First dot-brand gTLD to go generic after TLS deal

The would-be dot-brand gTLD .observer will actually open as an unrestricted generic after the contract was bought out by Top Level Spectrum.
TLS, which has a small portfolio of gTLDs already, bought out the ICANN contract from UK newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media a couple of months ago, it emerged today.
The Observer is the title of the Guardian’s sister paper, published on Sundays.
But TLS CEO Jay Westerdal said it will be sold as a generic with pricing under $10 per name, as a thematic stable-mate for its gripe-oriented gTLD .feedback.
The price of the TLD has not been revealed, but Westerdal characterized it as a sub-$1 million deal.
It’s the first instance of a dot-brand, albeit one that that not yet gone live, being taken over by a portfolio gTLD player.
Westerdal said he’s looking for more, similar acquisition opportunities.
The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, with no published go-live date.
The Guardian had signed a Registry Agreement containing Specification 9. That allows registries to disregard the Code of Conduct — which obliges them to treat registrars equally.
It seems likely this will have to be removed from the RA before .observer can go to the masses as a proper generic.

Comment Tagged: .guardian, acquisition, ICANN, new gTLDs, observer, tls, top level spectrum

Correction: what NTIA said about .com pricing

The US government has not confirmed that it expects to keep Verisign’s .com registry fee capped at the current level until at least 2024, despite what DI reported on Monday.
At this URL we published an article reporting that the US government had confirmed that it was going to keep .com prices frozen at $7.85 for the next eight years.
That was based on a misreading of a letter from the Department of Commerce to Senator Ted Cruz and others, which merely explained how the price cap could be maintained without expressing a commitment to do so.
The letter actually said very little, and nothing of news value, so I thought it best to simply delete the original piece and replace it with this correction.
I regret the error.
Thanks to those readers who got in touch to point out the mistake.

Comment Tagged: .com, iana, ICANN, justice, ntia, prices, ted cruz, transition, verisign

Relaunch and slashed prices for .whoswho after terrible sales

New gTLD registry Who’s Who is to slash prices, lift restrictions and drop thousands of reserved names in an attempt to relaunch the struggling business.
From today, its registry fee has been dropped from $75 to $20 a year, and registrants no longer need to prove they’re a big shot in order to buy a name.
Despite the name, Who’s Who Registry is not affiliated with any of the various “Who’s Who” books you may have seen published. It’s run by the same company that owns whoswho.com.
According to CEO John McCabe, it’s only managed to move 88 names since it started selling domains almost two years ago. Judging by registry reports, most of those have been defensive registrations made via corporate registrars.
The lack of sales can be partly blamed on the restrictions that were in place. Would-be registrants had to show that they had featured in a print Who’s Who book in order to be considered for a domain.
Naturally, that’s the kind of preregistration hassle that makes most registrars balk, so eligibility rules are being scrapped altogether, McCabe said.
The company is also releasing some 750,000 domains — most are one, two, three and four-character strings — from registry-reserved status, he said.
About 150,000 of those will be available will be available at the new $20 reg fee, while the rest will fit into tiers ranging from $120 to $39,000.
The pricing for the more expensive domains will revert to $20 upon renewal, which also marks a change from the old business model.
There will also be a three-month 50% promotional discount period, which will apply to all tiers, starting October 15.
The changes bring .whoswho into conformity with tried and tested mechanisms that run in other TLDs using the same back-end, in order to reduce friction for registrars already plugged in to Neustar, McCabe said.
The company hopes to have a couple of thousand names under management by early next year.

6 Comments Tagged: .whoswho, new gTLDs

US claims option to delay IANA transition as Cruz launches free speech doomsday clock

The US government has told ICANN that it may extend the current IANA functions contract for a year, should something unexpected happen this month.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration wrote to ICANN (pdf) yesterday, to provide “preliminary notice” that it could extent the contract until September 30, 2017, if a “significant impediment” should occur before October 1, 2016.
It appears to be a formality. NTIA said:

the department intends to allow the IANA functions contract to expire as of October 1, 2016, barring any significant impediment. This notice preserves the Government’s rights under the contract during this interim period should there be a change in circumstance.

Under the contract, NTIA is allowed to extend the term for another year in the last 15 days of the current term, but it has to give 30 days notice to ICANN if it wants to do so.
NTIA assistant secretary Larry Strickling told ICANN (pdf) a couple weeks ago that it plans to allow the IANA contract to expire — thereby removing NTIA’s piddling influence in root zone management — October 1.
But the move is facing continued criticism from increasingly unhinged elements of the American political right, who have got it into their heads that the transition means Russia and China will be able to take over ICANN and crush free speech online.
The campaign has been spearheaded by Senator Ted Cruz and whoever pulls the strings of Wall Street Journal columnist L Gordon Crovitz, and has roped in a multitude of hard-right think-tanks.
The latest publicity push for the campaign saw Cruz yesterday launch a countdown clock on its Senate web page.

Cruz’s site states:

If that proposal goes through, countries like Russia, China, and Iran could be able to censor speech on the Internet, including here in the U.S. by blocking access to sites they don’t like.

None of that is true, needless to say.
But the anti-transition sentiment is strong enough that it’s not impossible that there will be a “significant impediment” to the transition before October 1 — a legal injunction against the Federal government, perhaps — and the extension will enable ICANN to run IANA under the current regime for another year.

3 Comments Tagged: iana, ICANN, ntia, ted cruz, transition

.trust gTLD might be for sale as NCC closes domain business

NCC Group has stroppily departed from the domain name business but is evading questions about whether its .trust gTLD is for sale.
The company last month told the markets that it is to “cut its losses” and get rid of its Open Registry registry/registrar business, which it acquired for up to £14.9 million ($22.6 million) just 19 months ago.
But it left open the question of whether it would also divest .trust, the gTLD it acquired from Deutsche Post for an undisclosed sum a year earlier.
Talking to The Telegraph earlier this week, NCC CEO Rob Cotton had some harsh words for the new gTLD industry:

People thought there’d be a need for lots of generic domains, but there’s no need for them at all, it’s only good news for bad guys who can get them for free and pretend to be anyone.

It’s not exactly a volte face from NCC, which has repeatedly published research showing consumers don’t trust new gTLDs.
The company had been banking on .trust (a back-up plan after it failed to obtain .secure, which it had originally applied for) to showcase its potentially higher-margin domain security services.
In its full-year 2016 financial results last month, the company said it was closing down its domain services division, taking a charge of over £13 million as result.
Forty-five people lost their jobs as a result of change in strategy.
The closure does not appear to apply to its data escrow business, which has proven popular among new gTLD registries. That business sits within a separate Escrow Division.
The company said:

It is clear that the open generic domains and city codes have not been taken up by businesses and consumers as well as expected with all of these falling well short of their initial registration targets. Coupled with the fact that the branded domains are still either undelegated or those that are, are unused, it is clear that the market is not ready for the very necessary changes that need to happen to strengthen security on the Internet.

The domains division brought in just shy of £5 million ($6.6 million) in the year to May 31, but most of that was due to its withdrawal of its application for .secure. The division was making a loss.
On .trust, which the company reckons is worth £4.2 million, NCC was less than clear about its plans.
It said in its results that it “will continue to use .trust as the Group’s domain”, but that could merely mean it will continue to use nccgroup.trust as its primary web site.
I asked the company whether .trust was for sale this week and received the following PR statement:

NCC Group said in their FY results statement that certain parts of the Domain Services Division will be divested in due course, although the capability to provide a secure domain environment will be retained. They also stated that this will involve the diminution and realisation of assets. They said that Open Registry is to be realised and other assets written down.
They also made the point that they are still committed to the concept behind domain services and have retained the ability to provide a secure, managed environment when the marketplace changes.

Given the language, I would err towards .trust not being for sale, but the fact that the firm declined to give a straight answer it seems possible that it actually is.

3 Comments Tagged: ncc group, new gTLDs, open registry, trust

Tata ponders “buy a school” strategy to release .tata from limbo

Tata Group is reportedly considering buying a school for the Moroccan province of Tata in order to unlock the .tata gTLD.
The huge Indian conglomerate has been prevented from acquiring its own dot-brand because it matches the name of the tiny region, which is as protected geographic string under ICANN rules.
Without the express permission of Morocco, Tata will not get its desired domain.
According to the New Indian Express newspaper, the company has now reached out to the Indian government in an attempt to open diplomatic channels with Morocco and finally resolve the issue.
The paper cites an unnamed “official” as stating that buying a new school for the province may be the best way to “open the door” to a formal non-objection.
That has precedent.
New gTLD registry Punto 2012, managed to get a non-objection for its .bar application from Montenegro by offering to pay $100,000, spread over 10 years, to fund a school in the Bar region of the country.
Tata came close to acquiring .tata in 2014.
It was the final new gTLD application to pass its evaluation, after it managed to produce a letter from Morocco that was taken as a non-objection.
But Morocco’s digital minister subsequently objected, denying that the government had permitted the use of the string.
Tata’s application was then returned to its Geographic Names Review, which it flunked last December.
Since then, the bid has been marked “Will Not Proceed”, a status that usually only changes when an application is withdrawn.

Comment Tagged: .tata, geographic names review, ICANN, morocco

.hotel losers gang up to threaten ICANN with legal bills

The six losing applicants for the .hotel new gTLD are collectively threatening ICANN with a second Independent Review Process action.
Together, they this week filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, challenging its decision earlier this month to allow the Afilias-owned Hotel Top Level Domain Sarl application to go ahead to contracting.
HTLD won a controversial Community Priority Evaluation in 2014, effectively eliminating all rival applicants, but that decision was challenged in an IRP that ICANN ultimately won.
The other applicants think HTLD basically cobbled together a bogus “community” in order to “game” the CPE process and avoid an expensive auction.
Since the IRP decision, the six other applicants — Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry — have been arguing that the HTLD application should be thrown out due to the actions of Dirk Krischenowski, a former key executive.
Krischenowski was found by ICANN to have exploited a misconfiguration in its own applicants’ portal to download documents belonging to its competitors that should have been confidential.
But at its August 9 meeting, the ICANN board noted that the timing of the downloads showed that HTLD could not have benefited from the data exposure, and that in any event Krischenowski is no longer involved in the company, and allowed the bid to proceed.
That meant the six other applicants lost the chance to win .hotel at auction and/or make a bunch of cash by losing the auction. They’re not happy about that.
It doesn’t matter that the data breach could not have aided HTLD’s application or its CPE case, they argue, the information revealed could prove a competitive advantage once .hotel goes on sale:

What matters is that the information was accessed with the obvious intent to obtain an unfair advantage over direct competitors. The future registry operator of the .hotel gTLD will compete with other registry operators. In the unlikely event that HTLD were allowed to operate the .hotel gTLD, HTLD would have an unfair advantage over competing registry operators, because of its access to sensitive business information

They also think that HTLD being given .hotel despite having been found “cheating” goes against the spirit of application rules and ICANN’s bylaws.
The RfR (pdf) also draws heavily on the findings of the IRP panel in the unrelated Dot Registry (.llc, .inc, etc) case, which were accepted by the ICANN board also on August 9.
In that case, the panel suggested that the board should conduct more thorough, meaningful reviews of CPE decisions.
It also found that ICANN staff had been “intimately involved” in the preparation of the Dot Registry CPE decision (though not, it should be noted, in the actual scoring) as drafted by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The .hotel applicants argue that this decision is incompatible with their own IRP, which they lost in February, where the judges found a greater degree of separation between ICANN and the EIU.
Their own IRP panel was given “incomplete and misleading information” about how closely ICANN and the EIU work together, they argue, bringing the decision into doubt.
The RfR strongly hints that another IRP could be in the offing if ICANN fails to cancel HTLD application.
The applicants also want a hearing so they can argue their case in person, and a “substantive review” of the .hotel CPE.
The HTLD application for .hotel is currently “On Hold” while ICANN sorts through the mess.

16 Comments Tagged: .hotel, community, cpe, donuts, Famous Four Media, Fegistry, glitch, hacking, ICANN, irp, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs, radix, reconsideration, rfr, travel reservations

Are .mail, .home and .corp safe to launch? Applicants think so

ICANN should lift the freeze on new gTLDs .mail, .home and .corp, despite fears they could cause widespread disruption, according to applicants.
Fifteen applicants for the strings wrote to ICANN last week to ask for a risk mitigation plan that would allow them to be delegated.
The three would-be gTLDs were put on hold indefinitely almost three years ago, after studies determined that they were at risk of causing far more “name collision” problems than other strings.
If they were to start resolving on the internet, the fear is they would lead to problems ranging from data leakage to systems simply stopping working properly.
Name collisions are something all new TLDs run the risk of creating, but .home, .corp and .mail are believed to be particularly risky due to the sheer number of private networks that use them as internal namespaces.
My own ISP, which has millions of subscribers, uses .home on its home hub devices, for example. Many companies use .corp and .mail on their LANs, due to longstanding advice from Microsoft and the IETF that it was safe to do so.
A 2013 study (pdf) showed that .home received almost 880 million DNS queries over a 48-hour period, while .corp received over 110 million.
That was vastly more than other non-existent TLDs.
For example, .prod (which some organizations use to mean “production”) got just 5.3 million queries over the same period, and when Google got .prod delegated two years it prompted an angry backlash from inconvenienced admins.
While .mail wasn’t quite on the same scale as the other two, third-party studies determined that it posed similar risks to .home and .corp.
All three were put on hold indefinitely. ICANN said it would ask the IETF to consider making them officially reserved strings.
Now the applicants, noting the lack of IETF movement to formally freeze the strings, want ICANN to work on a thawing plan.
“Rather than continued inaction, ICANN owes applicants for .HOME, .CORP, and .MAIL and the public a plan to mitigate any risks and a proper pathway forward for these TLDs,” the applicants told ICANN (pdf) last Wednesday.
A December 2015 study found that name collisions have occurred in new gTLDs, but that no truly serious problems have been caused.
That does not mean .home, .corp and .mail would be safe to delegate, however.

6 Comments Tagged: .corp, .home, .mail, collisions, ICANN, jas advisors, new gTLDs

Dot Registry backs .africa loser, batters on the ICANN lawsuit floodgates

Rejected community gTLD applicant Dot Registry has waded into the lawsuit between DotConnectAfrica and ICANN.
Filing an amicus brief on Friday in support of the unsuccessful .africa applicant, Dot Registry argues that chagrined new gTLD applicants should be allowed to sue ICANN, despite the legal releases they all signed.
The company is clearly setting the groundwork for its own lawsuit against ICANN — or at least trying to give that impression.
If the two companies are successful in their arguments, it could open the floodgates for more lawsuits by pissed-off new gTLD applicants.
Dot Registry claims applicants signed overly broad, one-sided legal waivers with the assurance that alternative dispute mechanisms would be available.
However, it argues that these mechanisms — Reconsideration, Cooperative Engagement and Independent Review — are a “sham” that make ICANN’s assurances amount to nothing more than a “bait-and-switch scheme”.
Dot Registry recently won an Independent Review Process case against ICANN that challenged the adverse Community Priority Evaluation decisions on its .inc, .llc, and .llp applications.
But while the IRP panel said ICANN should pay Dot Registry’s share of the IRP costs, the applicant came away otherwise empty-handed when panel rejected its demand to be handed the four gTLDs on a plate.
The ICANN board of directors has not yet fully decided how to handle the three applications, but forcing them to auction with competing applications seems the most likely outcome.
By formally supporting DotConnectAfrica’s claim that the legal waiver both companies signed is “unconscionable”, the company clearly reckons further legal action will soon be needed.
DotConnectAfrica is suing ICANN on different grounds. Its .africa bid did not lose a CPE; rather it failed for a lack of governmental support.
But both companies agree that the litigation release they signed is not legally enforceable.
They both say that a legal waiver cannot be enforceable in ICANN’s native California if the protected party carries out fraud.
The court seems to be siding with DotConnectAfrica on this count, having thrown out motions to dismiss the case.
Dot Registry’s contribution is to point to its own IRP case as an example of how ICANN allegedly conned it into signing the release on the assumption that IRP would be able to sort out any disputes. Its court brief (pdf) states:

although claiming to provide an alternative accountability mechanism, the Release, in practice, is just a bait-and-switch scheme, offering applicants a sham accountability procedure
…
Indeed, the “accountability” mechanism is nothing of the sort; and, instead of providing applicants a way to challenge actions or inactions by ICANN, it gives lip-service to legitimate grievances while rubber-stamping decisions made by ICANN and its staff.

That’s an allusion to the IRP panel’s declaration, which found no evidence that ICANN’s board of directors had conducted a thorough, transparent review of Dot Registry’s complaints.
Dot Registry is being represented by the law firm Dechert. That’s the current home of Arif Ali, who represented DotConnectAfrica in its own original IRP, though Ali is not a named lawyer in the Dot Registry brief.

Comment Tagged: .inc, .llc, .llp, africa, dca, dot registry, dotconnectafrica, ICANN, irp, lawsuit, new gTLDs, reconsideration

West.cn targets Engrish domainers with new .xyz site

West.cn, the Chinese registrar that has quickly become the highest-volume seller of new gTLD domains, has turned its attention to the English-speaking market.
The company has launched a new site at West.xyz, offering domains at some of the cheapest prices available, in English.
A .com can be obtained for the equivalent of $8.25 a year, while a .xyz costs about $1.20, according to the site. In .top, names are on sale for about $0.60.
West.xyz is still pricing its names in CNY, which may be off-putting to buyers in English-speaking markets.
The quality of the translation is currently quite poor also, verging on what razy lacists know as “Engrish”.
“Wish you a good luck in deals!” the front page offers.
“We hope to let all customers invest breezily and contribute to the domain industry with unremitting efforts,” the About page reads.
“In future, west.xyz will devote itself to the healthy and sustainable domain industry development and serve all customers wholeheartedly.”
The choice of .xyz as the domain for the new site is perhaps not surprising.
West.cn is XYZ.com’s biggest-volume channel partner, and recently put $1.5 million into subsidizing .xyz renewal fees.

5 Comments Tagged: west.cn, west.xyz