Domain growth flat in Q2

Growth in the volume of registered domain names was exactly the same in the second quarter as it was in the first.
That’s according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by Verisign late last week.
Q2 closed with 331.9 million registered names, up 1.3 million or 0.4% sequentially. The Q1 DNIB published three months ago also showed net growth of 1.3 million names.
That’s an increase of 6.7 million names, 2.1%, over the second quarter 2016, which compares unfavorably to the first quarter’s annual growth of 11.8 million names.
A slight majority of the 1.3 million bump seems to have come from .com and .net, which together grew from 143.6 million to 144.3 million names, roughly a 700,000 name or 0.4% sequential increase.
ccTLDs fared a little better, going to to 144.2 million names from 143.1 million in Q1. That’s a 1.1 million increase.
New gTLDs took the edge off the overall industry growth, shrinking from 25.4 million names in Q1 to 24.3 million in Q2.
That’s largely due to the expiration of millions of speculative .xyz registrations that were given away for free or nearly free in 2016.
As anticipated, .xyz fell off the top 10 list of all TLDs to be replaced by 17-year-old .info, which added an impressive 300,000 names to wind up in the #9 spot ahead of flat Netherlands ccTLD .nl.

Comment Tagged: dnib, domain name industry brief, versigin

Another ccTLD plays down the “com”

Another ccTLD operator has decided to allow registrants to register domains at the second level.
Following a trend that has swept the country-code world over the last few years, Malta’s NIC (Malta) said direct .mt registrations will become available December 1.
Previously, only third-level regs under .com.mt, .org.mt, .net.mt, .edu.mt and .gov.mt were possible.
NIC (Malta) said that existing .mt registrants will be able to claim their matching second-level names for free until the end of November 2020.
That’s a similar policy to the one adopted by Nominet in the UK, one of several ccTLDs to allow “direct” registrations in recent years. Others include New Zealand (.nz), Kenya (.ke) and, possibly but controversially, Australia (.au).
There are no residency requirements to register .mt names. Prices are usually around €20 to €30 per year, but NIC (Malta) said prices will be “halved” come December.
If you’re curious about the second-level policy change opening up new domain hacks, forget about it.
Apart from variations on “dreamt” (which doesn’t even pass a US English spell-check), there are bugger-all words ending in “mt”, according to the various Scrabble-cheating web sites I never use.

3 Comments Tagged: .mt, cctlds, nic (malta), second-level

Will ICANN punt on .amazon again?

Amazon is piling pressure onto ICANN to finally approve its five-year-old gTLD applications for .amazon, but it seems to me the e-commerce giant will have a while to wait yet.
The company sent a letter to ICANN leadership this week calling on it to act quickly on the July ruling of an Independent Review Process panel that found ICANN had breached its own bylaws when it rejected the .amazon and and Chinese and Japanese transliterations.
Amazon’s letter said:

Such action is necessary because there is no sovereign right under international or national law to the name “Amazon,” because there are no well-founded and substantiated public policy reasons to block our Applications, because we are committed to using the TLDs in a respectful manner, and because the Board should respect the IRP accountability mechanism.

ICANN had denied the three applications based on nothing more than the consensus advice of its Governmental Advisory Committee, which had been swayed by the arguments of primarily Brazil and Peru that there were public policy reasons to keep the gTLD available for possible future use by its own peoples.
The string “Amazon”, among its many uses, is of course the name of a river and a rain forest that covers much of the South American continent.
But the IRP panel decided that the ICANN board should have at least required the GAC to explain its public policy arguments, rather than just accepting its advice as a mandate from on-high.
Global Domains Division chief Akram Atallah had testified before the panel that consensus GAC advice sets a bar “too high for the Board to say no.”
But the governmental objections “do not appear to be based on well-founded public policy concerns that justify the denial of the applications” the IRP panelists wrote.
The panel, in a 2-to-1 ruling, instructed ICANN to reopen Amazon’s applications.
Since the July ruling, ICANN’s board has not discussed how to proceed, but it seems likely that the matter will come up at its Montevideo, Uruguay retreat later this month.
No agenda for this meeting has yet been published, but there will be an unprecedented public webcast of the full formal board meeting, September 23.
The Amazon letter specifically asks the ICANN board of directors to not refer the .amazon matter back to the GAC for further advice, but I think that’s probably the most likely outcome.
I say this largely because while ICANN’s bylaws specifically allow it to reject GAC advice, it has cravenly avoided such a confrontation for most of its history.
It has on occasion even willfully misinterpreted GAC advice in order to appear that it has accepted it when it has not.
The GAC, compliantly, regularly provides pieces of advice that its leaders have acknowledged are deliberately vague and open to interpretation (for a reason best known to the politicians themselves).
It seems to me the most likely next step in the .amazon case is for the board to ask the GAC to reaffirm or reconsider its objection, giving the committee the chance to save face — and avoid a lengthy mediation process — by providing the board with something less than a consensus objection.
If ICANN were to do this, my feeling is that the GAC at large would probably be minded to stick to its guns.
But it only takes one government to voice opposition to advice for it to lose its “consensus” status, making it politically much easier for ICANN to ignore.
Hypothetically, the US government could return to its somewhat protectionist pre-2014 position of blocking consensus on .amazon, but that might risk fanning the flames of anti-US sentiment.
While the US no longer has its unique role in overseeing ICANN’s IANA function, it still acts as the jurisdictional overlord for the legal organization, which some other governments still hate.
A less confrontational approach might be to abstain and to allow friendly third-party governments to roadblock consensus, perhaps by emphasizing the importance of ICANN being seen to accountable in the post-transition world.
Anyway, this is just my gut premonition on how this could play out, based on the track records of ICANN and the GAC.
If ICANN can be relied on for anything, it’s to never make a decision on something today if it can be put off until tomorrow.

6 Comments Tagged: amazon, brazil, gac, geographic, ICANN, montevideo, new gTLDs, peru

MMX sells 7,000 domains for $3.4 million

New gTLD registry MMX said it has sold $3.4 million in “premium” .vip domains names to Chinese domainers in the last few months.
In what is believed to be a small number of deals to a limited number of investors, “over 7,000” domains changed hands since they became available in late June.
MMX said that $2.8 million of the deals closed in the last 10 days.
While we don’t have the exact number of domains, it looks to work out in the ball-park of $485 per domain.
As $3.4 million is a materially significant number — the company’s entire revenue for 2016 was $15.6 million — it was disclosed to the financial markets this morning.
.vip has been MMX’s cash cow, so far amassing a zone file with more than 600,000 domains names in it.
For some reason it has been hugely popular in China — the vast majority of its registrations have been through Chinese registrars and 59% of its overall revenue was from China in 2016.
In April, the company sold 200,000 .vip names to a single Chinese investor for $1.3 million.
MMX has also said that renewal rates for .vip, which only launched last year, have been over 75%.

1 Comment Tagged: .vip, china, Minds + Machines, mmx, premium

.CLUB HQ trashed by Irma, nobody hurt

.CLUB Domains returned to its new digs in Fort Lauderdale, Florida yesterday to find the building trashed by hurricane Irma.

Fortunately, none of the .club gTLD registry’s 17 employees were hurt during Irma, the category 5 hurricane which lashed Florida over the weekend.
Irma caused at least 10 reported deaths in the state and untold amounts of property damage. Over its full path, close to 50 people have been reported killed.
Chief marketing officer Jeff Sass said that “large parts of the roof had been torn away, exposing our office to devastating wind and rain, pretty much ruining everything”.
“Literally, it looks like a bomb went off. I couldn’t believe the damage. It’s truly a sad day for our company. We feel for everyone affected by this horrible storm and we are very fortunate as all our staff are safe,” CEO Colin Campbell said in a blog post.
Ironically, the building had been scheduled for a refurbishment anyway.
.CLUB plans to use the facility as a tech startup incubator under the brand Startups.club. It had recently been approved for funding by the local Fort Lauderdale government, according to Sass.
None of the company’s registry operations, which are based hundreds of miles north in Virginia, were affected by the damage.
Fellow new gTLD registry MMX is legally based in the thoroughly devastated British Virgin Islands, but has no staff or premises there so was unaffected.
Domain Name Wire is reporting that some registry functions of Anguilla’s .ai ccTLD, also in Irma’s path, were not working in its wake.
Photo: .CLUB Domains

7 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, hurricane irma

XYZ slashes $10 million a year from premium stash

XYZ.com has slashed the asking price of a few thousand “premium” .xyz domain names, in some cases by many thousands of dollars.
Overall, it looks like the company has dropped prices by a total of $10.8 million.
At the top end of its reserved list, several single and double-character domains previously priced a $55,000 per year have been reduced to $13,000 per year.
At the lower end, domains previously priced at around $1,300 are now around $300.
Those are the recommended retail prices. Some registrars are offering them with a substantial mark-up.
The reductions affect 2,700 of the domains on XYZ’s premium list, which runs to about 3,075 names in total.
Whereas the previous hypothetical value of the full list was $15.3 million a year, it’s now at $4.4 million a year.
Of course, they’re not worth anything unless somebody is willing to pay the price, and the domains still seem to have end-user price tags on them.
Premium renewal fees have so far proved unpopular in the domain investing community due to the large carrying cost.
XYZ’s full list can be obtained here.

8 Comments Tagged: .xyz, new gTLDs, premium, xyz.com

CentralNic extends XYZ deal until 2032

CentralNic and XYZ.com have extended their registry services pact for the next fifteen years, according to CentralNic.
Announcing its first-half 2017 financial results today, CentralNic said the back-end contract has been extended until 2032.
It’s an unusually long duration for a registry services contract, which are usually much more likely to run about five years.
It even lasts 10 years beyond the expiration of XYZ.com’s own ICANN contracts (though renewal of these is a near-certainty).
The deal covers all .xyz domains, as well as all of the other TLDs in XYZ.com’s portfolio. That currently includes the likes of .rent, .storage and .college.
CentralNic said it “will receive a fixed fee based on the volume of .xyz registrations and subscriptions managed” under the new deal.
In a statement to the markets, CEO Ben Crawford said the relationship “has been updated to normalise the Company’s revenues and profits going forward.”
I believe the previous contract contained a per-domain component, which exposed CentralNic’s revenue to .xyz’s erratic pricing-influenced growth trajectory.
.xyz’s zone file has shrunk by a whopping four million domains since this time last year, causing it to lose the crown of highest-volume new gTLD, due to it offering free or almost free domains that expired without renewing after a year.
However, CentralNic disclosed that the proportion of its own wholesale transaction volumes that were renewals (rather than adds and transfers, I assume) was 18% in the first half, up from 2% in the same 2016 period.
For the six months ended June 30, the company had overall revenue of £10.6 million ($13.9 million), up 18.5% year over year.
Its net loss after tax was £619,000 ($810,000), down from £1.3 million. At the EBITDA level, profit was £1.4 million ($1.8 million) compared to $900,000 in H1 2016.
While I still stubbornly think of CentralNic as primarily a registry play, in fact the company now gets about three quarters of its revenue today from its retail registrar division, which contributed just shy of £8 million to the total in H1.
Instra, the Australian registrar it acquired at the end of 2015, contributed £5.83 million.
The wholesale division, registry back-end services — contributed £1.82 million to revenue and £450,000 to EBITDA in the half.
That’s despite CentralNic being the back-end for six of the top 20 new gTLDs by volume — .website, .space, .tech, .site, .online, and .xyz
If we tally up the number of domains in only those six TLDs, we get to about 4.2 million, per their zone files.
The company’s third reporting unit, Enterprise, contributed £800,000 ($1 million) in the half, of which £360,000 ($471,000) came from premium domain sales.

2 Comments Tagged: .xyz, centralnic, earnings, financials, instra, internet.bs, xyz.com

Pilot program for Whois killer launches

ICANN is to oversee a set of pilot programs for RDAP, the protocol expected to eventually replace Whois.
Registration Data Access Protocol, an IETF standard since 2015, fills the same function as Whois, but it is more structured and enables access control rules.
ICANN said this week that it has launched the pilot in response to a request last month from the Registries Stakeholder Group and Registrars Stakeholder Group. It said on its web site:

The goal of this pilot program is to develop a baseline profile (or profiles) to guide implementation, establish an implementation target date, and develop a plan for the implementation of a production RDAP service.

Participation will be voluntary by registries and registrars. It appears that ICANN is merely coordinating the program, which will see registrars and registrars offer their own individual pilots.
So far, no registries or registrars have notified ICANN of their own pilots, but the program is just a few days old.
It is expected that the pilots will allow registrars and registries to experiment with different types of profiles (how the data is presented) and extensions before ICANN settles on a standard, contractually enforced format.
Under RDAP, ICANN/IANA acts as a “bootstrapping” service, maintaining a list of RDAP servers and making it easier to discover which entity is authoritative for which domain name.
RDAP is basically Whois, but it’s based on HTTP/S and JSON, making it easier to for software to parse and easier to compare records between TLDs and registrars.
It also allows non-Latin scripts to be more easily used, allowing internationalized registration data.
Perhaps most controversially, it is also expected to allow differentiated access control.
This means in future, depending on what policies the ICANN community puts in place, millions of current Whois users could find themselves with access to fewer data elements than they do today.
The ICANN pilot will run until July 31, 2018.

4 Comments Tagged: ICANN, rdap, rrsg, rysg, whois

Hammock swings from Rightside to MarkMonitor

Statton Hammock has joined brand protection registrar MarkMonitor as its new vice president of global policy and industry development.
He was most recently VP of business and legal affairs at Rightside, the portfolio gTLD registry that got acquired by Donuts in July. He spent four years there.
The new gig sounds like a broad brief. In a press release, MarkMonitor said Hammock will oversee “the development and execution of MarkMonitor’s global policy, thought leadership, business development and awareness strategy”.
MarkMonitor nowadays is a business of Clarivate Analytics under president Chris Veator, who started at the company in July.

Comment Tagged: donuts, markmonitor, rightside

Registry bosses to talk ICANN “tax cuts” at private meeting

The CEOs of 20 or more gTLD registries are due to meet privately this month to discuss, among other things, the possibility of a reduction in their ICANN fees.
The Registry CEO Summit is being held in Seattle at the end of September, I’m told.
Jay Westerdal of Top Level Spectrum (.feedback etc) and Ray King of Top Level Design (.design etc) are organizing the event.
“It’s a small, informal gathering, where the agenda will be set by the participants, most likely around best practices for running a new registry,” Westerdal said.
“It’s not an official group like the RySG, and we don’t expect to be putting out any statements or ‘work product’,” he said.
He said he expects 20 to 25 registry CEOs to attend.
.CLUB Domains CEO Colin Campbell, who said he will attend, said he intends to bring proposals to the meeting around persuading ICANN to support the industry with marketing support and fee reductions.
Campbell wants ICANN to commit to spend $4 million on marketing new gTLDs at trade shows and conferences.
He also wants ICANN to reduce its $0.25 per-domain registry fee, which he referred to as a “tax”, to $0.18 for three years (which would match the $0.18 registrars pay ICANN per transaction).
He said the money would ideally flow through into the pockets of registrants, rather than the industry.
“I’m not suggesting that it be permanent, I’m suggesting that in order to support the fledgling new gTLD industry that they offer a small reduction and hope registries will pass that on to registrars and hopefully registrars will pass that on to consumers,” Campbell said.
The reduction would also help raise awareness of new gTLDs, he said.
The $0.25 fee only kicks in when a registry tops 50,000 billable transactions per year, so the reduction would at first only affect the roughly 50 to 60 new gTLDs that are already over that milestone.
The $0.07 per-domain reduction is so small that even a registry as large as .club, with about a million domains, would only see its fees reduced by about $70,000 per year.
Over all the affected TLDs, it would come out to a cost to ICANN of about $1.2 million per year if current volumes hold.
“It’s a very small amount but I still believe the benefit goes to end users,” Campbell said.
For registrants, it’s difficult to imagine $0.07 making a huge difference, unless they’re a high-volume buyer (which are not always the buyers you want). Generally, the cheaper domains get the more they attract abusive registrants.
Whether the ideas will get any traction among other registry CEOs remains to be seen, but it’s not the first idea for reduced ICANN fees to come out of the registry community recently.
In March, the RySG formally asked ICANN to tap into its war chest of excess new gTLD application fees to waive 75% of its fixed $25,000 annual per-TLD fee, a move that would affect all new gTLDs rather than just the larger ones.
The rebate would have cost ICANN $17 million.
But ICANN knocked that idea back last week, saying it still does not know how much of this $96 million cash pile it will have to spend on unexpected events stemming from the program.

10 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, registry ceo summit, top level design, top level spectrum