Three millionth .it name registered

Italian ccTLD .it has topped three million domains for the first time, according to registry Registro.it.
The milestone name was abbigliamentoludica.it, seemingly a clothes shop. It appears to have been registered November 25.
The registry announced the news in English last week.
It appears that growth is slowing somewhat over the long term. The ccTLD hit one million in 2005 and two million in 2010, but it’s taken six years to get to the next big landmark.
.it seems to have started the year with 2,869,010 domains under management, according to its stats page.
It currently has 3,002,135 domains under management, according to the web site.

Comment Tagged: .it, cctld, registro.it

Survey says most Whois records “accurate”

Ninety-seven percent of Whois records contain working email addresses and/or phone numbers, according to the results of an ongoing ICANN survey.
The organization yesterday published the second of its now-biannual WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System reports, a weighty document stuffed with facts and figures about the reliability of Whois records.
It found, not for the first time, that the vast majority of Whois records are not overtly fake.
Email addresses and phone numbers found there almost always work, the survey found, and postal addresses for the most part appear to be real postal addresses.
The survey used a sample of 12,000 domains over 664 gTLDs. It tested for two types of accuracy: “syntactical” and “operability”.
Syntactical testing just checks, for example, whether the email address has an @ symbol in it and whether phone numbers have the correct number of digits.
Operability testing goes further, actually phoning and emailing the Whois contacts to see if the calls connect and emails don’t bounce back.
For postal addresses, the survey uses third-party software to see whether the address actually exists. No letters are sent.
The latest survey found that 97% of Whois records contain at least one working phone number or email address, “which implies that nearly all records contain information that can be used to establish immediate contact.”
If you’re being more strict about how accurate you want your records, the number plummets dramatically.
Only 65% of records had operable phone, email and postal contact info in each of the registrant, administrative and technical contact fields.
Regionally, fully accurate Whois was up to 77% in North America but as low as 49.5% in Africa.
So it’s not great news if Whois accuracy is your bugbear.
Also, the survey does not purport to verify that the owners of the contact information are in fact the true registrants, only that the information is not missing, fake or terminally out-of-date.
A Whois record containing somebody else’s address and phone number and a throwaway webmail address would be considered “accurate” for the survey’s purposes.
The 54-page survey can be found over here.

Comment Tagged: accuracy, ICANN, whois

Buy a $10k .club, get a free T-shirt

.CLUB Domains will today release 9,200 previously reserved .club names into the channel at premium prices.
The registry is also offering free T-shirts to the first 500 people to purchase a premium name for $59.99 and more, personalized with said name.
While the names will become available at 1500 UTC today, the full list is not expected to be published until midnight UTC at landrush.club
CMO Jeff Sass gave the following list of examples of names to be released: watches.club, vino.club, ocean.club, elite.club, driving.club, comicbook.club, Chinese.club and gambling.club.
A thousand of the names are three-character strings.
The first-year prices are suggest at between $100 and $10,000 at the retail level, Sass said.
All premium names renew at standard-name pricing, he said.
The T-shirt offer requires the user to tweet using promotional hashtags and expires December 31.

1 Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, premium, reserved

ICANN picks Madrid for next gTLD industry meeting

ICANN’s Global Domains Division has invited the domain industry to Madrid for next year’s GDD Industry Summit.
The meeting will be held at the drably named NH Collection Madrid Eurobuilding hotel from May 8 to 11 2017.
The timing may be fortuitous for intercontinental travelers — it ends just a couple of days before the Domaining Europe event starts in Berlin, which is just a short flight away.
ICANN summits are intersessional meetings dedicated to particular constituencies within the ICANN community. The GDD Industry Summit caters to registries, registrars and others in the business of selling gTLD domains.
They’re less formal that ICANN’s regular public meetings, designed to enable engagement between participants and between participants and ICANN staff.
The 2016 meeting was held in Amsterdam this June, attracting about 400 attendees.
ICANN’s formal public meetings next year are slated for Copenhagen (March), Johannesburg (June) and Abu Dhabi (October).

Comment Tagged: domaining europe, gdd, ICANN, summit

ICANN 57 brings in thousands of noobs

ICANN 57 set new records in terms of attendance, with a large majority of participants total newbies who’d never been to an ICANN meeting before.
The meeting, held in Hyderabad, India last month, had 3,182 attendees, and first-timers outnumbered veterans over two-to-one.
The previous record was 3,115 total participants, set at ICANN 50 in London two years ago.
Over two thirds of participants — 2,180 people or 68% of the total — were noobs, according to ICANN statistics released last night (pdf).
That compares to 344 newcomers at the abbreviated June meeting in Helsinki.
The massive turnout in November appears to be due to huge local interest.
Over 72% of attendees — 2,306 people — were from the Asia-Pacific region. ICANN does not break down attendance by nationality, but I suspect the large majority will have been Indian.
Only 200 people from Asia-Pac showed up in Helsinki.
Of the Asia-Pacific participants in Hyderabad, 2,056 were first-time attendees.
For context, there were hundreds more first-time Asia-Pac participants in Hyderabad than there were total attendees at the Helsinki meeting, when 1,436 people showed up.
There were also slightly more Asia-Pac attendees at ICANN 57 than total attendees at ICANN 55 in Marrakech this March.
The significant local interest appears to have tilted the gender balance in favor of men, who represented 74% of the total. Women were 20%. The remainder did not disclose their sex.
That compares to 61% and 32% in Helsinki.
UPDATE: This story was updated with better gender mix data a few hours after publication.

4 Comments Tagged: hyderabad, ICANN, icann 57

Spot all the Easter eggs in this Radix mannequin viral [NSFW]

Domain registry Radix has shamelessly jumped on the “mannequin challenge” meme bandwagon, with the release of video plugging its forthcoming .fun gTLD.
It’s quite slickly produced, on the face of it shot in a single unbroken take (though I suspect there are a few edits hidden in the motion blur), but the real fun for me, as someone who’s obviously been working alone from his mother’s basement for the last decade, is having a nosey around the office of a modern tech company.
Radix, it seems, names its meeting rooms after Harry Potter characters and festoons its walls with inspirational quotes from self-help books.

There are a few visual gags too. One employee has hit the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels, presumably celebrating the wish-fulfilling sales figures we see on another’s monitor.
Another seems to be trying to offload a stack of banned Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes on a colleague. Topical satire, kids!
Did you spot anything else amusing?
NB: If you’re wondering why a respectable company would produce a video backed with profane, sexist and sexually explicit lyrics, a young person I know assures me that using Rae Sremmurd’s chart-topper “Black Beatles” as the soundtrack is a standard component of the mannequin challenge meme.
UPDATE: Seems Key-Systems has done one too.

Comment Tagged: .fun, radix

GoDaddy will pay $1.79 billion for HEG in major Euro expansion

GoDaddy is to substantially increase the size of its European operation with the $1.79 billion acquisition of Host Europe Group.
The market-leading registrar confirmed yesterday earlier reports that it was on track to buy HEG, which counts several big-name British and German registrars among its brands.
The deal is worth €1.69 billion ($1.79 billion), which breaks down to €605 million to HEG shareholders and €1.08 billion in debt. It’s expected to close in the second quarter next year.
HEG’s domain brands include 123Reg and DomainMonster in the UK and DomainFactory in Germany.
The company says it has 1.7 million customers and manages over seven million domains.
But the acquisition is more concerned with HEG’s higher-margin small business hosting business, where the company has nine data centers in Europe and the US.
GoDaddy said in a press release:

Combining GoDaddy’s global technology platform with HEG’s footprint in Europe will enable the rapid deployment of a broader range of products to customers and allow for better scale of product development and go-to-market investments across both companies.

One part of the HEG business, the $92 million-a-year PlusServer, is likely to be sold off, however.
GoDaddy said that unit “serves larger, more mature companies that require a dedicated field sales force and account management”, which is not GoDaddy’s core strength.
The deal means that GoDaddy will become the owner of the annual NamesCon conference, which HEG picked up in August for an undisclosed amount.
The acquisition is unlikely to have closed before this coming January’s NamesCon, so there’s unlikely to be many obvious changes to the 2017 event.
GoDaddy said the acquisition is being financed by debt.
HEG’s current owner is private equity firm Cinven, which paid $545 million in 2013.

Comment Tagged: 123-reg, acquisition, godaddy, heg, host europe group

.xyz, .club and .vip get the nod to sell in China

The Chinese government has granted licenses to operate in the country to its first tranche of new gTLDs — .vip, .club and .xyz.
The agreements mean that Chinese registrars will be able to give their Chinese customers the ability to actually use their domains for web sites.
It also means the companies will be obliged to censor domains the government does not like, but only those domains registered via Chinese registrars.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the licenses, given to the Chinese subsidiaries of Minds + Machines, .CLUB Domains and XYZ.com respectively, today.
M+M CEO Toby Hall told DI that it’s “a great moment of support for Chinese registrars”, giving them a “very clear signal about which TLDs they can focus on”.
XYZ.com said in a blog post that some of its Chinese registrars (its biggest channel) are planning on offering discounts to celebrate the approval.
It’s always been possible for Chinese people to register new gTLD domains via Chinese registrars — it’s estimated that 42% of the 27 million new gTLD domains in existence today are Chinese-owned.
However, Chinese citizens need a government license if they want to launch a web site, and the government only issues licenses for domains in approved TLDs.
In addition to .cn and China-based gTLDs, which were the first to be given the nod, Verisign was approved earlier this year for .com.
Hall said that while .vip has been popular with Chinese domainers, the MIIT license means it can start to tap the small business market there too.
Obtaining the license means that the three registries, which are all based in the US or Europe, will have to comply with Chinese regulations when it comes to Chinese customers.
That basically means the Chinese government gets to censor pretty much anything it doesn’t like, up to and including sites that “spread rumors”.
Hall said that there’s no chance of this censorship bleeding out to affect non-Chinese customers.
M+M, along with XYZ and .CLUB, are using Chinese registry gateway ZDNS to act as a proxy between their own back-ends (Nominet for .vip, Neustar for .club and CentralNic for .xyz) and Chinese registrars.
“All of our Chinese web sites go through ZDNS, so only web sites going through ZDNS would be affected,” Hall said, referring to the censorship rules.
Hall added that he was “not aware” of there being a blocklist of politically sensitive strings that Chinese customers are not allowed to register.

2 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, .vip, .xyz, censorship, china, miit, Minds + Machines, xyz.com

DropCatch spends millions to buy FIVE HUNDRED more registrars

Domain drop-catching service DropCatch.com has added five hundred new registrar accreditations to its stable over the last few days.
The additions give the company a total accreditation count of at least 1,252, according to DI data.
That means about 43% of all ICANN-accredited registrars are now controlled by just one company.
DropCatch is owned by TurnCommerce, which is also parent of registrar NameBright and premium sales site HugeDomains.
Because gTLD registries rate-limit attempts to register names, drop-catchers such as DropCatch find a good way to increase their chances of registering expiring names is to own as many registrars as possible.
DropCatch is in an arms race here with Web.com, owner of SnapNames and half-owner of NameJet, which has about 500 registrars.
The new accreditations would have cost DropCatch $1.75 million in ICANN application fees alone. They will add $2 million a year to its running costs in terms of extra fixed fees.
That’s not counting the cost of creating 500 brand new LLC companies — named in the new batch DropCatch.com [number] LLC where the number ranges from 1046 to 1545 — each of which is there purely for the purpose of owning the accreditation.
In total, the company is now paying ICANN fixed annual fees in excess of $5 million, not counting its variable fees and per-transaction fees.
Because the ICANN variable fee is split evenly between all registrars (with some exceptions I don’t think apply to DropCatch), I believe the addition of 500 new registrars means all the other registrars will be paying less in variable fees.
There’s clearly money to be made in expiring names.

14 Comments Tagged: accreditation, auctions, drop catching, dropcatch.com, ICANN, namebright, premiums, turncommerce

Short .at domain auction raises over $1m

Nic.at’s three-stage auction of one and two-character .at domains has raised over $1 million.
Auction house Sedo announced today that over 1,000 .at names were sold, for a combined total of over $1 million.
The biggest-ticket name was c.at, which went for €56,000, according to Sedo.
Bidders were not restricted to Austria or German-speaking nations. Sedo said notable bids came in from China, the US and Canada.
Here’s the top-ten list, priced in euros:
[table id=46 /]

Comment Tagged: .at, auction, nic.at, sedo