senior staff from rivals Afilias, Donuts and Neustar.
Judy Song-Marshall of Neustar has joined as chief of staff, Joe Abley of Afilias is the new chief technology officer and Anand Vora has joined from Donuts as VP of business affairs.
They’re the first senior level appointments to be announced since Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett was appointed CEO three months ago.
PIR, the non-profit which runs .org and related gTLDs, has also let it be known that it’s looking for a chief financial officer. The job ad can be found here.

3 Comments Tagged: .org, afilias, donuts, neustar, pir

Internet to lose its .co.ck? Cook Islands mulls name change

The government of the Cook Islands is reportedly thinking about changing its name, putting a question mark over the long-term longevity of its .ck top-level domain.
The AFP is reporting that an exploratory committee has been set up to pick a new name for the country, which is currently named after British explorer James Cook.
The new name would be in the local language, Cook Islands Maori, but would also reflect the country’s Polynesian heritage and “strong Christian belief”, AFP reports.
The Cook Islands is in the Pacific Ocean, about 3,000km from New Zealand. It gained independence in 1965 but retains strong ties to NZ. It has about 12,000 citizens.
Telecom Cook Islands has been running its ccTLD, .ck, since 1995. Registrations, which are a few hundred bucks a year, are only possible at the third level, under .co.ck, .org.ck and so on.
It appears from reporting that any formal name change is still a long way off, but it seems possible that a change of name could well lead to a change of ISO 3166-1 string and therefore a change of ccTLD.
As I explained in my post about the possible loss of .io last week, any such change would take years to roll through the ICANN system. Nobody would lose their domains overnight.
But perhaps the most famous .ck domain appears to have already gone dormant.
Fictional mid-noughties hipster Nathan Barley, antihero of the Charlie Brooker sitcom of the same name, owned trashbat.co.ck, as the opening shot of the show established.

Sadly, that domain, which unlike clownpenis.fart actually existed and was used to promote the short-lived series, appears to stop resolving three or four years ago.

Comment Tagged: .ck, cctlds, cook islands, dick jokes, iana, ICANN

Donuts founder replaces Pitts as MMX’s premium guru

MMX has hired one of Donuts’ recently departed co-founders to market its premium domain name inventory, the company said today.
Dan Schindler, formerly Donuts’ executive VP, has been hired as a “special advisor”, tasked with “monetizing” premiums in the US and Europe.
He appears to be functionally replacing Victor Pitts, who was hired as director of premium sales two years ago. Pitts appears to have left the company in January.
MMX, which counts .vip, .law and .luxe among its stable of 32 gTLDs, expects to report premium sales for 2018 of around $2.3 million.
The company has also hired domain consultant Christa Taylor, founder and CEO of dottba, as its new chief marketing officer, a newly created position.
News of the appointments was released as MMX published another preliminary trading update ahead of its final 2018 financial results next month.
Here are some more nuggets from the announcement:

• Total domain registrations so far in 2019 up 38% to 1.84 million compared to a year ago.
• Billings up 129% year-on-year due to contributions from ICM Registry and a 40% increase in sales of .vip and .luxe domains in China.
• ICM’s porn-themed domains are renewing at 91%.
• Integration of .luxe into two more blockchain platforms — NameCoin and XAYA — is underway.

MMX expects to announce its full-year results April 3.

3 Comments Tagged: donuts, dottba, mmx, new gTLDs