eBay’s new slogan looks like a $75,000 domain it doesn’t own

eBay has launched a television and radio advertising campaign featuring a slogan that looks very much like a domain name that the company does not actually own.

The campaign, reportedly eBay’s first global branding campaign in a decade, targets Gen Z customers looking for vintage and second-hand clothing and other goods.

The new slogan is “Things.People.Love”.

While the dots are not vocalized, it sure looks like a domain name.

The domain things.people.love does not currently resolve, but .love is a real TLD and people.love is registered to a domain investor.

It belongs to TopDomains, a portfolio of premium domain names mostly for sale with buy-it-now or lease-to-own prices.

The domain people.love has a BIN of $75,000, peanuts for a company with a market cap of $30 billion.

2 Comments Tagged: .love, ebay

Americans are deserting .com

Forget China, Verisign is now seeing most of its domain sales weakness coming from the US.

The company revealed in its quarterly earnings call last week that .com and .net were down by a combined 1.1 million names in the third quarter, and 850,000 of those losses were from American registrars.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the weakness was a result of US registrars concentrating more on making existing customers more profitable and less on acquiring new customers.

Registrars are raising prices and pushing more secondary market sales, he said. That’s great for the registrars’ bottom lines, but it doesn’t help Verisign shift product.

There were 169.6 million .com and .net domains at the end of Q3, Bidzos said. The Q3 renewal rate is expected to be about 72.3%, compared to 73.5% a year ago.

There was also weakness in China, he said, due to economic factors and regulation. China has frequently been blamed for sales fluctuations in previous weak quarters. Europe was actually up by 200,000 names, Bidzos said.

Verisign now expects domain growth of between -2.9% and -2.3% for the full year, narrowing its forecast from the -3% to -2% it predicted in July and the +1% to -1% predicted at the start of the year.

Higher wholesale prices means the company is still growing, however. Revenue was up 3.8% to $391 million and net income was up from $188 million to $201 million compared to year-ago numbers.

2 Comments Tagged: .com, .net, earnings, financials, verisign

Weak Q3 for the domain universe, Verisign reports

The number of domain names registered worldwide decreased slightly in the third quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The total of 362.3 million domains was down 0.1 million on the quarter. It would have been up had it not been for a 1.1 million decline in the combined .com and .net gTLDs, a pattern we’ve seen for the last several quarters.

.com was down to 156.7 million names from 157.6 million, while .net slipped below 13 million to 12.9 million, Verisign said.

Pre-2012 gTLD domains not including .com and .net were up 100,000 to 17.3 million and ccTLD registrations were up by the same amount to 140.1 million at the end of the quarter, the DNIB says.

New gTLD registrations were up 800,000 to 35.4 million, Verisign said.

1 Comment Tagged: dnib, verisign

ICANN says it WILL raise its domain taxes soon

Prices in all gTLDs will go up after ICANN told registries and registrars last week that it plans to increase the fees it charges them, sometimes called its “tax”, next year.

The extra fee ICANN takes from registrars for each new domain registration and renewal will increase from $0.18 to $0.20, according to an email sent from ICANN VP Russ Weinstein to registrars Thursday evening.

This fee is typically passed on explicitly and directly to registrants in their registrar’s shopping cart.

Less-visible charges on registries will also go up. The fixed quarterly fee will go from $6,250 per quarter ($25,000 per year) to $6,450 per quarter ($25,800 per year) and the per-transaction fee will go up from $0.25 per year to $0.258 per year.

The registry fee changes will take effect January 1, but the registrar fee changes will not take effect until July 1, 2025, the start of ICANN’s next fiscal year, according to ICANN.

“After more than a decade of no changes to registry-level and registrar-level fees, ICANN would like to increase the fees it charges to both parties,” Weinstein wrote.

The two cents tax increase is big in percentage terms — about 11% — while the registry fee is more in line with US inflation at 3.20%.

The fixed registrar accreditation fee is to stay the same at $4,000 per year, while the variable accreditation fee, which is divided between registrars based on their transaction volume, is going up from a total of $3.42 million to $3.8 million per year.

The increases come as ICANN struggles to fill a $10 million hole in its budget — a situation that has already led to layoffs — and some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the combined fee increases are designed to raise annual revenue in that ball-park.

Due to the differences between the standard Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement, ICANN can push through the registry fee increases fairly quickly and unilaterally, while the registrar changes have some red tape.

The two-cent tax increase will be part of ICANN’s usual budget process, which includes a public comment period and consideration by the board of directors, while the variable fee increase will be subject to a registrar vote.

Note: an early, unfinished draft of this post was inadvertently published on Friday, for which I can only apologize.

2 Comments Tagged: budget, ICANN, prices, ra, raa

Senator says domain industry “enables” Russian disinfo attacks

An influential US senator has accused major registries and registrars including GoDaddy and Namecheap of facilitating Russian disinformation campaigns.

Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told registrars that “legislative remedies” may be required unless they “take immediate steps to address the continued abuse of your services for foreign covert influence”.

The threat came in letters sent to registrar groups Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, NewFold Digital, NameSilo, and .com registry Verisign today.

Warner’s letters seem to have been inspired by Facebook owner Meta, perhaps the domain industry’s most prolific antagonist, and align closely with Meta’s views on issues such as cybersquatting and Whois access.

The criticisms also stem from a recent FBI seizure of 32 domains that were being use to proliferate fake news about the invasion of Ukraine and the upcoming US presidential election.

The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, used domains such as fox-news.in and washingtonpost.pm to trick visitor into thinking they were reading news sources they trust.

Warner tells the registrars (pdf) they have “ostensibly facilitated sustained covert influence activity by the Russian Federation and influence networks operating on its behalf”.

The main concern appears to be the lack of access to private information in Whois records. Warner’s list of industry sins includes:

withholding vital domain name registration information from good-faith researchers and digital forensic investigators, ignoring inaccurate registration information submitted by registrants, and failing to identify repeated instances of intentional and malicious domain name squatting used to impersonate legitimate organizations

Warner called for “immediate” action “to address the continued abuse of your services” as the US presidential election looms, and in its aftermath. Voters go to the polls November 5.

1 Comment Tagged: abuse, cloudflare, fake news, godaddy, meta, namecheap, namesilo, newfold digital, verisign

bit.ليبيا? Libya to get its Arabic ccTLD

Libyan ccTLD .ly is to get an Arabic version, ICANN has said.

The TLD is ليبيا. (Arabic reads left to right, so the dot goes at the end), means “Libya”, and the ASCII Punycode that will actually show up in the DNS is .xn--mgbb7fyab.

ICANN said that the string has passed the String Evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track process and is now eligible for delegation.

It’s not entirely clear how long Libya was in the “Fast Track” process, but Wikipedia has records of requests for ليبيا. going back over a decade. That’s not unusual.

But ليبيا. is an unusual, though not unprecedented, case of an IDN ccTLD set to be delegated to a different manager than the existing Latin-script ccTLD’s registry.

The Arabic version is set to go to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics, Regulatory Affairs Directorate, while .ly is delegated to the General Post and Telecommunication Company.

.ly is of course well known on the Anglophone internet as a domain hack, with the best-known registrant probably URL shortening service bit.ly.

Comment Tagged: .xn--mgbb7fyab, ICANN, idn cctld fast track, idns, ly

Verisign gets eight more years running the root

Verisign and ICANN have renewed their deal that sees Verisign run the DNS root, according to the company.

Verisign said the Root Zone Maintainer Agreement was renewed on October 20 for another eight-year term.

The RZMA is basically a technical services contract under which Verisign updates and publishes the root zone file (basically a list of TLDs and their nameservers) according to ICANN’s instructions. All the other root zone operators mirror that file.

It’s the first renewal since ICANN secured its independence from the US government in 2016, but Verisign and its predecessors have been managing the root since 1993.

The deal is separate from Verisign’s contracts to run .com and .net.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, root zone, rzma, verisign

Two-horse race for open ICANN board seat

A Brit and a Canadian have been put forward to fill the seat on the ICANN board of directors that unexpectedly became vacant last month.

The ccNSO-appointed seat 12 was left empty with the abrupt resignation of Katrina Sataki in September.

Now, the ccNSO says two candidates will face election — Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA, and Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet.

The election is not expected to take place until next February, following due diligence and a ccNSO community Q&A with the candidates.

Sataki is European, so a Wenban-Smith win would keep the geographic mix on the board unchanged. A Holland win would tilt the balance towards North America.

Both candidates are men, so the result will not go towards balancing the gender mix. After ICANN 81 next month, there will be one additional woman on the board, but this gain will be reversed when the CEO changes in December.

Comment Tagged: board, ccnso, ICANN

Chinese say internet not ready for single-letter gTLDs

Several major Chinese tech organizations have urged ICANN not to lift its ban on single-character gTLDs, saying the risk of confusion is too great.

Allowing single-character gTLDs in Han script was the most objected-to part of the draft Applicant Guidebook in ICANN’s just-closed public comment period, with the objections all coming from China.

Han script is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. A single character can convey the same semantic impact as a whole multi-character word in European languages.

But the commenters warned that a single character can have multiple meanings, increasing the risk of confusion.

Rui Zhong of the Internet Society of China said for example that the Han character “新” can mean “new” but is also the abbreviation for the Chinese province of Xinjiang and the nation of Singapore.

Lang Wang of CNNIC warned: “the similarities in pronunciation, form, and meaning of Han script single-character gTLD could lead to the risks of phishing, homophone attacks, intellectual property disputes, etc”.

It seems the issue may be a bit more complex than visually identical words having multiple definitions in other languages, with multiple commenters saying that single-character words do not reflect the reality of modern Chinese usage.

1 Comment Tagged: cnnic, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, next round, single-character

Unloved INTA slams ICANN over new gTLDs

The new gTLD program is an existential threat to ICANN if it continues to ignore the concerns of IP interests, according to the International Trademark Association.

Trademark owners are becoming disillusioned with the ICANN process and “instead have opted to pursue more balanced outcomes through regulators, legislatures, and courts”, INTA said in comments on draft new gTLD program rules yesterday.

INTA warned that there has been “a decline in interest in the work of ICANN as otherwise engaged members have determined that there is very little return on the thousands of hours of time that they have devoted to ICANN’s continuous improvement”. It said:

The ICANN Board, Org and review team members would do well to consider the consequences of continuing to ignore the input of non-contracted parties especially when it comes to addressing ongoing harms within the domain name system. At a time when governments are vying to assume more policy oversight over the DNS, ICANN is well positioned to double down on the multistakeholder model by giving serious consideration and adjusting proposed policies in a balanced manner.

ICANN’s refusal to take on board the IP lobby’s suggestions when it added new DNS abuse requirements to its registry and registrar contracts earlier this year seems to be at the root of the outburst.

INTA said that it is “opposed to new [gTLD application] rounds” until “substantial reforms are made to ICANN’s approach to domain abuse and contract compliance”.

The comments were by far the angriest filed in response to the ICANN public comment period, just closed, that sought input on several draft sections of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

Pre-rant, INTA substantively said that the AGB needs to give brand owners and potential dot-brand applicants more clarity on when subsequent application rounds will launch.

Currently, ICANN expects the Next Round’s first wave to kick off in the second quarter of 2026, but subsequent application windows are subject to a checklist of triggering events that on the face of it is a little confusing.

Threats of government intervention undermining the legitimacy of the ICANN multistakeholder model are of course far from new. I’ve been writing about them for 20 years or more.

But the latest INTA threat may ring a little hollow given that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee also filed comments on exactly the same issues, so we know exactly what governments think: they’re totally cool with how the AGB is being drafted, and just seem happy to be involved.

3 Comments Tagged: agb, gac, icann. next round, inta, new gTLDs