Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

With Zika fears, is ICANN dissing Latin America?

Kevin Murphy, May 10, 2016, Domain Policy

Internet organizations in Latin America are pissed off with ICANN for cancelling its Panama public meeting and potentially cancelling its Puerto Rico meeting.
They said that the cancellations will have “a direct negative impact on the participation of our communities in the region, since they view these meetings as favorable opportunities to get together for the development of their respective work agendas, leveraging geographic and cultural proximity.”
“This has a direct effect on the development of the Internet in our regions,” they added.
The comments came in a May 5 letter (pdf) from the Latin America and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) the Latin America and Caribbean TLD Association (LACTLD) and the Latin America and Caribbean Association of Internet Exchange Points (LAC-IX).
Together, they represent IP addressing, ccTLDs and internet exchanges in the region.
ICANN recently switched its ICANN 56 venue from Panama to Finland due to the Zika virus outbreak in the region.
It is also expected to relocate ICANN 57 from Puerto Rico to Las Vegas, for the same reason, though no decision has yet been made.
The letter claims that the LAC region is being under-served in terms of ICANN meeting time.
While ICANN’s goal is to rotate its meetings through its five regions, the letter says that the LAC region only gets one out of six meetings.
But is the region getting fewer meetings than elsewhere? I don’t think the numbers support that assertion.
This is how all the meetings to date break down by ICANN region.
[table id=40 /]
It’s clear that LAC isn’t getting singled out in particular for a dissing, no more than Africa or North America.
In fact, LAC may be doing better than North America, due to the weird way ICANN assigns countries to regions.
The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico (where ICANN met in 2007) counts as North America as far as ICANN is concerned, due to its status as a US territory.
ICANN counts Mexico (where it met in 2009), which is geographically North American, as a LAC nation for some reason.
But the three organizations signing this letter all count both Mexico and Puerto Rico as LAC nations. By that definition, they’ve had 11 meetings to North America’s nine, placing LAC in the middle of the table with exactly one out of every five meetings taking place there.
ICANN chair Steve Crocker did not dissect the numbers in his reply (pdf) yesterday, instead focusing on sympathizing with the LAC groups’ concerns and pointing out that finding suitable locations for ICANN meetings is extremely tricky.
“On rare occasions, due to events outside ICANN’s control, we face challenges sufficiently severe that we feel we cannot proceed with meetings in the venue we have planned,” Crocker wrote.
He continued: “[I]t is our understanding that the Zika virus poses a serious threat to human health. We have consulted extensively on risks and considered whether under the circumstances we can hold an efficient and safe meeting. In this instance we have decided this is a serious risk and decided to go to an alternate venue for the safety of our community.”

2 Comments

Donuts wins .doctor

Kevin Murphy, May 9, 2016, Domain Registries

Donuts has emerged the victor of the .doctor gTLD contention set.
Competing applicants Radix and The Medical Registry both withdrew their applications last week.
The string wasn’t due to head to its ICANN last-resort auction until May 25, indicating that the contention set was settled privately.
.doctor has been the subject of some controversy.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee had insisted that .doctor should be reserved purely for licensed medical doctors.
Donuts had complained that this would rule out use by any of the myriad other types of doctor, as well as registrants using “doctor” in a fanciful sense (like “rug doctor” or “PC doctor”).
ICANN initially accepted the GAC advice, but changed its mind this February, declining to impose such restrictive language on .doctor’s contractual Public Interest Commitments.
So it seems that .doctor will be generally unrestricted.
Donuts will have to sign up to the standard “Category 1” PICs, which require the registry to work with relevant regulatory bodies, however.

1 Comment Tagged: , , , , ,

African brands wiped off the map as ICANN flips the kill switch on 10 gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, May 9, 2016, Domain Registries

Ten dot-brand gTLDs may never see the light of day, after ICANN sent termination notices to the applicants.
The move means that the number of African-owned dot-brand gTLDs to go live in the current round will be precisely zero.
The 10 affected gTLDs are .naspers, .supersport, .mzansimagic, .mnet, .kyknet, .africamagic, .multichoice, .dstv and .gotv, which were applied for by four South African companies, and .payu, which came from a Dutch firm.
In each case, the applicant had signed a Registry Agreement with ICANN in early 2015, but had failed to actually go live in the DNS within the required 12-month window.
All had deadlines in February or March but failed to meet even extended deadlines.
The condemned gTLDs make up more than half of the total applications originating in Africa.
Of the original 17 African applications, only ZACR’s .joburg, .capetown and .durban city gTLDs have actually been delegated.
Another application, the generic .ummah from Ummah Digital of Gambia, was withdrawn in 2013.
The League of Arab States’ .arab and عرب. are both currently in pre-delegation testing, having signed ICANN contracts in November.
The remaining two applications are both for .africa, which is currently stuck in litigation.
We’re looking at a maximum of six African-owned gTLDs, of a possible 16, going live in the 2012 round.
ICANN was criticized back in 2012 for not doing enough to raise awareness of the new gTLD program, criticisms that have been raised again recently as the community starts to seriously look at how things can be improved for the next round.
UPDATE: This article originally stated that .ummah was a dot-brand application. It was not. The text has been corrected accordingly.

4 Comments Tagged: , , ,

GoDaddy grows domain revs 10% in Q1

Kevin Murphy, May 5, 2016, Domain Registries

GoDaddy reported its first quarter numbers last night, which including an almost 10% increase in revenue from domain names.
The market-leading registrar reported a net loss of $18.3 million, smaller than the $43.4 million a year ago, on total revenue of $433.7 million, up 15.3%.
It broke out its revenue from domain names as $218.9 million, up 9.9% on Q1 2015.
Hosting-related services and business applications grew 14.4% and 47.4% respectively, to $160.4 million and $54.4 million.
The company raised its revenue expectations for the year to a range of $1.83 billion to $1.845 billion.

Comment Tagged: ,

A third of mayoral candidates using .london domains

Kevin Murphy, May 5, 2016, Domain Registries

Londoners are going to the polls today to select a new mayor so, as a Londoner, I thought I’d check out how many of the candidates are supporting the local domain name.
Turns out four of the 12 candidates have registered .london domains for their campaign sites.
The four are favorite Sadiq Khan (Labour), Sian Berry (Green), Peter Whittle (UK Independence Party) and Prince John Zylinski (damned if I know).
The remaining candidates, if they have dedicated sites at all, use a mixture of .com, .org and .net domains. Not a .uk to be seen.
Will this influence anybody’s vote? No. Has it raised the profile of .london domains? Probably.
Whoever wins the election will find themselves with a degree of control over the future of .london.
While the registry is basically managed by Minds + Machines, the ICANN contract is held by London & Partners, a not-for-profit promotional agency funded by the mayor’s office. The mayor is also a partner in the endeavor.
The M+M outsourcing contract was recently renegotiated in light of M+M’s financial woes, but details have not been made available.

2 Comments Tagged: , , ,

Former GoDaddy VP apes Trump in Congressional bid

Kevin Murphy, May 4, 2016, Gossip

Former GoDaddy general counsel and apparent glutton for punishment Christine Jones is to run for political office for a second time.
She’s looking for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District, she said in an email circular yesterday.
In a video announcing the candidacy, it seems pretty clear she’s taking a leaf out of the Donald Trump playbook by playing the “outsider” card.
“She’s one of us, not a politician,” a talking head says in a totally unrehearsed, unscripted and utterly convincing soundbite.

Much like Trump, she’s also touting the fact that she’s “independently wealthy” and therefore not as reliant on big donors to fund her campaign.
According to Jones’ web site, the most important issues facing Arizonians are border security, Islamic State, abortion (she’s anti-), an overly complex tax system and gun ownership (she’s pro-).
It sounds ridiculous, but this is what passes for mainstream politics in the US nowadays.
The incumbent in the Congressional seat she wants, considered safely Republican, recently announced his retirement, but Jones will face at least three established local politicians in the contest for the nomination.
Jones stood for the Republican nomination for Arizona Governor in 2014, but came third in the seven-strong field, with 16.6% of the vote.

5 Comments Tagged: , ,

Donuts makes weird investment in startup

Kevin Murphy, May 4, 2016, Domain Registries

Donuts has made a surprising investment in a company that makes geolocation technologies.
The new gTLD registry operator announced yesterday that it has something called Donuts Labs, through which it will make “strategic investments” in “similar” companies.
Its first investment is in California tech startup GeoFrenzy, which operates in the emerging “geofences” space.
A geofence is a virtual perimeter around a defined geographic location.
Basically, GeoFrenzy has divided the world up into square-centimeter chunks and stores data about who owns these chunks in a registry database.
Using the GPS service you’ll find in all modern mobile devices, apps using the technology can figure out when you walk into or out of a registered, fenced-off area, triggering some behavior.
Such services are believed to have applications ranging from logistics to advertising. One example on the GeoFrenzy web site says that its database and software could be used to keep drones out of restricted airspace.
The terms of the deal with were not disclosed, but it’s surprising news for a couple of reasons.
First, Donuts appears to have cash to throw around on pet side-projects at a time when one would assume, as an early-stage company itself, it would be more focused on growing its fledgling new gTLD business.
Second, the press release makes out that there are technology synergies between the companies.
GeoFrenzy CEO Sean Eilers is quoted as saying: “Their expertise in managing a highly scalable registry and their experience with innovative DNS technologies makes Donuts an ideal fit as an investor and strategic partner.”
But to the best of my knowledge Donuts doesn’t have any experience managing a highly scalable registry. It outsources all of that kind of thing to Rightside, doesn’t it?
Donuts says it will be making more, similar investments in future.

1 Comment Tagged: , , , ,

.shop lawsuit falling to pieces

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2016, Domain Policy

Commercial Connect’s lawsuit against ICANN appears to be on its way out, as ICANN claims the .shop applicant has “abandoned” the case.
The company sued ICANN in January in an attempt to prevent .shop gTLD being sold off via an ICANN last-resort auction.
It failed, and the auction raised a $41 million winning bid from GMO Registry.
It transpired that the company didn’t bother telling its lawyer that it had signed an agreement not to sue when it applied for .shop, and the lawyer jumped ship less than two weeks after the complaint was filed.
The lawyer told the court the waiver had been “buried among thousands and thousands of documents on a USB drive” and that he hadn’t noticed it before filing the suit.
In a court filing (pdf) yesterday, ICANN said that Commercial Connect had failed to secure a new lawyer, had failed to formally serve ICANN with the complaint, and had missed its April 25 deadline to argue against ICANN’s motion to dismiss the case.
For these reasons, it said, the case should be chucked.
Commercial Connect applied for .shop in 2000 and again in 2012 and has used every appeals mechanism and legal tool at its disposal in order to disrupt competing bids.
GMO’s .shop is currently in pre-delegation testing.

2 Comments Tagged: , , , ,

Verisign facing its own activist investor

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2016, Domain Registries

While new gTLD registries Rightside and Minds + Machines have faced board-room challenges by activist investors in recent months, it seems industry heavyweight Verisign is contended with a similar problem.
John Chevedden, once described as an “economy class” activist due to his relatively small stakes, is attempting to give smaller Verisign shareholders the ability to propose directors for the company’s board.
Rather than attempting to gut the companies he invests in, he tries to make the odd incision into their corporate governance in order to give smaller investors a greater voice in their companies.
He’s filed a proposal, which will be voted on at Verisign’s June 9 annual general meeting, for a new “proxy access” bylaw.
Essentially, the proposal would allow an unlimited number of shareholders who collectively own over 3% of the company’s stock to propose two people for director elections (or 25% of the board, whichever is greater).
But Verisign’s current board is recommending that shareholders vote against the proposal, saying it’s “unnecessary”.
The company says that it plans to introduce its own proxy access bylaw that would be slightly different.
The Verisign alternative would limit the size of the nominating gang to 20 shareholders. That would mean that each individual investor would have to own much larger stakes, in order to pass the 3% threshold and nominate director candidates.
Verisign says Chevedden’s proposal, which does not limit the number of small shareholders involved, would be expensive and unwieldy to manage.
Chevedden reportedly has quite a decent success rate with these kinds of proposals.

Comment Tagged: , ,

Two more dot-brands self-terminate

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2016, Domain Registries

The dot-brand dead-pool is now up to three gTLDs.
FLSmidth, which supplies machinery to the cement industry, and Emerson Electric, which also makes industrial machinery, have both decided that they don’t need their new gTLDs.
The affected gTLDs are .flsmidth and .emerson.
Both companies have filed cursory notices of termination with ICANN, indicating that they no longer wish to have a new gTLD Registry Agreement.
Neither company has yet received a preliminary determination from ICANN, a step that will lead to a month-long public comment period before the contracts are terminated.
In Emerson’s case, .emerson has not been delegated so there will be no impact on the number of TLDs in the root.
FLSmidth’s dot-brand has been live since September 2014, but the company never made the transition away from its .com.
While registry reports show that six domains have been registered, its latest zone file shows only the obligatory nic.flsmidth domain is active.
The first new gTLD to cop out was .doosan, the dot-brand for Korean conglomerate Doosan. It took over four months from filing its notice last October to the TLD being retired.

Comment Tagged: , , , , , ,