Seven domain hacks already registered in Google’s .ing

Some companies are using their trademarks to grab potentially valuable domain hacks in the upcoming .ing gTLD, possibly avoiding having to cough up seven figures for them later on.

There’s about a week left on Google Registry’s .ing sunrise period, but some hacks have already started showing up in the .ing zone file. Not counting those that look like they belong to Google, I count seven so far:

• adapt.ing
• design.ing
• draw.ing
• dumpl.ing
• edit.ing
• giv.ing
• sign.ing

None of them resolve to web sites from where I’m sitting and Whois is pretty much useless nowadays other than to confirm that the registration dates that fell within the .ing sunrise, which began September 20.

edit.ing and sign.ing both have Adobe-owned name servers, which may give an indication of who registered those names.

To get a domain name during sunrise, you don’t necessarily need to have a famous brand, you only need to have a trademark recognized by the ICANN-approved Trademark Clearinghouse.

The trademark string can “cross the dot”, which may be what’s happened in the case of dumpl.ing and giv.ing.

Getting these potentially valuable generic domain hacks is particularly important in the case of .ing, where Google has set ludicrously high fees for its Early Access Period, which follows sunrise on October 31.

As first reported by Domain Name Wire, EAP prices start at $1.1 million retail.

Comment Tagged: eap, google. .ing, sunrise

The first four new gTLDs have been unmitigated disasters

“Arabic ‘Dot Shabaka’ goes online, ‘Dot Com’ era nearing end”.

That was a headline from a Turkish news site in February 2014 when the first Arabic gTLD — شبكة. — went to general availability, having been delegated to the DNS root October 23, 2013, 10 years ago next week.

It was one of the first four gTLDs to go live from ICANN’s 2012 new gTLD application round. At the time, the registry very kindly documented its launch on the pages of this very blog.

A decade on, شبكة. — which transliterates as “dot shabaka” — has just 670 registered domains, a 2015 peak of 2,093 names, and barely any active web sites of note. The registrar arm of the registry that runs it, GoDaddy, doesn’t even support it.

شبكة. is the Arabic for “.web”. The dot goes to the right because Arabic is read right-to-left. A full domain looks like this فيمأمنمنالألغام.شبك in your address bar but in the DNS, the TLD is represented by the Punycode .xn--ngbc5azd.

Given the Latin-script version of .web auctioned off for $135 million, and that there are 274 million Arabic speakers in the world, you might expect there to be a thirsty market for dot shabaka domains.

Nope.

It added about 2,000 domains in its first three months, crept up to 2,093 over the next two years, and has been on the decline pretty much consistently ever since. It has 40 accredited registrars, but only 21 of those have any domains under management.

Notably, GoDaddy has zero dot shabaka names under management, despite GoDaddy Registry being the official registry due to a string of consolidation ending with its acquisition of Neustar’s registry business over three years ago.

Its largest registrar is Dynadot, which seems to have a pretty responsive, intuitive storefront for non-Latin domain names.

Doing a site search on Google reveals the registry’s NIC site as the top hit — never a good sign — and a first page dominated by broken, misconfigured, and junk sites. An anti-landmine organization and a reputation management service are among the legit sites that show up.

One of the first-page results is actually in Japanese, a page declaring “ドメイン「المهوس.شبكة」は、日本語では、「オタク.ネット」という意味です。” or “The domain ‘المهوس.شبكة’ means ‘otaku.net’ in Japanese.” (per Google Translate).

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the demand for Arabic script names. If a reasonably priced, .com-competitive, god-tier gTLD such as “.web” is a backwater neglected even by its own registry, what does that say about any long-tail internationalized domain name gTLDs that might be applied for in the next ICANN application round?

We don’t have to wait until then to get a sense, however. Dot shabaka was one of four gTLDs delegated on the same October 2013 day, and the others haven’t fared much better. The other three were:

• .xn--unup4y (.游戏) — means “.games” in Chinese. Operated by Identity Digital (formerly Donuts).
• .xn--80aswg (.сайт) — means “.site” in several Cyrillic languages, including Russian. Operated by CORE Association.
• .xn--80asehdb (.онлайн) — means “.online” in several Cyrillic languages, including Russian. Also operated by CORE Association.

You might expect .游戏 to do quite well. There are over a billion Chinese speakers in the world and gaming is a popular pastime in the country, but this TLD is doing even worse than dot shabaka.

While it was a day-one delegation, Identity Digital didn’t actually start selling .游戏 domains until early 2017, so it’s had a shorter amount of time to build up to the pitiful 318 domains recorded in the last registry transaction report. While its DUM number is lumpy over time, there’s an overall upward trend.

Compare to Latin-script .games (also Identity Digital) which had over 48,000 domains at the last count. Even comparing to premium-priced and XYZ-operated .game (Chinese isn’t big on plurals), which had 4,227 names, is unfavorable.

The two decade-old Cyrillic gTLDs aren’t doing much better, despite there being 255 million Russian-speakers in the world.

While .онлайн (“.online”) has a relatively decent 2,340 domains, the English version, run by Radix, has 2,732,653 domains. The Russian “.site” (.сайт) has just 829 domains, compared to Radix’s English version, which has 1,501,721.

The major Russia-based registrars, while they are understandably the biggest sellers of Cyrillic gTLD domains, are actually selling far more of their Latin-script, English-language equivalents.

Reg.ru, for example, has 99,716 .site domains under management, but just 249 in .сайт. It has 188,125 .online domains — where it is the fourth-largest registrar — but just 918 in .онлайн.

While there are certainly supply-side problems, such as the problem of Universal Acceptance, I suspect the abject failures of these four IDN gTLDs to gain traction over the last decade, despite their first-mover advantages, is based at least equally on a lack of demand.

ICANN has made UA — particularly with regards IDNs — one of its top priorities for the next new gTLD application round. Supporting a multilingual internet is one of the CEO’s goals for the current fiscal year.

But it had the same goals in the 2012 round too. The reason the first four to be delegated were IDNs was because IDN applicants, in act of what we’d probably call “virtue signalling” nowadays, were given priority in the lottery that decided the order in which they were processed.

Second time lucky?

1 Comment Tagged: ..游戏, .ua, .xn--80asehdb, .xn--80aswg, .xn--ngbc5azd, .xn--unup4y, .онлайн, .сайт, dotshabaka, godaddy, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, شبكة

Team Internet hires Nominet alum as domains CEO

Team Internet, formerly CentralNic, has named Simon McCalla as CEO of its domains-related business.

McCalla is formerly CTO of .uk registry Nominet, though he’s been taking a break from the domains industry for the last few years.

Team Internet said he is now CEO of its “Online” division, which I can only assume is the business it previously called “Online Presence”.

That’s the division encompassing the company’s registrars, registries and back-end business, as opposed to the traffic arbitrage business where it makes most of its money nowadays.

Comment Tagged: nominet, team internet

XYZ adds 35th gTLD to its stable

XYZ has acquired .ceo, making its portfolio of new gTLDs now 35-strong.

XYZ, judging by a blog post and press release, seems to the sticking to the original use case of yourname.ceo, highlighting a couple of CEOs that are using .ceo as their primary domain. But it seems that many of the .ceo domains with Google juice are generics.

The former registry was CEOTLD of Australia, originally affiliated with social media wannabe PeopleBrowsr.

When the gTLD launched a decade ago the plan was to issue registrants with their own template calling card style web sites, but the idea never really caught on.

.ceo had 3,789 domains at the end of June, according to the latest registry reports. GoDaddy and Namecheap were its largest registrars.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, ceo, new gTLDs, xyz.com

Wood company scraps its dot-brand

A Swedish wood-products company has become the latest company to ask ICANN to terminate its dot-brand gTLD registry agreement.

Svenska Cellulosa AB, which Wikipedia tells me makes almost $2 billion a year selling paper and wood pulp, is dumping .sca, which it has never used.

While ICANN will not transition the gTLD to another operator, there are plenty of other organizations in the world using the same abbreviation, so the string itself could show up in the root again in future.

The TLD was managed by Valideus on a Verisign back-end. Verisign is getting out of the dot-brand back-end business.

Assuming SCA’s request is not withdrawn, it will become the 120th dot-brand to self-terminate.

Comment Tagged: .sca, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs

Freenom gets yet another ICANN breach notice

ICANN Compliance is really up in Freenom’s face now, filing yet another contract-breach notice against its registrar arm barely a week after the last one.

The September 29 notice adds three new tickets to the 12 in the September 20 notice I wrote about last month. It’s the sixth notice OpenTLD has received since 2015.

The cases are similar to those in the previous missive. ICANN wants proof that the registrar has been complying with the Transfer Policy and the Expired Registration Recovery Policy.

It seems some Freenom customers have had difficulty transferring their names out of the company’s control, and have been unable to restore their domains after accidentally allowing them to expire.

It still also owes ICANN past-due fees, the notice reiterates.

The notice covers complaints from June and July. The company has until October 20 to comply or risk losing its accreditation. The claims in the earlier notice give it until October 11.

Freenom is the company that runs a dwindling collection of free-to-register ccTLDs, notably .tk. It has not allowed registrations on its site all year, blaming technical issues. It’s also being sued by Facebook owner Meta over alleged cybersquatting.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, freenom, ICANN, opentld

Did Andrew Tate buy university.com for a “record-breaking” sum?

The category-killer domain name university.com appears to have been sold to the world’s biggest douchebag, Andrew Tate.

According to a press release from last-but-one owner VPN.com, the domain changed hands last month for “an undisclosed, but record-breaking amount”. The buyer, according to the release, is The Real World, and the seller is an individual name Syed Hussaini.

The Real World is Andrew Tate’s alleged pyramid scheme in which users pay $50 a month for access to tutorials on subjects such as online content creation, cryptocurrency, drop-shipping, and marketing.

It looks like your basic get-rich-quick scam, with testimonials from alleged members bragging about making tens of thousands of dollars a month.

The domain university.com currently leads to the same offering as therealworld.co on a redesigned site. The Real World was in turn the second iteration of Tate’s Hustler’s University offering, which shut down last year.

The Real World’s app was banned from Apple’s App Store last month due to claims it is an illegal pyramid scheme and is used to spread misogynistic views.

If the domain sale was indeed a “record-breaker” — and I don’t think the source is 100% reliable in this case — it would have to have topped the $30 million paid for voice.com back in 2019.

Tate could probably afford it. If his scheme does in fact have 200,000 subscribers at $50 a month, he’s pulling in $120 million a year.

If you’ve never heard of Tate — lucky you — he’s a former kickboxer and social media influencer best known for turning a generation of teenage boys into misogynists. He’s currently out on bail in Romania following charges of sex trafficking and rape, which he denies.

13 Comments Tagged: andrew tate, university.com

After Verisign’s sluggish year, ICANN misses funding goal by $2 million

ICANN’s fiscal 2023 revenue came in $2 million light when compared to its budget, the annual report published today shows.

The Org blamed lower-than-expected transaction fees for the shortfall, suggesting the domain industry wasn’t quite as buoyant as its accountants had hoped.

Funding for the year came in at $150 million against a budgeted target of $152 million.

The period covered is July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, a period in which Verisign — ICANN’s biggest contributor by some margin — repeatedly lowered its revenue estimates from .com and .net sales.

This is not a coincidence. The two outfits’ fates are intertwined. Verisign funded ICANN to the tune of $49.7 million from its legacy gTLD business in FY23, up only slightly from $49.5 million in FY22.

Overall, ICANN said that its revenue from registry transactions was $60 million versus its budget estimate of $62 million, and that registrar transactions revenue was $39 million versus its $41 million estimate.

Other registrar fees and registry fixed fees seem to have come in a bit ahead of budget, and rounding accounts for the fact that the numbers don’t make prima facie sense.

ICANN said its expenses for the year came in $10 million lower than expected, at $142 million, due to lower professional services and personnel costs. Its travel expenses were $2 million more than expected, it seems due to the Washington DC meeting being more expensive than planned.

Comment Tagged: budget, funding, ICANN, revenue

Russia cuts off ICANN funding after pro-Ukraine stance

Russia did not pay its usual annual tribute to ICANN in the Org’s fiscal 2023, newly published funding data reveals.

Coordination Center for TLD RU usually funnels $50,000 a year into ICANN’s budget, but that was reduced to nothing in the year to June 30, 2023, according to ICANN’s FY23 annual report, published today.

While it could of course be a coincidence, I rather suspect it’s retaliation for ICANN’s overt support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion last year.

ccTLD.ru counts the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media as one of its “founding members”.

ICANN donated $1 million to the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster, a relief organization, to support Ukrainians affected by the war, and gave the Ukrainian government a platform to denounce the war at a public meeting.

Later last year, ICANN also lobbied against the Russian candidate for ITU secretary general.

The .ru registry was not the only ccTLD operator to slash funding in FY23.

Belgium already said it would cut its donation from $75,000 to $25,000 in protest at “mission creep” and perceived failures to deal with privacy regulations, and the annual report shows it made good on its threat.

But it seems to have been joined by the Netherlands and Denmark, which cut their contributions respectively by $45,000 to $180,000 and by $30,800 to $30,000. Slovenia halved its donation to $5,000.

Overall, ccTLD contributions were down $176,535 to $2,214,240.

ICANN’s bean-counters probably won’t be losing any sleep over the decline; the Org’s overall funding was $150 million in the year.

Comment Tagged: .ru, cctld.ru, funding, ICANN

Epik drops another 50,000 domains after scandal

Epik lost almost 50,000 domains under management in June, dropping below half a million domains for the first time since 2019, according to just-published registry transaction reports.

The registrar ended the month with 461,822 DUM, down from 511,028 in May and an August 2022 peak of 808,160.

The transfer exodus continued in the month, which was the first month Epik was operating under new management, having paid off most of its debts following its financial scandal.

The company saw a net transfer figure of -24,789 domains, with only 667 inbound transfers.

Newly registered domains recovered slightly, moving back into four figures after a couple of months, ending June at 3,391, still a long way off pre-scandal levels.

1 Comment Tagged: epik