.ai sells 100,000 domains in a year

The registry managing the .ai ccTLD grew its business by over 100,000 domains in the last 12 months, according to its web site.

The company that manages the domain for the Government of Anguilla, DataHaven.net, typically does not disclose its reg numbers — its plain text web site is extremely bare bones and it lets its registrars do the marketing — but that changed when it recently updated its FAQ with the lines:

What is the total number of domains?
As of July 20, 2022 the total was 143,737 domains.
As of June 14, 2023 the total is 248,609 domains.

According to a Bloomberg interview this week, the number is now 287,432. It seems the rise of ChatGPT, which launched at the end of last year, and large language model AIs has spurred interest in the domain.

Bloomberg reckons .ai may account for 10% of Anguila’s GDP. The Caribbean British territory has a population of just 16,000 and makes most of its money from tourism and offshore banking.

Comment Tagged: ai, datahaven

Google to launch two fun new gTLDs next month

Google Registry is continuing its piecemeal rollout of new gTLDs with the launch of .ing and .meme this September.

Both TLDs will go to sunrise for a month from September 20, with general availability from December 5.

While both will have more-expensive Early Access Period phases, .meme is also getting a Limited Registration Period where “only content creation platforms specializing in the creation and distribution of internet memes may apply”.

While .meme is a pretty self-explanatory regular TLD with standard amount of long-tail potential, I think .ing might be the first TLD ever to launch with domain hacks as the primary envisaged use case.

Google gave “design.ing or writ.ing, ink.ing or row.ing” as potential domains.

There are a finite number of English verbs that would work well with a .ing suffix, potentially limiting registrations. I doubt the TLD will pass the 50,000 name threshold at which ICANN starts charging transaction fees, unless some other use cases are found.

1 Comment Tagged: .ing, .meme, google, launch, sunrise

Domainers not welcome as .music readies September launch

The long-awaited .music gTLD finally has a set of launch dates, but it looks like actually registering and keeping hold of a name is going to be painful, especially for domain investors.

DotMusic has filed its registry launch plans with ICANN, kicking off with a two-month sunrise period on September 11. General availability seems to be slated for April 9 next year.

Before the floodgates open, there’s going to be a “Community Organization Phase” from October 16 to March 10. Judging by registry policy documents, this phase looks like an extended sunrise for “music community” members that may not necessarily qualify for regular sunrise.

It looks like applying during this phase will be free, but there will be auctions for contested names.

At all stages including GA, it looks like people will be able to register .music names as usual via registrars, but then DotMusic will carry out a post-registration check that the registrant has sufficiently high musical street cred and the name closely matches their brand.

It will delete registrations that fail to meet these criteria. Indeed, it does not consider names truly “registered” until they have past these verification checks.

The registry has come up with something called a “Music Score” — I don’t know whether that’s an intentional pun — to determine whether a registrant is eligible for a .music domain.

It’s not really clear whether this is a numerical score with a pass/fail threshold, but calculating it requires the registrant to submit evidence of intellectual property, awards, social media activity, streams, and so on — 73 categories in total.

Registrants also have to demonstrate a nexus to their domain, so Napalm Death couldn’t register justinbieber.music, for example.

These verifications will be handled by a third-party company called ID.music (the domain does not currently resolve) which is also based in DotMusic’s home nation of Cyprus.

If all of this palaver isn’t enough to deter casual registrants and domainers, there’s a strict prohibition on “domain warehousing”. The policy states “the buying and holding of MTLD domain names as assets for resale, especially in bulk is prohibited”.

Record companies will be able to register their acts in bulk, if they’re approved by DotMusic, but domainers are not welcome.

The policy also bans privacy/proxy services.

2 Comments Tagged: .music, dotmusic, launch, sunrise

Another six dot-brands self-terminate (two are very strange)

Three companies have asked ICANN to turn off a total of six dot-brand gTLDs. Two each.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings no longer wants to run .cityeats and .frontdoor, Paramount-owned CBS Domains wants out of .cbs and .showtime, and chocolate maker Ferrero wants rid of .kinder and .rocher.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lifestyle Domains is done with .cityeats and .frontdoor, given that they were never used. What is surprising is that the brands themselves have been defunct for many, many years.

The registry was a part of Scripps Networks, an American cable TV company that owned HGTV and the Food Network. It’s now part of Warner Bros Discovery. CityEats.com and FrontDoor.com were part of its online empire.

But both sites were sold off to third parties in 2015 — the same year Lifestyle signed its two registry agreements with ICANN. In the case of .cityeats, the brand seems to have been sold off months before the contract was signed.

The registry appears to have been paying ICANN $50,000 a year for two TLDs is has absolutely no need for — it owned the dot-brands but not the matching brands. Very weird.

The case of CBS is little more typical. The company has three active domains in .cbs — one just a redirect to a privacy policy — and none in .showtime. It’s a case of not knowing what to do with the TLDs.

The Ferrero case is similar — the domains were not used and the company doesn’t want them any more.

I’ll give the chocolatier honesty points for the message on both nic. sites, which basically admits they were defensive registrations: “This domain is registered and protected by BARBERO & Associates Ltd”.

As both of these strings are non-English dictionary words, they could come up for grabs in the next round. “Kinder” is German for “children”, so it’s not impossible someone might want it as kid-focused generic.

Comment Tagged: .cbs, .cityeats, .frontdoor, .kinder, .rocher, .showtime, dot-brands, ICANN, termination

Four more years for Identity Digital in Oz

Identity Digital has won another fours years as .au registry back-end provider.

Australian ccTLD manager auDA said the reappointment was decided after an open Request for Tender process that started in May.

It’s not clear how many other registries responded, but there’s a limited pool of companies that have a proven track record of handling such a large zone.

When .au moved from Neustar (now part of GoDaddy) to Afilias (now part of Identity Digital) in 2018 it was the largest back-end migration in the history of the DNS.

Back then, .au had 3.1 million domains under management. Now, following the release of second-level names last year, it’s closer to 4.3 million. Another migration would have been another record-breaker.

auDA said dentity Digital’s next four-year contract begins July 1 next year, with a two-year extension option.

Comment Tagged: auda, identity digital

ICANN might be a director light after election stalemate

Months of internecine bickering have led to ICANN facing the possibility that it might enter its 25th anniversary meeting this October without a properly elected director in one seat of the board.

Chair Tripti Sinha has written to (pdf) the heads of the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group and Commercial Stakeholder Group — and then published the letter, no doubt to light a fire under their arses — to demand they name their candidate for Seat 14 on the board.

The name was due under ICANN’s bylaws by April 26, which is six months before the Hamburg AGM, she said.

Without an appointment, any newly picked director won’t be able to participate in training and meetings to help them hit the ground running at the conclusion of ICANN 78’s AGM, she said.

Seat 14 is selected by the Non-Contracted Parties House. That’s every participant in the GNSO that is not a registry or registrar. It comprises the NCSG and CSG. The incumbent director is Matthew Shears, first picked in 2017.

The CSG has made it clear that it does not want Shears, the NCSG’s initially preferred candidate, reappointed for a third term. It seems the group is unhappy with his performance. It has also rejected alternate Rafik Dammak.

The NCSG meanwhile rejected CSG preference Mark Datysgeld, saying he lacks ICANN experience.

The problem seems to be election rules (pdf) agreed to by the two SGs in 2018 that requires them to reach a “consensus” on a candidate, which can be difficult when by definition they have two fundamentally opposing policy goals.

There may also be confusion about whose “turn” it is to pick a candidate. As the names of the SGs suggests, the two groups represent diametrically opposed interests, so there’s been an informal agreement to rotate nominations between the SGs. The question is whether NCSG/Shears’ turn has ended, or whether he gets the full nine years.

Eight months after the NCPH leaders started to discuss Seat 14, there appears to be four candidates currently under consideration, albeit only at the very early interview phase of the process.

The CSG has put forward Khaled Koubaa and Ihab Osman as candidates. The names are notable as they’re both previous ICANN directors who each served a single term as Nominating Committee appointees (until 2019 and 2022 respectively).

The NCSG has picked “ICANN Policy Ninja” Amr Elsadr and Chris Buckridge, a policy guy from the Regional Internet Registry world, as its two nominees.

With three Africans in the mix, there’s a possibility that next year’s NomCom may have more freedom than usual when trying to fill its geographic diversity quota. None of the slate are female.

Right now, with voting not yet underway, it seems the chances of the two SGs settling on a consensus candidate before Sinha’s end-of-August deadline are close to zero.

ICANN’s general counsel John Jeffrey wrote to (pdf) the NCPH heads back in May to remind them that their nomination was a month late and that any failure to pick a new director before the AGM would lead to Shears retaining the role while his successor is picked (assuming he wants the gig).

There seems to be some concern among ICANN’s top brass that the deadlock within the NCPH — caused, as so many ICANN conflicts are, by a failure to compromise — might reflect badly on ICANN and the multistakeholder model in general.

Yup.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

ICANN turns down money from blockchain alt-root

It seems ICANN is turning down free money from blockchain alt-root providers, apparently as a matter of principle.

We hear one such alt-root, Freename.io, tried to sponsor the upcoming ICANN 78 meeting in Hamburg, but was rebuffed.

“At this time, ICANN is not interested in having Freename serve as a sponsor and will not be moving forward with a sponsorship agreement,” the Org told the company in an unsigned email.

Freename had offered to be a general sponsor, and not at the cheapest tier, I’m told.

ICANN sponsorship offers typically start in the low thousands but can get up to six figures at the higher tiers. Sponsorship is overall a very small part of ICANN’s revenue.

Org has become increasingly rattled in recent years with the proliferation of alt-roots, which have been gradually gaining market acceptance while ICANN’s own efforts to expand the domain universe languish in interminable policy knots.

ICANN delayed the sale of the UNR portfolio of gTLDs until buyers renounced their ownership rights to blockchain versions of their authoritative root strings.

Clearly, splashing an alt-root’s branding all over an ICANN stage would be seen as problematic.

Freename.io plans to attend the Hamburg meeting anyway.

1 Comment Tagged: alt-roots, blockchain, crypto, freename.io, hamburg, ICANN, icann 78

CentralNic chief calls on industry to tackle climate change

CentralNic CEO Michael Riedl is calling on his counterparts at other large domain name registries and registrars to meet up to coordinate the industry’s response to climate change.

During a broad keynote at the London Domain Summit this morning, Riedl said that each domain company is too small to make an impact on the industry’s carbon footprint individually, and that coordination is needed.

He said the industry’s carbon footprint is currently “relatively reasonable” but said “we need to get it down to zero… together I’m pretty sure we can make an impact”.

Speaking to DI shortly after his speech, Riedl said he will soon invite industry leaders to a climate change “summit” in Hamburg, Germany, to coincide with ICANN’s 78th public meeting.

He said the domain industry needs to coordinate and standardize its approach to emissions, following the leads of other industries such as automotive.

He said he hoped he could get the CEOs of the big domain companies — he named Verisign and GoDaddy, who rarely send their CEOs to ICANN meetings — to show up.

Planning for the meeting is in the very early stages and Riedl said he has not spoken publicly about the initiative until today’s speech.

2 Comments Tagged: centralnic, climate change, hamburg, ICANN, icann 78

London Domain Summit starts tomorrow

The second London Domain Summit is to kick off tomorrow, August 22, with a two-day agenda blending domain investor and local domain policy themes.

The conference, at the Hilton London Metropole, is being organized by founder Helmuts Meskonis, who also owns two popular domainer forums: DNForum and AcornDomains.

Registration is available on the door and currently costs £50 for the two days.

It’s a single-track agenda, so nobody’s going to have to choose between sessions they find interesting.

I will be attending.

On the policy side of things, the highlights are a Q&A with Nominet director Kieren McCarthy, who was elected by members last year following hustings at the inaugural Summit, and a separate session with the UK government’s representative to ICANN, Nigel Hickson.

Two of this year’s three Nominet director candidates — Steven Wright and Thomas Rickert — will debate during the final session of the conference on Wednesday. The third, rejected candidate, Jim Davies, may well be in the audience. Andrew Bennett of Netistrar moderates.

There’s also going to be a panel on “Web3” domains — presumably meaning blockchain-based alt-roots — hosted by sponsor Freename.io.

A few sessions are set to focus on opportunities in other regions — namely the Middle East, Africa and China.

The domainer-oriented sessions cover the usual topics of monetization and premium sales with speakers from the likes of Sedo, CentralNic, BrandForce and IT.com. Not exactly my wheelhouse, but there’s nothing on the agenda that looks uninteresting and I anticipate checking out most sessions.

That said, if any fellow attendees fancy a hallway chat or a coffee or want to smash my face in or whatever, feel free to collar a fatter, grayer, shagged-out version of whatever photos you’ve previously seen of me, or slide into my DMs.

UPDATE — this post was updated August 24 to correct the number of candidates in this year’s Nominet election. Apologies to David Thornton, the candidate I neglected to mention, who did not participate.

Comment Tagged: london domain summit

Closed generics ban likely to remain after another policy group failure

Closed generic gTLDs are likely off the table for ICANN’s next application round, after a secretive policy development working group failed to reach a consensus on how they could be permitted.

The chairs of the ALAC-GAC-GNSO Facilitated Dialogue on Closed Generic gTLDs have put their names to a draft letter that essentially throws in the towel and recommends ICANN sticks to the status quo in which closed generics are not permitted.

The chairs of the three committees write that they “believe that it is not necessary to resolve the question of closed generic gTLDs as a dependency for the next round of new gTLDs, and we plan to inform the ICANN Board accordingly.”

In other words, whatever latency related to needing a closed generics policy that was built in to ICANN’s recent April 2026 target for opening the next application round could be eliminated from the timeline.

The three chairs added (emphasis in original PDF):

We agree with the ICANN Board (in its original invitation to the GAC and the GNSO to engage in a facilitated dialogue) that this topic is one for community policy work, rather than a decision for the Board. As such and based on our collective belief that there is neither the need nor the community bandwidth to conduct additional work at this stage, we also plan to ask that, for the next round, the Board maintain the position that, unless and until there is a community-developed consensus policy in place, any applications seeking to impose exclusive registry access for “generic strings” to a single person or entity and/or that person’s or entity’s Affiliates (as defined in Section 2.9(c) of the Registry Agreement) should not proceed. Finally, we also plan to inform the Board that any future community policy work on this topic should be based on the good work that has been done to date in this facilitated dialogue.

But that position — still a draft — is already facing some push-back from community members who disagree about what the current status quo actually is.

The 2012 application round opened up with the assumption that closed generics were A-okay, and it received hundreds of such applications.

But the governments of the GAC, no doubt stirred by competition concerns, balked when they saw big companies had applied for gTLD strings that could enable them to dominate their markets.

The GAC demanded that closed generics must service the public interest if they were to be permitted, so ICANN Org — in what would turn out to be an Original Sin injected into the destiny of future rounds — retroactively changed the rules, essentially banning closed generics but allowing applicants to withdraw for a refund or open up their proposed registration policies.

The third option was to defer their applications to a future application round, by which point it was assumed the community would have established a closed generics policy. No applicant took that option.

But making that policy was the job of a committee called SubPro, but when turned its attention to the issue, entrenched positions among volunteers took hold and no consensus could be found. It couldn’t even agree what the status quo was. The group wound up punting the issue to the ICANN board.

The discussion moved on last year when ICANN decided to launch the “Facilitated Dialogue”, forcing the GAC and the GNSO to the negotiating table in last-ditch attempt to put the issue to bed for good.

Ironically, it was the 2013 GAC advice — made at time when the governments drafted their advice in secret and were deliberately ambiguous in their output — that killed off closed generics for a decade that ICANN used to reopen the issue. The GAC hadn’t wanted a blanket ban, after all, it just wanted to mandate a “public interest” benefit.

The assumption was that the Facilitated Dialogue would come up with something in-between a ban and a free-for-all, but what it actually seems to have come up with is a return to the status quo and disagreement about what the status quo even is.

It really is one of those situations where ICANN, in its broadest definition, can’t see to find its ass with two hands and a flashlight (and — if you’ll indulge me — a map, GPS coordinates, and a Sherpa).

2 Comments Tagged: closed generics, facilitated dialogue, gac, gnso, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round