auDA now looking to outsource .au registry

Australian ccTLD overseer auDA appears to have softened its approach to overhauling the management of .au.
The organization said today that it’s now planning to look for an “outsourced registry operation” that will come online in July 2018.
In recent months, the company had been looking for suppliers to help it build a dedicated, in-house, .au infrastructure, in addition to keeping its outsourcing options open.
Today, auDA said that its recent request for expressions of interest had concluded. It said:

The [Registry Transformation Project] team have been very pleased with the strength of responses received and recommended to the auDA Board that auDA should proceed to the next stage of the project. The auDA Board subsequently resolved to undertake a formal Request for Tender (RFT) process. The RFT will be restricted to the respondents of the REOI with a scope to deliver an outsourced registry operation, based on auDA’s updated specifications, by July 2018.

It looks like any registry providers that did not get their foot in the door with the REOI are now permanently shut out of the process.
Additionally, it appears as though auDA has settled on an outsourced, rather than in-house, solution. Given the fact that the majority of the industry is based on service-based registry solutions, that had always seemed like a strong possibility.
auDA now plans to post a draft technical spec for comment August 14 and a formal request for tenders August 28, with a view to picking a winner in October/November for a July 2018 launch.
The company currently uses Neustar as its back-end due to Neustar’s 2015 acquisition of 15-year incumbent AusRegistry.
The names of the companies responding to the REOI, and their number, have not been disclosed.
auDA is currently facing a member revolt, partly but by no means exclusively over its decision to build an in-house registry. The company’s chair finds out whether members want him fired or not on Monday.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, ausregistry, cctlds, neustar

.blog tops 100,000 names, 66,500 blogs

The new gTLD .blog has gone through the 100,000 registered domain mark, according to its registry.
Knock Knock Whois There said that the milestone was reached with the registration of kitchenmagic.blog today.
It’s a pretty good start for the gTLD, which went into general availability last November, making for an average of 12,500 names added per month.
While KKWT has offered discounts and volume incentives to registrars, its wholesale prices have not approached levels low enough to start attracting abusive use en masse. We’re talking around the $8 mark at the cheapest, I hear.
In fact, the registry said today that it reckons 66.5% of its domains — 66,500, in other words — “have a unique website associated with them”, compared with an industry average under 40%.
Both of those statistics seem to have been supplied by Pandalytics, the DomainsBot service to which KKWT subscribes, and do not appear to be publicly available.
If accurate, 66.5% usage is a much better statistic to brag about than 100,000 registrations, in my view. Usage, of course, drives the virtuous circle that leads to more sales.

3 Comments Tagged: .blog, automattic, kkwt, knock knock whois there, wordpress

Attendance dips for ICANN in Johannesburg

The number of people showing up for ICANN’s latest meeting was down compared to previous meetings, just-released statistics show.
The organization reported today that there were 1,353 attendees at the ICANN 59 meeting in Johannesburg last month, down from 1,436 at the comparable Helsinki meeting a year ago.
It was also down from the 2,089 people attending the Copenhagen meeting in March, but that’s to be expected due to the mid-year meeting having a shorter schedule more tightly focused on policy work.
It also seems to be typical for meetings in Africa to get lower attendance than meetings elsewhere in the world, given the relatively low participation at last year’s Marrakech meeting.
But attendance from the local region spiked again. There were 498 Africans there, 36% of the total. By comparison, just 5% of Copenhagen attendees were African.
This tilted the gender balance towards males, with declared female participation down to 31% from 33% in Copenhagen and 32% in Helsinki.
The number of people attending their first ICANN meeting was 33% of the total. That’s much higher than the 20% reported for Copenhagen. About two thirds of the noobs were from Africa.
These numbers are among the thousands of statistics released in the ICANN 59 roundup today, which for the first time included some eye-opening facts about food and drink consumption at the venue, reproduced here.

If these numbers are correct, there was one waiter or member of service staff for every 2.7 meeting attendees, which strikes me as a weirdly balanced ratio.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 59, johannesburg

Empowered Community makes first symbolic exercise of power

The new “Empowered Community” of ICANN has exercised its power for the first time.
The EC on Friday told ICANN that it has approved the ICANN board of directors’ recent resolution to create a new committee tasked with handling various oversight processes.
It’s of largely symbolic importance, the first test of whether the EC process works when the issue at hand is non-controversial.
The EC is a body made up of representatives of ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization, At-Large Advisory Committee, Country Code Names Supporting Organization, Generic Names Supporting Organization and Government Advisory Committee.
Among its powers and responsibilities is the duty to accept or reject changes to ICANN’s fundamental bylaws.
Some of those bylaws concern the composition and roles of board committees, so creating a new such committee required EC assent.
All five EC members, known as Decisional Participants, approved the resolution (pdf).
The EC also has the power to reject ICANN’s budget. The deadline for exercising this power for the 2017/18 budget is approaching soon, but I’m not expecting that to happen.

Comment Tagged: empowered community, ICANN

CentralNic brings back old CFO

CentralNic has swapped its currently chief financial officer for his immediate predecessor.
Glenn Hayward has left the company after three and a half years “to pursue other opportunities”, the company said in a statement to the markets today.
He has been replaced by Don Baladasan, who was CFO of the company between 2010 and 2014.
During his previous stint in the role, he oversaw CentralNic’s flotation on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

Comment Tagged: centralnic

Short .vegas domains go on sale

Dot Vegas has made one and two-character .vegas domain names available to register on a first-come, first-served basis.
Single-character domains such as a.vegas and 7.vegas and two-character names such as 77.vegas and bj.vegas all appear to be available, including domains that match country-code TLDs.
Prices seem to be around the $2,750 to $3,299 mark for the one-character names at the three registrars Dot Vegas plugged in its announcement.
For the two-character names, you’re looking at $550 to $699, again depending on registrar.
Renewal fees for these short names seem to be about double what you’d expect to pay per year for a regular .vegas name, starting at over $100 per year.
Of the three promoted registrars — GoDaddy, Uniregistry and NameCheap — Uniregistry appears to be the cheapest and GoDaddy the most expensive.
The .vegas gTLD has been on the market for about three years and has about 16,000 domains in its zone file currently.

5 Comments Tagged: .vegas, dot vegas, premium, short

GoDaddy flips hosting business for $456 million

GoDaddy has sold off its recently acquired PlusServer business for €397 million ($456 million).
The buyer is a private equity firm, BC Partners.
The registrar had taken control of the business when it spent $1.79 billion on Host Europe Group earlier this year, but had said from the start that the asset was for sale.
PlusServer sells hosting to larger companies, which have more demanding support needs that small-business-focused GoDaddy is accustomed to dealing with.
The unit was bringing in annual revenue approaching $100 million per year.
GoDaddy said it planned to put the proceeds of the flip towards paying off some loans.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, bc partners, godaddy, heg, host europe group, plusserver

Domain growth slows a lot in Q1

The growth of the domain name industry slowed in the first quarter, numbers published today by Verisign reveal.
According to its latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), the domain universe grew to 330.6 million in Q1.
That’s an increase of 1.3 million names on Q4 2016, a 0.4% sequential increase, and 11.8 million names, 3.7% growth, compared to Q1 2016.
In the Q4 DNIB, Verisign reported industry growth of 0.7% and 6.8% respectively.
The only change on the list of the top 10 TLDs was that .nl and .xyz switched places (.xyz is now in 10th place, with 5.6 million names, but this rank will not last long).
ccTLDs in general did not match the growth of the overall market. There were approximately 143.1 million ccTLD domains at the end of March, up 0.3% sequentially and 1.7% year over year, both substantially smaller numbers than reported in Q4.
The free ccTLD .tk, which has been responsible for huge swings in recent reports, is reported to have declined by about 100,000 names to 18.6 million.
Excluding .tk, the growth rate of ccTLDs was better — 0.5% sequentially and 3.9% compared to the year-ago quarter.
Verisign’s data is largely based on zone files for gTLDs and independent researcher ZookNic for ccTLDs.

Comment Tagged: dnib, domain name industry brief, versign

Governments slammed for overreach as Amazon wins gTLD appeal

Amazon has won its appeal against the rejection of its .amazon gTLD application, in a ruling that criticizes ICANN for giving too much deference to government advice.
The Independent Review Process panel’s 2-to-1 ruling, delivered July 11 and published this week, means that .amazon and its Chinese and Japanese translations has been un-rejected and ICANN will have to consider approving it again.
The ruling (pdf) turns on the idea that ICANN’s board of directors rejected the gTLD based on nothing more than the groundless objections of a few South American governments.
Amazon’s applications were rejected three years ago when ICANN accepted the consensus advice of its Governmental Advisory Committee.
That advice, which had no attached rationale, had come largely at the behest of Brazil and Peru, two countries through which the Amazon river flows.
At issue was the word “Amazon”, which the governments protested matched the name of an important geographic region extending into several countries.
But the string was not protected by ICANN’s new gTLD program rules because it does not match the name of an administrative region of any country.
Regardless, Brazil and Peru said that to give .amazon to Amazon would prevent it being used in future by citizens of the informal South American region.
GAC consensus was reached only after the US government, for political reasons connected to the then-recent announcement of the IANA transition, decided to withdraw its objection to the advice.
Consensus, under GAC rules means simply that no one government objects to the proposed advice. It does not indicate unanimity.
But at no point in the pubic record of discussions within the GAC or ICANN board did anyone give any substantial public policy reasons for the objection, the IRP panel has now found.
Global Domains Division chief Akram Atallah testified before the panel that consensus GAC advice sets “too high for the Board to say no.”
It seems ICANN sometimes just assumes that GAC advice by default is rooted in sound public policy, even when that is not the case.
Brazil and Peru’s objections “do not appear to be based on well-founded public policy concerns that justify the denial of the applications” the panelists wrote.
The panel wrote:

We conclude that GAC consensus advice, although no reasons or rationale need be given, nonetheless must be based on a well-founded public interest concern and this public interest basis must be ascertained or ascertainable from the entirety of the record…
the Board cannot simply accept GAC consensus advice as conclusive. The GAC has not been granted a veto under ICANN’s governance documents.

So, while the GAC was under no obligation to state its reasons for objecting to .amazon, the ICANN board was obliged to state its reasons for accepting this advice beyond just “the GAC made us do it”.
As somebody who spent much of 2011 arguing that the GAC new gTLD veto was a bad idea, it’s nice to see the panel agree with me.
The GAC itself also erred by refusing to consider Amazon’s arguments in favor of its application, the IRP panel’s majority found.
Peru had publicly claimed that the string “Amazon” was protected under ICANN rules, which was not true, and Amazon did not have the opportunity to correct the record.
Amazon had also pointed out that the Brazilian oil company Ipiranga was granted its application for .ipiranga, despite its name matching the name of a Brazilian river apparently so important that it is referred to in the Brazilian national anthem.
However, the IRP panel decided that because ICANN’s board had not taken any action on .ipiranga, there was no basis for it to consider whether Amazon had been unfairly subject to different treatment.
In conclusion, this is what the panel has sent to the board:

The Panel recommends that the Board of ICANN promptly re-evaluate Amazon’s applications in light of the Panel’s declarations above. In its re-evaluation of the applications, the Board should make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications. Further, if the Board determines that the applications should not proceed, the Board should explain its reasons supporting that decision. The GAC consensus advice, standing alone, cannot supplant the Board’s independent and objective decision with a reasoned analysis.

It seems Amazon’s chances of having .amazon approved have improved. If ICANN wants to reject the applications again it is going to have to come up with some good reasons, some good reasons that possibly do not exist.
The panel also ordered ICANN to reimburse Amazon for the $163,045.51 it spent on the IRP.

2 Comments Tagged: amazon, gac, ICANN, irp

ICANN gives the nod to Donuts-Rightside merger

ICANN has given its consent to the acquisition of Rightside by rival new gTLD registry Donuts, according to the companies.
The nod means that one barrier to the $213 million deal has been lifted.
Rightside, which is listed on Nasdaq, still needs the majority of its shareholders to agree to the deal and to satisfy other customary closing conditions.
ICANN approval does not mean the organization has passed any judgment about whether the deal is pro-competition or anything like that, it just means it’s checked that the buyer has the funds and the nous to run the TLDs in question and is compliant with various policies.
All new gTLD Registry Agreements given ICANN the right to consent — or not — to the contract being assigned to a third party.
The acquisition was announced last month at the end of a turbulent year or so for Rightside.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, donuts, ICANN, rightside