Another auDA director quit in secret

Australian ccTLD registry auDA, in the midst of a transparency controversy, reportedly lost another of its directors last month.
According to a report in Australia’s Financial Review newspaper, Leonie Walsh stepped down August 14.
The paper cited Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents as its source.
Embattled auDA did not disclose her departure at the time, despite the fact that it did disclose that fellow director Michaella Richards had also quit the same week.
Richards had been accused by some auDA members, noting her previous professional relationship with CEO Cameron Boardman, of lacking experience in the domain industry.
No reason for Walsh’s departure has been given.
The two directors left just a couple of weeks after chairman Stuart Benjamin, who was facing a member vote of no-confidence he did not think he could win, quit.
auDA has come under criticism from members, such as those organized at Grumpy.com.au, for several policy shifts that seemed to make the organization more secretive and less responsive to members’ interests.
The organization has since done U-turns on most of controversial policies.

1 Comment Tagged: auda

.CLUB nears profitability, talks renewals and “trial” domains

.CLUB Domains is nearing profitability and poised to become a “growth engine”, despite the view that most of its current domains are not expected to renew, according to its CEO.
Colin Campbell told DI today that the company made $6.7 million in revenue last year, and is “very close” to breaking even.
The company reached one million domains under management milestone in June, but Campbell freely admits that the majority of its current domains are unlikely to renew.
Almost 700,000 of these domains are what .CLUB considers “trial accounts”, he said. These are domains that typically sold for under a dollar — .club has been seen for sale as low as $0.88 — to speculators.
The registry usually sees a 10% to 15% renewal rate on these domains, he said.
Of the remaining 300,000 “solid, regular registrations”, Campbell said he sees first-year renewals in the 68% to 70% range and subsequent years at 80% to 90%.
The company typically only discounts on its first-year registrations, so renewal rates are a much better indicator of performance.
He said .club has around 120,000 web sites (not including parked domains), some of which are showcased on its web site.
With this in mind, renewals are at the forefront of Campbell’s mind. He said a key performance indicator .CLUB uses is “average cost of acquisition per renewed domain”, which the company tracks on a per-registrar basis.
The company invested $3.3 million in marketing in 2016, he said. That does not include rebates to registrars participating in volume programs, but it does take into account acquiring prominent shelf space on key registrars, he said.
“We’re very close to break-even and we’re still going to be able to invest multi-million dollars in ad campaigns and marketing,” he said.
“We’re going to have a company that’s breaking even and is still going to be a growth engine,” he said. “We’re going to be able to sustain a path of growth. I don’t know too many TLDs who could say that. Of course, if you reduce your expenses down to nothing you can make a profit, but can you also be a growth engine?”
“That’s where I feel like a TLD needs to get to, to be a sustainable long-term presence in the market, like a .org or .net or .co,” he said.
Despite the narrowing losses and starkly higher volumes, the $6.7 million in 2016 revenue is a lower than the $7 million in 2015 revenue Campbell told Domain Name Wire about a year ago.
Campbell said today that the reason for the dip is that late 2015 saw many gTLDs (old and new, even including .com) benefit from a bump from the Chinese market. .CLUB’s top line was particularly exposed by some premium sales it made to Chinese investors during that growth spike.
Premium sales have also been performing well in 2017, Campbell said, driven by the financing options and broker program introduced in January.
.CLUB announced first-quarter premium sales totaling $505,000 and $2.5 million in Q2.

7 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, new gTLDs

Deutsch and Doria to join ICANN board

Veteran ICANN community members Avri Doria and Sarah Deutsch are to join ICANN’s board of directors in November.
Both have been selected by ICANN’s Nominating Committee to serve three-year terms starting at the end of the public meeting in Abu Dhabi, which wraps up November 3.
They replace current chair Steve Crocker, who is leaving after his maximum three terms on the board, and Asha Hemrajani, who is leaving after one term. Both take seats reserved for North Americans.
Doria, an independent consultant, is a 12-year member of the community and tireless working group volunteer, most closely associated with the Non-Commercial Users Constituency. Her clients include Public Interest Registry.
Deutsch is an intellectual property attorney perhaps best known as a 23-year employee of Verizon. She currently works at Mayer Brown in Washington DC.
Both new directors have been knocking about ICANN for ages in various leadership positions.
This contrasts with previous years, in which NomCom has gone outside of the community for board expertise.
NomCom also selected new members of the ccNSO, GNSO and ALAC, listed here.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

Afnic appoints Pierre Bonis new CEO

French ccTLD registry Afnic has named Pierre Bonis its new CEO.
Bonis officially started his new job today, but he’s been in the role on an interim basis since May 1, when he replaced Mathieu Weill.
Weill had abruptly quit after 12 years at Afnic in order to join the Digital Economy Department of the French government’s Directorate-General for Enterprise.
Bonis was Weill’s deputy for five years, so being kicked up the ladder by the Afnic board of trustees was perhaps not unexpected.

Comment Tagged: .fr, afnic

After slow launch, .africa looks to add hundreds of resellers

ZA Central Registry is opening up .africa and its South African city gTLDs to potentially hundreds of new registrars via a new proxy program.
The company today announced that its new registrar AF Proxy Services has received ICANN accreditation, which should open up .africa, .joburg, .capetown and .durban to its existing .za channel.
ZACR is the ccTLD registry for South Africa and as such it already has almost 500 partners accredited to sell .za names. But most of these resellers are not also ICANN accredited, so they cannot sell gTLD domains.
The AF Proxy service is intended to give these existing resellers the ability to sell ZACR’s four gTLDs without having to seek out an ICANN accreditation themselves.
“Effectively, all users of the AF Proxy service become resellers of the Proxy Registrar which is an elegant technical solution aimed at boosting new gTLD domain name registrations,” ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said in a press release.
While reseller networks are of course a staple of the industry and registries acting as retail registrars is fairly common nowadays, this new ZACR business model is unusual.
According to ZACR’s web site, it has 489 accredited .za registrars active today, with 52 more in testing and a whopping 792 more in the application process.
Depending on uptake of the proxy service, that could bring the number of potential .africa resellers to over 1,300.
And they’re probably needed.
The .africa gTLD went into general availability in July — after five years of expensive legal and quasi-legal challenges from rival applicant DotConnectAfrica — but has so far managed to put just 8,600 names in its zone file.
That’s no doubt disappointing for TLD serving a population of 1.2 billion and which had been expected to see substantial domain investor activity from overseas, particularly China.

2 Comments Tagged: .capetown, .durban, .joburg, af proxy services, africa, dotconnectafrica, ICANN, zacr

No $17 million rebate for struggling new gTLDs

ICANN has turned down a request for about $17 million to be refunded to under-performing new gTLD registries.
The organization cannot spare the cash from its $96 million new gTLD program war chest because it does not yet know how much it will need to spend in future, Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah told registries this week.
The Registries Stakeholder Group made the request for fee relief back in March, arguing that the $25,000 per-TLD fixed annual fee each registry must pay amounts to an unfair “burden” that has “hampered their success and put them at a competitive disadvantage”.
The RySG proposed that this $6,250 per quarter fee should be reduced by $4,687.50 per quarter for a year, a 75% reduction, at a cost to ICANN of $16.87 million.
The money, they said, should be drawn from the $96.1 million in new gTLD application fees that were still unspent at the time.
The new gTLD program charged each applicant $185,000 per application. About third of the fee was to cover unforeseen events, and is often sniggeringly referred to as its legal defense fund.
Because the program was meant to work only on a cost-recovery basis, there are question marks hanging over what ICANN should ultimately do with whatever cash is left over.
(It should be noted that this cash is separate from and does not include the quarter-billion dollars ICANN has squirreled away from its new gTLD last-resort auctions).
Now that the vast majority of the 2012 round’s 1,930 applications have been fully processed, it must have seemed like a good time for the RySG to ask for some cashback, but ICANN has declined.
Atallah said in a August 29 letter (pdf) to the group that ICANN has had to spent lots of its program reserve on unanticipated projects such as name collisions, universal acceptance, the EBERO program and the Trademark Clearinghouse. He wrote:

We do not yet know how much of the New gTLD Program remaining funds will be required to address future unanticipated expenses, and by when. As such, at this time, ICANN is not in a position to commit to the dispensation of any potential remaining funds from the New gTLD Program applications fees.

It seems for now the hundreds of new gTLDs with far fewer than 10,000 registrations in their zones are going to keep having to fork over $25,000 a year for the privilege.

16 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, rysg

MMX: three gTLDs approved for sale in Beijing

Three foreign new gTLDs have been approved for sale and resolution in Chinese capital Beijing, according to MMX.
The portfolio registry said today that its .vip is among the first to receive approval from the Beijing Communications Administration, one of China’s many regional authorities.
According to MMX, while many gTLDs have managed to pass through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s stringent vetting process, the Beijing local authority has so far been slow to follow the national regulator’s lead.
But BCA approved .vip, along with GMO’s .shop and Donuts’ .ltd on August 16, the registry said in a market update.
This gives .vip national coverage in China, adding Beijing’s 22 million inhabitants.
MMX added that 188,764 different .vip sites, of the over 600,000 in its zone file, are currently indexed by Chinese search engine Baidu.
It also said that it plans to start selling Chinese-script internationalized domain names in .vip (in IDN.ascii format) in November.

2 Comments Tagged: .ltd, .shop, .vip, bca, china, donuts, gmo, miit, mmx

.museum soon could be open to all (no haters please)

The 15-year-old .museum gTLD could soon be open to a great many more potential registrants, following an ICANN contract renewal.
The registry, MuseDoma, has negotiated a new Registry Agreement that rewrites eligibility rules to the extent that soon basically anyone should be able to register a name.
Since the gTLD went live back in 2002, it has been tightly restricted to legitimate museums and museum associations, as well as verifiable museum workers such as curators.
But the new proposed contract expands eligibility to “individuals with an interest or a link with museum profession and/or activity” and “bona fide museum users”.
It’s not at all clear how one proves they are a “bona fide museum user”, but the language suggests to me that the registry is likely to take registrants at their word and enforce some kind of post-registration review of how the domains are being used.
Indeed, the new contract contains the following new restriction:

Registration implies compliance with a fair use that only allows a use harmless to the image of museums and the community. Non-compliance will result in suspension or termination of the domain name.

So if you are fundamentally opposed to the idea of museums and want to set up a .museum web site trashing the entire concept, you probably won’t be allowed to.
Even though .museum was part of the “test-bed” application round from 2000, the proposed new contract has acquired chunks of the standard new gTLD RA from 2012.
As such, MuseDoma has agreed to take on the Uniform Rapid Suspension rights protection mechanism. This may prove somewhat controversial among those opposed to URS being “forced” on legacy gTLD registries before it has been approved as full ICANN policy.
The way ICANN fees are calculated — .museum’s flat fees are much lower — has not changed.
.museum has had a fairly steady 450 to 600 domains under management for the entirety of its existence.
The contract is open for public comment until October 3.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, musedoma, uniform rapid suspension, urs

CentralNic promises $30 million .sk will only ever mean “Slovakia”

CentralNic has committed that it will not repurpose Slovakian ccTLD .sk to mean anything other than “Slovakia”, following its purchase of SK-NIC this week.
The acquisition of the Bratislava-based registry, which will cost between €21 million and €26 million ($25 million to $31 million) depending on performance, has been controversial in Slovakia, with many leading registrars campaigning against the sale.
One of the charges leveled against CentralNic was that its modus operandi has been to market ccTLDs as if they have other meanings. It markets Laos’ .la as a TLD for Los Angeles, and acts as the back-end for Palau’s .pw, which is marketed as an acronym for “Professional Web”.
“From a technical point of view, it’s definitely a good acquisition. CentralNic has a good system that is stable and working well, but we don’t agree with their sales and marketing policies,” Ondrej Jombik of Slovak registrar Platon told DI today.
Jombik is the person who organized a petition against the sale that attracted almost 10,000 signatures.
“We don’t agree with how they manage national TLD registries,” he said. “What they do in Palau is not acceptable. What they do in Laos is not acceptable. We’re kind of scared what they plan to do with our domain, how they plan to market it.”
But CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford said in an email interview that these concerns are misplaced. He said:

CentralNic has never had plans to repurpose .sk, and CentralNic commits not to market it with any other meaning than as the Slovak country code. Moreover, while some of the ccTLDs we work with welcome the export revenues from repurposing their TLDs, such practices are specifically restricted under recent contractual requirements put in place by the Slovak Government in response to this concern being raised by SK-NIC’s policy committee.

Jombik’s petition, which claimed to be supported by 13 of the top 15 .sk registrars covering 73% of .sk’s 360,000 domains, called for the ccTLD to be handed over to a “new independent non-profit organization” that more fairly represented the Slovak internet community.
But Crawford said that .sk already has strong community representation, which is guaranteed by the registry’s contract with the Slovak government.
“I am honestly unaware of any ccTLD where the Government, the internet community in general and the registrars all have such a defined and important role,” he said, adding:

There will be changes under our management: The Government contract has recently been beefed up placing further stability and disclosure responsibilities on SK-NIC, including escrowing the registry data to the Government cloud, a formalised Service Level Agreement, giving the Government the right to audit SK-NIC’s performance, etc., all of which we will abide by. We have other ideas too on contributing to the Slovak internet, and we are planning to hold discussions with not for profits, industry associations, Universities and other such entities in Slovakia, to seek their guidance on the best ways to do this.

Whether these promises and actions will be enough to assuage critics of the deal, who are also motivated by a sense of national pride and aggrieved that what is arguably a national resource is falling into foreign hands, remains to be seen.
Having a ccTLD manager acquired outright by a foreign entity without a redelegation by ICANN/IANA is an unusual occurrence. Only the $109 million acquisition of .CO Internet by US-based Neustar back in 2014 springs to mind.

1 Comment Tagged: .sk, acquisition, centralnic, sk-nic

Former MarkMonitor execs join new brand protection registrar

Two former MarkMonitor executives have teamed up with a Fairwinds co-founder to launch a new “next generation” brand protection registrar.
The new company is Brandsight. It was set up by CEO Phil Lodico, who left brand consultancy Fairwinds about a year ago, and was accredited by ICANN earlier this month.
The first two hires are Matt Serlin, who until a couple months ago was VP of client services at MarkMonitor, and Elisa Cooper, who joins after being VP of marketing at the intellectual property management company Lecorpio.
Cooper, who also worked for MarkMonitor in the same position until a couple of years ago, will be Brandsight’s head of marketing and policy. Serlin will head up operations and client services.
The two told me yesterday that Brandsight will attempt to differentiate itself from its alma maters through a combination of better technology, expertise and use of data.
Both have many years experience in the domain industry and ICANN and, one imagines, thick contacts books of potential clients.
The Brandsight site, which went live today, will feature improved workflow via a streamlined user interface, they said.
The company also hopes “better leverage big data to help companies make better decisions and streamline processes around domain management”, Cooper said.
“Legacy registrars haven’t been focused on building new technology, some for almost 10 years,” she said.
It looks like it’s going to be a boutique operation at first — I believe Lodico, Serlin and Cooper are the only three employees right now — but Cooper said the plan is to staff up over the remainder of the year in areas such as sales.
The idea is to be a company that is purely focused on corporate domain services as its core competency, as opposed to what they called the “legacy” larger registrars that have domains as just one service among many, Cooper and Serlin said.
Brandsight is based in New York state and funded by private investors.

Comment Tagged: brandsight, cybersquatting, markmonitor, trademarks