Domainers want the head of auDA’s chair

Disgruntled domainers have managed to arrange for a vote on whether auDA chair Stuart Benjamin should be fired.
auDA, the .au ccTLD administrator, has been under fire for many months from registrants who believe the organization is being managed in an increasingly erratic and secretive manner.
Now, a campaign and petition at Grumpy.com.au, run by Domainer.com.au publisher Ned O’Meara, has led to auDA calling a special meeting July 31 with a single resolution on the agenda:

That Stuart Benjamin be removed as a director of the Company with immediate effect.

Benjamin will therefore lose his job with simple majority votes of both classes of auDA members — “supply” class, meaning registrars, and “demand” class, meaning registrants.
O’Meara blogged yesterday that he believes there is “a slightly less than even chance” of the resolution being carried due to the possible lack of votes from supply class members.
But auDA rejected as legally “invalid” three additional resolutions that had been proposed.
Grumpy members had also wanted auDA to restore all of its board’s meeting minutes that were inexplicably deleted from the organization’s web site.
They’d wanted a recently instituted member code of conduct to be scrapped, rewritten, and then put to members for a vote.
The code of conduct bans “harassment” and “bullying” of auDA staff, but it also prevents members from talking to the media about auDA in disparaging terms.
Finally, they’d also wanted auDA to abandon its plan to build an in-house registry infrastructure (replacing current provider Neustar) without first putting the plan to a member vote.
But all of these resolutions have been taken off the table on the basis of unspecified “legal advice” provided to auDA.
According to O’Meara and others, dissatisfaction with the organization has been brewing for some time, ever since late 2015 when Benjamin was brought in as a “demand” class director and appointed chair, only to be quickly dismissed and immediately reinstated as an “independent” director and reappointed chair.
In March 2016, 16-year CEO Chris Disspain was fired and replaced by Cameron Boardman.
I’m told auDa has been hemorrhaging staff for months — 10 of its 13 employees have apparently left the organization this year.

3 Comments Tagged: .au, auda, cctlds, grumpy.com.au

ICANN expects to lose 750 registrars in the next year

ICANN is predicting that about 750 accredited registrars will close over the next 12 months due to the over-saturation of the drop-catching market.
ICANN VP Cyrus Namazi made the estimate while explaining ICANN’s fiscal 2018 budget, which is where the projection originated, at the organization’s public meeting in South Africa last week.
He said that ICANN ended its fiscal 2017 last week with 2,989 accredited registrars, but that ICANN expects to lose about 250 per quarter starting from October until this time next year.
These almost 3,000 registrars belong to about 400 registrar families, he said.
By my estimate, roughly two thirds of the registrars are shell accreditations under the ownership of just three companies — Web.com (Namejet and SnapNames), Pheenix, and TurnCommerce (DropCatch.com).
These companies lay out millions of dollars on accreditation fees in order to game ICANN rules and get more connections to registries — mainly Verisign’s .com.
More connections gives them a greater chance of quickly registering potentially valuable domains milliseconds after they are deleted. Drop-catching, in other words.
But Namazi indicated that ICANN’s cautious “best estimate” is that there’s not enough good stuff dropping to justify the number of accreditations these three companies own.
“With the model we have, I believe at the moment the total available market for these sought-after domains that these multifamily registrars are after is not able to withstand the thousands of accreditations that are there,” he said. “Each accreditation costs quite a bit of money.”
Having a registrar accreditation costs $4,000 a year, not including ICANN’s variable and transaction fees.
“We think the market has probably gone beyond what the available market is,” he said.
He cautioned that the situation was “fluid” and that ICANN was keeping an eye on it because these accreditations fees have become material to its budget in the last few years.
If the three drop-catchers do start dumping registrars, it would reveal an extremely short shelf life for their accreditations.
Pheenix upped its registrar count by 300 and DropCatch added 500 to its already huge stable as recently as December 2016.

6 Comments Tagged: drop catching, dropcatch.com, ICANN, namejet, pheenix, snapnames, turncommerce, web.com

.blog renewal prices will not go up, registry promises

Knock Knock Whois There, the .blog registry, has promised not to raise its wholesale fees on existing registrations.
The company, which is affiliated with WordPress, seems to have made the move in response to ongoing registrar discomfort following Uniregistry’s plan to significant raise the price of several of its new gTLDs (which has since been backpedaled).
The promise has been baked into the Registry-Registrar Agreement under which all of its registrars can sell .blog names.
The new RRA reads (with the new text in italics):

5.1.1. Registrar agrees to pay Registry Operator or its designee in accordance with the fee schedule set forth in Exhibit A for initial and renewal registrations and other services provided by Registry Operator to Registrar (collectively, “Fees”). Registry Operator reserves the right, from time to time, to modify the Fees in a manner consistent with ICANN policies and Registry Policies. However, once a domain is registered, Registry Operator will not modify the Renewal Fee of that domain.

This of course leaves the door open for KKWT to increase the price of a new registration, but it seems renewal prices are frozen.
I believe the current wholesale .blog fee starts at $16 per year.
The new RRA also adds ICANN-mandated language concerning the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy and a clarification about registrar legal indemnifications, KKWT said.

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

ICANN shuffles regional bosses, drops “hub” concept

ICANN has made a couple of changes to its senior management team and abandoned the Chehade-era concept of “hub” offices.
Rather than having three offices it calls “hubs” in different parts of the world — Los Angeles, Istanbul and Singapore — it will now have five of what it calls “regional offices”.
As well as the three former hubs, one will be in Brussels, Belgium and the other in Montevideo, Uruguay.
A few vice presidents are being shuffled around to head up each of these offices.
Senior policy VP David Olive is being replaced as managing director of the Istanbul office by Nick Tomasso, who’s also VP in charge of ICANN’s public meetings. Olive will carry on in his VP role, but back in Washington DC, from August.
Fellow policy VP and veteran GAC relations guy Olof Nordling is retiring from ICANN at the end of the July. His role as MD of the Brussels office will be filled by Jean-Jacques Sahel, VP of stakeholder engagement for Europe.
Rodrigo de la Parra, VP of stakeholder engagement for the Latin America region, will be MD of the Montevideo office. Jia-Rong Low runs the Singapore office. ICANN CEO Goran Marby of course is top dog in LA.
The difference in nomenclature — “hub” versus “regional office” — looks to me like it’s quite minor.
Former CEO Fadi Chehade had early on in his stint at ICANN professed a desire to pursue a strategy of aggressive internationalization, with hub offices having equal importance, but I don’t think the idea ever really took off to the extent he expected and he didn’t stick around long enough to see it through.
In addition, the IANA transition last year, which separated ICANN from its US government oversight, pretty much carved ICANN’s California roots into stone for the time being.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

.net price increases approved

Verisign has been given the right to continue to raise the wholesale price of .net domains.
It now seems likely the price charged to registrars will top $15 by 2023.
ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend approved the renewal of the .net Registry Agreement, which gives Verisign the right increase its prices by 10% per year for the six years of the contract.
Assuming the company exercises all six options — and there’s no reason to assume it will not — the price of a .net would be $15.27 by the time the contract expires, $0.75 of which would be paid to ICANN in fees.
There was some negative public comment (pdf) about the increases, largely from domainers and those representing domainers, but the ICANN board saw nothing to persuade it to change the terms of the contract.
In notes appended to its resolution, the board stated:

the Board understands that the current price cap provisions in Verisign’s Registry Agreements, including in the .NET Registry Agreement, evolved historically to address various market factors in cooperation with constituencies beyond ICANN including the Department of Commerce. During the negotiations for the renewal, Verisign did not request to alter the pricing cap provisions, the parties did not negotiate these provisions and the provisions remain changed from the previous agreement. The historical 10% price cap was arguably included to allow the Registry Operator to increase prices to account for inflation and increased costs/investments and to take into account other market forces but were not dictated solely by ICANN.

(I assume the word “changed” in that quote should have read “unchanged”.)
Unlike contract renewals for other pre-2012 gTLDs, the .net contract does not include any of the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms, such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy.
ICANN explained this disparity by saying these mechanisms are not consensus policies and that it has no right to impose them on legacy gTLD registry operators.

1 Comment Tagged: .net, ICANN, pricing, verisign

India to have SIXTEEN ccTLDs

While most countries are content to operate using a single ccTLD, India is to up its count to an unprecedented 16.
It already has eight, but ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend approved the delegation of an additional eight.
The new ccTLDs, which have yet to hit the root, are .ಭಾರತ, .ഭാരതം, .ভাৰত, .ଭାରତ, .بارت, .भारतम्, .भारोत, and .ڀارت.
If Google Translate and Wikipedia can be trusted, these words all mean “India” in, respectively, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia, Arabic, Nepali, Hindi and Sindhi.
They were all approved under ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track program and will not operate under ICANN contract.
India already has seven internationalized domain name versions of its ccTLD in seven other scripts, along with its vanilla ASCII .in.
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will be ccTLD manager for the whole lot.
India may have as many as 122 languages, according to Wikipedia, with 30 spoken by more than a million people.

6 Comments Tagged: .بارت, .ڀارت, .भारतम्, .भारोत, .ভাৰত, .ଭାରତ, .ಭಾರತ, .ഭാരതം, cctlds, ICANN, idns, nixi

ICANN heading to Japan and Canada in 2019

ICANN has named two of the host cities for its 2019 public meetings.
The community will descend upon Kobe, Japan in March 2019 for the first meeting of the year and will head to Montreal, Canada, for the annual general meeting in November.
Both locations were approved by the ICANN board of directors at a meeting this weekend.
The location of the middle “policy forum” meeting for 2019 has not yet been identified.
ICANN is currently meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. Later this year it will convene in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Spanish speakers can rejoice next year, when the locations, in order, are Barcelona, Panama City and San Juan (the Puerto Rican one).

Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 59, johannesburg, kobe, montreal

Uniregistry sale leads to BBC telling millions that domainers exist

The BBC dedicated five minutes of prime-time air to telling the British public that domainers exist, after a Uniregistry domain name sale led to interest from producers.
The One Show appears on BBC One at 7pm five days a week. It’s the BBC’s flagship magazine program and appears to currently have about 3.5 million viewers per day.
It’s notorious for its hosts’ often jarring segues between sycophantic interviews with visiting celebrities and prerecorded human interest stories covering everything from people who collect doylies to people who are dying from AIDS.
In Friday’s episode — guest-hosted by Jerry Springer, no less — the first VT of the show is about domainers.
Regular host Alex Jones points out that while Springer and guest Rita Ora own their matching .com domains, fellow guest Tracey Ullman’s .com name is on the market for $795 (it’s registered to HugeDomains, but that isn’t mentioned).
Ullman laughs, and the UDRP-fodder is never mentioned again.
Cut to VT.
The roving reporter, whose name is not given, tells us that there are 335 million domains on the internet today, anyone can come up with one, and that “there are other people out there known as ‘domain dealers’ who buy these domains and sell them on for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pounds”.
Brit domainer Graham Haynes is then introduced as “one of the first people to buy and sell domains”. He says he sold a portfolio of domains for £1.5 million ($1.91 million at today’s exchange rate) and spent $600,000 on furniture.co.uk.
Haynes says domains are always going up in value so he always tries to hold on as long as he can before he sells.
Then we get a few seconds over Skype with Aron Meystedt, who bought first-ever .com Symbolics.com eight years ago and says the name as been a “good cornerstone” of his portfolio. He uses the word “domainer” for the first time.
Then our reporter says she wants to find out whether she has what it takes to be a domainer.
We’re introduced to 25-year-old domainer Simon Whipps, who says he buys domains for £10 to £20 and sells them to end users for about £1,000.
The reporter hands him a list of domains she’s come up with and gives him half an hour to tell her whether they’re worth anything or not.
Then we’re off to the Cayman Islands, where a Londoner identified only as “Mo” lives. It’s presented as if he’s living the high life on a beach having made a killing from domains.
I believe he’s Mohammed Khan, a broker from Uniregistry. He says he helped broker personalloans.com ($1 million) and kiwi.com ($800,000).
Then it’s into the Uniregistry office, where a VP identified (mistakenly, it turns out) as “Alan Schwartz” mentions that he helped broker the $13 million sale of sex.com.
Back to Whipps, who tells the reporter than the only two domains on her list worth a damn are christmas.net and adventure.net. Given she owns neither, it’s not clear how she came up with these picks.
All in all, it’s a strange, thin, directionless fluff piece with nothing to say about domaining other than the fact that it exists. It could have been produced at basically any time in the last 15 years with barely any changes.
According to Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling, the item came about as a result of interest from producers after Uniregistry made an aftermarket sale to somebody involved in the show.
It’s not clear who the buyer was or what the domain was, but apparently the kernel of the idea of the piece came about “organically” as a result of the deal.

10 Comments Tagged: the one show, uniregistry

Cybersquatting cases down in .uk

The number of cybersquatting complaints filed against .uk domains fell in 2016, according to data out this week from Nominet.
The .uk registry said that there were 703 complaints filed with its Dispute Resolution Service in the year, down from 728 in 2015.
However, the number of individual domains complained about appears to have increased, from 745 to 785. That’s partly due to registrants owning both .co.uk and .uk versions of the same name.
The number of cases that resulted in domains being transferred was 53%, the same as 2015, Nominet said.
The large majority of cases were filed by UK-based entities against UK-based registrants, the stats show.

Comment Tagged: .uk, cybersquatting, drs, nominet

As .boots self-terminates, ICANN will not redelegate it

The dot-brand .boots may become the first single-dictionary-word gTLD to be taken off the market, as The Boots Company told ICANN it no longer wishes to be a registry.
Boots, the 168-year-old British pharmacy chain, told ICANN in April that it is unilaterally terminating its Registry Agreement for .boots and ICANN opened it up for comment this week.
As with the 22 self-terminating dot-brands before it, .boots was unloved and unused, with just the solitary, ICANN-mandated nic.boots in its zone file.
Boots, as well as being a universally known brand name in the UK and Ireland, is of course a generic dictionary word representing an unrelated class of goods (ie footwear).
It’s the first dying dot-brand to have this kind of dual use, making it potentially modestly attractive as a true generic TLD.
However, because it’s currently a dot-brand with no third-party users, it will not be redelegated to another registry.
Under Specification 13 of the Registry Agreement, which gives dot-brands special rights, ICANN has the ability to redelegate dot-brands, but only if it’s in the public interest to do so. That’s clearly not the case in this instance.
These rules also state that ICANN is not allowed to delegate .boots to any other company for a period of two years after the contract ends.
Given that there’s no chance of ICANN delegating any gTLDs in the next two years, this has no real impact. Perhaps, if the ICANN community settles on a rolling gTLD application process in future, this kind of termination may be of more interest.

1 Comment Tagged: boots, dot-brands, ICANN, termination