Forget emojis, you can buy Egyptian hieroglyph .com domains

Call them the Emojis of the Ancient World.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were once the cutting edge of written communication, and it turns out Verisign lets you register .com domains using them.
Internationalized domain names expert Andre Schapp discovered a couple months ago that the Unicode code points for the ancient script have been approved in 16 Verisign gTLDs, and apparently no others.
This means that domains such as should resolve.
Unfortunately, DI’s database does not support these characters, so I’m having to use images.
But at least one domain investor seems have snapped up a few dozen single-pictograph Egyptian hieroglyph names about a month ago, and his page has clickable links.
Whether you see the hieroglyph or the Punycode, prefixed “xn--“, seems to depend on your browser configuration.
Ancient Egyptian is apparently not the only dead script that Verisign supports.
According to IANA, you can also get .com domains in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, which went out of fashion in the second century CE, as well Phoenician, the world’s oldest known script.
Then there’s Imperial Aramaic, Meitei, Kharosthi, ‘Phags-pa, Sylheti Nagari and goodness knows how many other extinct writing systems.
It seems .com has been approved for 237 IDN scripts, in total. Let it not be said that Verisign does not offer domainers ample opportunity to spunk their cash on gibberish.
No Klingon, though.

12 Comments Tagged: .com, emojis, hieroglyphs, idns, verisign

Donuts to pay $213 million for Rightside

Donuts is to acquire Rightside for $213 million, the companies have just announced.
The $10.60 per share cash offer represents a 12% premium over Rightside’s average closing share price over the last 30 days. Rightside’s 52-week high is over $12.
Just one year ago, Donuts offered $70 million for Rightside’s portfolio of gTLDs, but was shot down.
Rightside also turned down a $5 million offer for four gTLDs from XYZ.com in April 2016.
The $213 million offer is funded at least partly by Silicon Valley Bank, which is providing a credit facility to Donuts.
Assuming the deal closes — which will require the holders of more than half its shares to agree to the price — it will make Rightside a private company once more, as a wholly owned Donuts subsidiary.
The two gTLD registries are already partners, with Rightside providing domain registry services for Donuts’ roughly 200 new gTLDs.
There was talk of a split last year, with Donuts apparent endorsement of Google’s Nomulus platform, but the two companies reaffirmed their relationship earlier this year.
Rightside itself has a portfolio of 40 gTLDs, but it’s faced criticism from shareholders over the last year or so over their relatively poor performance.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, who owns almost 9% of Rightside, has been pressuring the company’s board to take radical action for the last 15 months.
Earlier this year, Rightside got out of the once-core wholesale registrar game by selling eNom to rival Tucows for $83.5 million.

11 Comments Tagged: acquisition, donuts, rightside

Bladel quits as Council chair as GoDaddy ruled “ineligible” for election

GNSO Council Chair James Bladel has resigned, after it emerged that GoDaddy, his employer, is not eligible for office under registrar rules.
He will continue to occupy the post on an interim basis until a new election is held.
Bladel was elected to represent the Registrars Stakeholder Group on the Council back in 2013 and was elected by the Council as chair in late 2015.
However, the RrSG has just discovered that he’s actually ineligible for elected office under its charter because GoDaddy is also a dot-brand registry.
The RrSG charter states that in order to avoid conflicts of interest, a registrar that also has a Specification 9 exemption from the registry Code of Conduct in an ICANN registry conduct may not hold office.
GoDaddy signed its .godaddy registry agreement, which includes the Spec 9 exemption, in July 2015. The gTLD is not currently being used.
GoDaddy is of course the largest registrar in the industry, but it appears its ability to wield power in ICANN’s policy-making bodies now appears to be hamstrung by its foray into new gTLDs.
Bladel’s resignation is not expected to have any significant impact on GNSO Council work.
He’s been reappointed by the RrSG executive committee on an interim basis until elections can be held for a replacement. His term is due to expire in November anyway.

3 Comments Tagged: dot-brands, gnso, godaddy, ICANN

Should ICANN get breastfeeding areas? Have your say!

ICANN has launched a survey of community members’ views on gender, apparently trying to figure out whether it has a sexism problem.
The short, anonymous quiz, published today, asks a bunch of reasonable questions about gender diversity at ICANN’s physical meetings and online interactions.
The organization wants to know if you think your gender has had any influence on your participation at ICANN, and whether you think it could in your future in the community.
It wants to know if you think ICANN is too male-dominated, whether gender is a barrier to progression, and whether you feel represented by current leadership.
The survey also throws up a few questions I found a little surprising.
Should ICANN be holding “educational” sessions on gender diversity? Should it have “mandatory” diversity “quotas”? Should its meetings have breastfeeding areas? Would people who don’t identify as either gender have difficulty ascending to leadership positions?
Founded in 1998, ICANN is the organization tasked with coordinating certain of the internet’s unique technical identifiers.

1 Comment Tagged: gender, ICANN

Domain President? Dicker fallout continues as Schwartz unleashes tweetstorm

“Domain King” domain investor Rick Schwartz has twunleashed a twirade of Twitter twabuse about deleted podcasts that would put Donald Trump to shame.
Starting late Sunday night and apparently still ongoing at time of publication, Schwartz has been haranguing Michael Cyger, publisher of the DomainSherpa and DNAcademy investor sites, about dozens of deleted DomainSherpa podcasts.
So far, he’s hit send on scores of tweets. A very small sample:

Mike, I think you should stop ignoring Mike Berkens @thedomains & myself before this gets out of control and spills over all over the place.

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

Exactly right! So @DomainSherpa should stop being a COWARD and clean this MESS up that HE ALONE CREATED. NOW!!!! SELF-DESTRUCTION! #Domains

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

No idea why @DomainSherpa jumped on the thread other day & opened up this GIANT CAN OF WORMS?? Then ignored everything. BAD MOVE! #Domains

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

Cyger was the host of the DomainSherpa video podcast, which regularly featured Schwartz and TheDomains publisher Mike Berkens as guests.
Also a regular guest was industry pariah Adam Dicker, who many domainers believe has used shady business practices in his dealings with others in the community.
After stories began to emerge of Dicker’s alleged wrongdoings, Cyger decided to stop using him as a guest. He subsequently removed all previous shows featuring Dicker from the DomainSherpa web site.
Now, Schwartz and Berkens are pissed that the hundreds of hours they volunteered into appearing on the show were wasted, and that hundreds of social media links they used to promote the shows are useless.
The three parties chatted by phone back in March, all seem to agree, about how to resolve this issue.
Cyger says it was agreed that the deleted shows would be replaced by an explanation that the show had been removed.
But Berkens and Schwartz claim that Cyger has in fact been ignoring their requests to reinstate the shows — hence the tweetstorm over the last 24 hours. Cyger denies that claim, and says he believes he did the right thing by removing the shows.
I, for the record, have no opinion on the matter.

17 Comments Tagged: domain king, domainsherpa, thedomains

InternetNZ wants to fire two of its three (!) CEOs

InternetNZ, the .nz ccTLD operator, is proposing a radical simplification of the organization in order to stay relevant in the age of new gTLDs.
A proposal put forward late last week would see the non-profit organization fold its two subsidiaries back into the parent and consolidate management under a single CEO.
Currently, InternetNZ owns Domain Name Commission Limited (DNCL), the .nz policy oversight body, and NZRS Limited, which actually runs the registry. Each of the three entities has its own CEO.
The new proposal describes the situation like this:

Our governance and management structures are cumbersome and a lack of single point of accountability makes it difficult to progress work across the group. The size of governance groups and management resource is out of proportion to the size of the organisation and the size of the issues it is dealing with. There are 20 governors, three chief executives and around 10 senior executives for the 35 FTE [Full Time Employees] across the three organisations.

The New Zealand organization needs to streamline, according to the working group that came up with the paper, in order to more effectively compete with the influx of new TLDs, which has seen ccTLDs see slowing growth.
.nz is one of the few ccTLDs that has a direct new gTLD competitor — .kiwi.
It also wants to diversify its revenue streams outside of domain registration fees, according to the paper, with a target of NZD 1 million ($720,000) from alternate sources by 2020.
As a member-based organization, InternetNZ has put the proposal out for public comment until June 30. It will make a decision in August.

1 Comment Tagged: .kiwi, .nz, cctlds, internetnz, new gTLDs

CIRA and Nominum offering DNS firewall

Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA has started offering DNS-based security services to Canadian companies.
The company has partnered with DNS security services provider Nominum to develop D-Zone DNS Firewall, which it said lets customers “block access to malicious content before it can reach their network”.
It’s basically a recursive DNS service with a layer of filterware that blocks access to lists of domains, such as those used by command and control servers, known to be connected to malware and phishing.
It’s a timely offering, given the high-profile WannaCry ransomware which infected hundreds of thousands of unpatched Windows boxes worldwide last month (though I’m not sure this kind of service would have actually prevented its spread).
The CIRA service uses Nominum’s technology but operates at Canadian internet exchange points and appears to be marketed at Canadian customers.
It’s the latest effort by CIRA to expand outside of its core .ca registry business. Earlier this year, it became ICANN’s newest approved gTLD back-end provider after a deal with .kiwi.
Many ccTLD registries are looking outside of their traditional businesses as the increasingly cluttered TLD market puts a squeeze on registration growth.

Comment Tagged: .ca, cira, nominum, security, wannacry

DENIC gets approved for registry escrow

DENIC is now able to offer data escrow services to gTLD registries, in addition to registrars.
The non-profit company, which runs Germany’s .de, said it gained ICANN approval for the registry escrow function June 6.
Back in March, ICANN approved it for the registrar escrow services.
All ICANN-accredited registries and registrars are contractually obliged to deposit their registrant data with escrow agents in case they go out of business, go rogue, suffer catastrophic data loss, or otherwise screw up.
Nine companies have been approved by ICANN for registry data escrow so far.
Two of others are based in Europe, but DENIC claims to be the only one that offers full compliance with the more stringent German and European Union data protection regulations.

Comment Tagged: .de, denic, escrow, ICANN, new gTLDs

ICANN scraps remote meeting hubs

ICANN is doing away with remote participation hubs for its thrice-yearly public meetings.
The organization said yesterday that the hubs were barely used and often hit technical barriers.
For avoidance of doubt, we’re not talking about remote participation here, we’re just talking about the “hubs” that various community members would set up in their home nations for locals who for whatever reason could not attend meetings in person.
Basically, they were a bunch of guys in a room somewhere in the southern hemisphere, watching the live meeting video stream and occasionally streaming their own wonky video and crackly audio into the primary meeting location in order to say, ask a question.
The first ones I’m aware of were in 2010 for the Nairobi meeting, when some Europeans and North Americans didn’t want to travel due to terrorism concerns, but ICANN formally started financially supporting them a couple years ago.
Two of the meetings since then did not have hubs. The mid-year Policy Forum in Helsinki didn’t have one last year, and the Hyderabad meeting couldn’t have them due to the ship fire that destroyed ICANN kit.
In January this year, ICANN said it would only pay for remote participation if the remote hubs could rustle up more than 25 participants each. There were also technical requirements that had to be met.
That seems to have been a tall order, so it looks like Copenhagen will be the last meeting ICANN will pay for these hubs.
There’s nothing stopping bunches of guys gathering together around Adobe Connect screens and participating that way, of course.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN

MMX says .vip renewals to be at 70%+

MMX believes the biggest money-spinner in its new gTLD portfolio, .vip, will see first-year renewals in excess of 70%.
The company said this morning that it is projecting renewals towards the top end of industry norms based on manual renewals to date.
.vip was a bit of a hit in China, topping a quarter-million domains in its first month of general availability a year ago. It peaked at around 750,000 domains a month ago.
MMX said in a statement:

To date, actual deletions for the first 31 days of registrations for .vip from China are currently less than 1%, with manually confirmed renewals for the same period already at over 60%, with the remainder being placed on auto-renew by registrars on behalf of their customers.
Whilst not all of those placed on auto-renew will be renewed, MMX expects the overall renewal rate for the first month of .vip registrations, which will be published in late July, to place .vip in-line with the best-in-class renewal rates of leading western facing top-level domains (i.e. c. 70% and above).

While MMX has made much of the fact that it has not sold .vip names for almost nothing, unlike some competitors, they’re still pretty cheap in China.
.vip names sell for the CNY equivalent of $3 to $4 at the major Chinese registrars. GoDaddy prices them at $20.
CEO Toby Hall said that there had been some volume-based discounts available to registrars, but “nothing which took the pricing below our general availability pricing”.
Its actual renewal rate will become clear at the end of July, MMX said.

1 Comment Tagged: .vip, china, mmx, renewals