Neustar ditches .biz for .neustar

Registry operator Neustar has migrated all of its web sites to its .neustar gTLD, abandoning its original home at .biz.
The company announced today that its main site can now be found at home.neustar. Its old neustar.biz already redirects to the dot-brand domain.
It’s also using domains such as marketing.neustar, security.neustar and risk.neustar to market its various services.
Neustar has been using its dot-brand extensively for years, adding at least 10 new sites this year, but today marks the formal blanket switch away from its old .biz branding.
The gTLD has over 600 names in its zone file, of which about 15 resolved to active .neustar web sites according to the last scan I did. There’s probably more today.
It must have been a bit of a Sophie’s Choice for the company.
Neustar has been using its own .biz ever since it went live with the gTLD over 15 years ago, a case of eating its own dog food when few others would, but it now clearly sees a tastier future in its dot-brand business.
The company acts as the back-end for almost 200 dot-brands already — about a third of those that went live from the 2012 gTLD application round — and seems to be laying the groundwork for a big push in the next round (expected at some point after 2020).
The rebrand should give Neustar some first-hand experience of the challenges current and future clients could face when switching to a dot-brand gTLD.

1 Comment Tagged: .biz, dot-brands, neustar

Roberts elected to ICANN board

Channel Islands ccTLD operator Nigel Roberts has been elected to ICANN’s board of directors.
He gathered an impressive 67% of the votes in an anonymous poll of ccNSO members conducted last week.
He received 60 votes versus the 29 cast for his only opponent, Pierre Ouedraogo, an internet pioneer from Burkina Faso.
Roberts, a Brit, runs ChannelIsles.net, registry manager for .gg (for the islands Guernsey, Alderney and Sark) and .je (for Jersey). These are the independent UK dependencies found floating between England and France.
He’s been in the ICANN community since pretty much day one.
His election still has to be formally confirmed by the ccNSO Council and then the ICANN Empowered Community.
Roberts will not take his seat on the ICANN board until October next year, at the end of public meeting in Barcelona.
He will replace Mike Silber, the South African who’s currently serving his ninth and therefore final year as a director.
The other ccNSO seat is held by Australian ICANN vice chair Chris Disspain, who is also term-limited and will leave at the end of 2019.

Comment Tagged: .gg, .je, board, ccnso, cctlds, channelisles.net, election, ICANN

Brazil loses its only registrar as UOL bows out

There are now no ICANN-accredited registrars in Brazil, following the termination of Universo Online’s contract this week.
I understand the agreement was ended at UOL’s request. It’s not a case of it breaching its contract.
UOL is a big deal in Brazil, getting beaten in the eyeballs stakes only by the likes of Google and Facebook, but as a registrar it wasn’t in the top 100 globally.
It had a little over 100,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count, with a peak over the last five years of roughly 200,000
I hear that these remaining domains will be transferred to Tucows’ accreditation.
Brazil has had at least four registrars, including UOL, over the years.
Countries roughly the same size as Brazil by population (over 200 million) include Nigeria and Pakistan, each of which still have one active registrar.
There are 10 contracted registries, managing nine 2012-round new gTLDs, in Brazil.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, termination, universo online, uol

Verisign wants to auction off O.com for charity

The internet could soon gets just its fourth active single-character .com domain name, after Verisign revealed plans to auction off o.com for charity.
The company has asked ICANN to allow it to release just one of the 23 remaining one-letter .com domains, which are currently reserved under the terms of the .com registry agreement.
It’s basically a proof of concept that would lead to this contractual restriction being lifted entirely.
O.com has been picked as the guinea pig, because of “long-standing interest” in the domain, according to Verisign.
Overstock.com, the $1.8 billion-a-year US retailer, is known to have huge interest in the name.
The company acquired o.co from .CO Internet for $350,000 during the ccTLD’s 2010 relaunch, then embarked upon a disastrous rebranding campaign that ended when the company estimated it was losing 61% of its type-in traffic to o.com.
Overstock has obsessed over its unobtainable prize for over a decade and would almost certainly be involved in any auction for the domain.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Overstock pressured Verisign into requesting the release of o.com.
Despite the seven or eight figures that a single-letter .com domain could fetch, Verisign’s cut of the auction proceeds would be just $7.85, its base registry fee.
Regardless, it has a payment schedule in mind that would see the winning bidder continue to pay premium renewal fees for 25 years, eventually doubling the sale price.
The winner would pay their winning bid immediately and get a five-year registration, but then would have to pay 5% of that bid to renew the domain for years six through 25.
In other words, if the winning bid was $1 million, the annual renewal fee after the first five years would be $50,000 and the total amount paid would eventually be $2 million.
All of this money, apart from the auction provider’s cut, would go to a trust that would distribute the funds to internet-focused non-profit organizations, such as those promoting security or open protocols.
There’s also a clause that would seem to discourage domain investors from bidding. The only way to transfer the domain would be if the buyer was acquired entirely, though this could be presumably circumvented with the use of a shell company.
It’s an elaborate auction plan, befitting of the fact that one-character .com domains are super rare.
Only x.com, q.com and z.com are currently registered and it’s Verisign policy to reserve them in the unlikely event they should ever expire.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk this July reacquired x.com, the domain he used to launch PayPal in the 1990s, back from PayPal for an undisclosed sum.
Z.com was acquired by GMO Internet for $6.8 million in 2014.
Single-character domains are typically not reserved in the ICANN contracts of other gTLDs, whether pre- or post-2012, though it’s standard practice for the registry to reserve them for auction anyway.
Verisign’s reservations in .com and .net are a legacy of IANA policy, pre-ICANN and have been generally considered technically unnecessary for some years.
Still, there’s been a reluctance to simply hand Verisign, already a money-printing machine through accident of history, another windfall of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars by allowing it to sell off the names for profit. Hence the elaborate plan with the O.com trust fund.
The proposal to release O.com requires a contractual amendment, so Verisign has filed a Registry Services Evaluation Process request (pdf) with ICANN that is now open for public comment.
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.

7 Comments Tagged: .com, auction, ICANN, o.co, o.com, overstock.com, rsep, single-character, verisign

ICANN urged to crack down on new gTLD abuse

Registries selling dirt-cheap new gTLD domains should be rewarded with lower ICANN fees when they get proactive about abuse, while registrars that turn a blind eye to spammers should be suspended, an ICANN working group will recommend.
In its second batch of findings, the Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT) said that financial incentives and a new complaints procedure should be used to persuade registries and registrars to fight DNS abuse.
The CCT said it “proposes the development of incentives to reward best practices preventing technical DNS abuse and strengthening the consequences for culpable or complacent conduits of technical DNS abuse” in a paper published today.
The review, which drew on multiple sources of market and abuse data, original research, and analysis of third-party research, is probably the most comprehensive study into the impact of the new gTLD program to date.
It concluded that overall rates of DNS abuse did not increase as a result of the program, but that bad actors are increasingly migrating away from legacy gTLDs such as .com to 2012-round TLDs such as .top, .gdn and Famous Four Media’s stable.
Indeed, much of the paper appears to be a veiled critique of FFM’s practices.
The registrar AlpNames, known to be affiliated with FFM and responsible for most of its retail sales, is singled out as the currently accredited registrar particularly favored by abusers.
The CCT report notes that AlpNames regularly sells domains for under $1, or gives them away for free, and offered a tool allowing registrants to randomly generate up to 2,000 available domains in 27 different gTLDs, pretty much inviting abuse.
“Certain registries and registrars appear to either positively encourage or at the very least willfully ignore DNS abuse. Such behavior needs to be identified rapidly and action
must be taken by ICANN compliance as deemed necessary,” the paper says.
The review found that gTLDs with no registration restrictions and the lowest prices had the most abuse. Duh.
“Generally, the DNS Abuse Study indicates that the introduction of new gTLDs did not increase the total amount of abuse for all gTLDs,” its report says. “[F]actors such as registration restrictions, price, and registrar-specific practices seem more likely to affect abuse rates.”
Drawing on data provided by 11 domain block-lists (SURBL, SpamHaus, etc), the paper states that at least one TLD (FFM’s .science) had an abuse rate excess of 50%.
Using SpamHaus data, the paper identities FFM’s .science, .stream, .trade, .review, .download and .accountant as having over 10% abuse during the period of its study. Also on that list: Uniregistry’s low-price .click and the China-based .top and .gdn.
One thing they all have in common is that AlpNames is a leading registrar, usually accounting for at least a quarter of domains under management.
There’s no way AlpNames/FFM is not aware of the amount of bad actors in its customer base, the question is what can ICANN do about it?
The CCT team recommends that registries and registrars with over 10% of their names used for abusive purposes should be tasked by ICANN with proactively cleaning up their zones. Those that fail to do so should be subject to a new Domain Abuse Dispute Resolution Process, it said.
These companies should have their contracts suspended when they’re “associated with unabated, abnormal and extremely high rates of technical abuse”, the report recommends.
There’s a big boilerplate specifying, tellingly, that registry operators that control registrars are affected by this recommendation too.
It should be noted that there was not a full consensus of support for the idea of a DADRP. Half a dozen working group members filed minority statements opposing it.
It’s not all stick in the report, however. There’s some carrot, too.
The CCT report recommends financial incentives such as fee reductions for registries that have “proactive anti-abuse measures” in place.
It noted that there is precedent for ICANN doing this kind of thing when it implemented an anti-tasting policy that seriously restricted registrars’ ability to get registry refunds.
The CCT Review Team was formed to figure out what impacts the 2012 new gTLD round had on the domain name market.
The completion of its work is one of several gating factors to the next new gTLD application round under ICANN’s new bylaws and the old Affirmation of Commitments with the US government.
It published initial recommendations earlier this year. This new set of recommendations is now open for public comment until January 8.

1 Comment Tagged: abuse, alpnames, cct, cct-rt, competition, Famous Four Media, ICANN

China and cheapo TLDs drag down industry growth — CENTR

The growth of the worldwide domain industry continued to slow in the third quarter, according to data out today from CENTR.
There were 311.1 million registered domains across over 1,500 TLDs at the end of September, according to the report, 0.7% year-over-year growth.
The new gTLD segment, which experienced a 7.2% decline to 20.6 million names, was the biggest drag.
But that decline is largely due to just two high-volume, low-price gTLDs — .xyz and .top — which lost millions of names that had been registered for pennies apiece.
Excluding these TLDs, year-over-year growth for the whole industry would have been 2.5%, CENTR said. The report states:

Over the past 2 years, quarterly growth rates have been decreasing since peaks in early 2016. The slowdown is the result of deletes after a period of increased investment from Chinese registrants. Other explanations to the slowdown are specific TLDs, such as .xyz and .top, which have contracted significantly.

The legacy gTLDs inched up by 0.2%, largely driven by almost two million net new names in .com. In fact, only five of the 17 legacy gTLDs experienced any growth at all, CENTR said.
In the world of European ccTLDs, the average (median) growth rate has been flat, but CENTR says it sees signs of a turnaround.
CENTR is the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. Its Q3 report can be downloaded here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: cctlds, centr, growth, new gTLDs

Domain blogger O’Meara elected to auDA board

Domainer-blogger Ned O’Meara, one of the fiercest critics of auDA, has been elected to the organization’s board of directors.
He was one of four directors elected at the Australian ccTLD registry’s Annual General Meeting today.
auDA splits its board into “demand” and “supply” classes. The former are registrants, the latter registrars and resellers.
O’Meara, a domain investor who blogs at Domainer.com.au, was elected as a demand class director, along with Nicole Murdoch, a trademark lawyer who O’Meara backed when he was prevaricating about his own run.
On the supply side, members elected Canadian-born chair of the Australian Web Industry Association and founder of 1300 Web Pro, James Deck, and Grant Wiltshire.
Wiltshire, who works for the government of the Australian state of Victoria, has been a demand-class director for the last two years. There’s no indication in his candidate statement where in the domain industry he has worked.
The election came a week after auDA named its new chair and a new independent director.
Chris Leptos is the new chair. He replaces Stuart Benjamin, who was forced out earlier this year after a “Grumpy” campaign led by O’Meara.
Leptos is deputy chair of financial advisory firm Flagstaff Partners and sits on the board of PPB Advisory. That’s the company that conducted an audit of auDA following the departure of its former CEO last year.
O’Meara landing on the board means he will of course become privy to all the information he’e been campaigning for auDA to be more transparent about recently. How this will affect his blogging remains to be seen, he has yet to write a post about his election.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, domainer.com.au, grumpy

New gTLDs blamed as .pl starts to shrink

Polish ccTLD .pl has lost over 125,000 domains in the last year, a change of growth trajectory blamed partly on new gTLDs.
NASK, the registry, released its third-quarter report in English today. It’s overflowing with more statistics than you could possibly need about the TLD’s performance.
The headline is that .pl is on the decline. On NASK’s web site, it reports registrations as of today are down 128,671 on the last 12 months.
It has 2,577,566 active domains in total today, 2,592,014 at the end of September, about three quarters of which are direct second-level registrations.
It’s one of many ccTLDs to have started to feel the pinch over the last few years. Increased competition, spurred by the expansion of the gTLD space, has been fingered as a likely culprit.
In the report’s introduction, NASK director Wojciech Kamieniecki wrote:

Temporary slowdown of the dynamics of the .pl domain market, observed from the beginning of the year — decrease in the number of new registrations — should be perceived in the light of extending the selection of attractive names as well as a growing number of new generic domains and increase in competition in the global domain market.

The renewal rate overall was 62.22%, a slight increase on 2016 but still on the low side for an established TLD. However, if you exclude third-level registrations (under .com.pl and .net.pl for example) the rate was a much more respectable 76.37%.
There were 203,898 new domains registered in the third quarter.
The vast majority — 93.96% — of current .pl domains are registered to Polish registrants, with registrants from Germany, the UK and the US also contributing to the total.
The full Q3 report can be downloaded here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: .pl, cctlds, nask, new gTLDs

GoDaddy renewal revamp “unrelated” to domainer auction outrage

GoDaddy has made some big changes to how it handles expired domain names, but denied the changes are related to domainer outrage today about “fake” auctions.
The market-leading registrar today said that it has reduced the period post-expiration during which registrants can recover their names from 42 days to 30. After day 30, registrants will no longer be able to renew or transfer affected names.
GoDaddy is also going to start cutting off customers’ MX records five days after expiry. This way, if they’re only using their domain for email, they will notice the interruption. Previously, the company did not cut off MX records.
The changes were first reported at DomainInvesting.com and subsequently confirmed by a GoDaddy spokesperson.
One impact of this will be to reduce confusion when GoDaddy puts expired domains up for auction when it’s still possible for the original registrant reclaim them, which has been the cause of complaints from prominent domain investors this week.
As DomaingGang reported yesterday, self-proclaimed “Domain King” Rick Schwartz bought the domain GoDaddyBlows.com in order to register his disgust with the practice.
Konstantinos Zournas of OnlineDomain followed up with a critique of his own today.
But the GoDaddy spokesperson denied the changes are being made in response to this week’s flak.
“This is unrelated to any events in the aftermarket,” he said. “We’ve been working on this policy for more than a year.”
He said the changes are a case of GoDaddy “optimizing our systems and processes”. The company ran an audit of when customers were renewing and found that fewer than 1% of names were renewed between days 30 and 42 following expiration, he said.
GoDaddy renews about 2.5 million domains per month in just the gTLDs it carries, according to my records, so a full 1% would equal roughly 25,000 names per month or 300,000 per year. But the company spokesperson said the actual number “quite a bit less” than that.
How many of these renewals are genuinely forgetful registrants and how many are people attempting to exploit the auction system is not known.
The changes will come into effect December 4. The news broke today because GoDaddy has started notifying its high-volume customers.

1 Comment Tagged: auctions, expiration, godaddy, renewal, schwartz

Aussie gov refuses to spill the beans on ICANN vice chair’s firing

The Australian government has refused to release documents concerning alleged “financial irregularities” at local ccTLD manager auDA that have been linked to the firing of former CEO Chris Disspain.
A request under the Freedom of Information Act sought documents detailing Disspain’s March 2016 termination, as well as high levels of travel expenses and apparent under-reporting of “fringe benefit tax” under his watch.
The request was filed in September by by industry consultant Ron Andruff, who is known to have beef with Disspain after having been passed over for an important ICANN leadership role.
One of the specific documents sought by Andruff was an unpublished audit by PPB Advisory known to have uncovered slack historical expenses management practices and high levels of travel expenditure.
While rumors have circulated, there have been no substantiated allegations of wrongdoing by Disspain.
The Australian Department of Communications and the Arts told Andruff this weekend that 13 relevant documents had been identified and reviewed, but that all were exempt from disclosure under the FOI Act.
Reasons given include the right to privacy of the individual concerned and the fact that the information could fuel “unsubstantiated allegations of misconduct”.
The Department also thought that disclosing the documents could make it harder to it to obtain information from auDA in future, particularly relevant given that it recently kicked off a review of the organization.
While acknowledging there were some public interest reasons to publish the documents, on balance it said that the public interest reasons not to publish were more numerous.
auDA has been plagued by problems such as high turnover of staff and board, unpopular policies, and the member-instigated ouster of its chair, since Disspain left.
Separately, Disspain became ICANN’s vice chair earlier this month, having sat on the board for the last seven years as a representative of the ccTLD community.
He’s one of four community-nominated ICANN directors who have agreed to undergo the same background checks as their Nominating Committee-appointed counterparts, in part due to pressure applied by Andruff.
The FOI response can be viewed here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: .au, andruff, auda, australia, disspain, expenses, ICANN, nomcom, ppb