Another ccTLD opens up its second level

Kuwait has become the latest country to make second-level domain registrations possible directly under its national ccTLD.

The registry, government regulator the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), said last week that it’s launching direct 2LD regs under .kw with an initial six-month sunrise period that has already started.

CITRA said in a press release that this first launch phase allows “government entities, registered trademark owners, and holders of third-level domains (.com.kw/.net.kw/.org.kw)” to register names.

The current three-level structure has six subdivisions, also including .ind.kw for individuals, .gov.kw for governmental entities, and .edu.kw for educational institutions. Local presence restrictions appear to apply to all.

While much of CITRA’s web site is available in English, its 2LD policies appear to be only published so far in Arabic, in PDFs that resist machine translation.

Domains in .kw currently cost about KWD15 (about $50) a year. Kuwait does not have an Arabic version of the ccTLD, but Arabic script is supported at the second and third levels.

Comment Tagged: .kw, citra, second-level

Reporter gains first access to .io island for decades

A BBC journalist is believed to have become the first reporter to visit Diego Garcia, the main island of the contested British Indian Ocean Territory that owns the .io domain, in decades.

Alice Cuddy was given access to the island after a court battle as part of the Beeb’s coverage of litigation against the UK government, which administers BIOT, and spent five days there.

Her coverage does not mention the contested .io ccTLD at all, but it does provide a fascinating account of her time on the island, the largest of the Chagos Archipelago, which is used almost exclusively as a US military base.

The article describes what sounds like a tropical island paradise populated almost exclusively by squaddies and giant crabs, but administered by Kim Jong Un.

Cuddy was escorted everywhere she went, had reporting restrictions imposed, and wasn’t allowed to visit certain places (including places as innocuous-sounding as a bowling alley).

The report delves into the history of the island, from the forcible deportation of its native population in the 1970s to its strategic use supporting US/UK military misadventures in the Middle East.

There’s also a fair bit of local color, with Cuddy noting that, despite the name, BIOT is in equal parts very much American. She notes the electrical outlets and currency are American, she dined on “tater tots”, and everybody drives on the wrong side of the road.

It’s well worth the read if you have a passing interest in the place .io technically represents.

As I reported earlier today, .io’s registry, part of Identity Digital, sold almost $40 million of domains last year.

Comment Tagged: biot, chagos, io

.io sells $40 million of domains after massive uptick

.io is now a $40-million-a-year domain, after a few years of impressive growth, judging by the registry’s latest financial reports.

UK-based Internet Computer Bureau, a subsidiary of Identity Digital, recently reported turnover of £29.6 million ($39.6 million) for 2023, up 13.9% on the £26.1 million it reported in 2022.

While that’s respectable growth, it pales compared to 2022 (which I don’t think was reported at the time), when turnover was up a whopping 59%.

Identity Digital does not reveal .io’s registration numbers, but with turnover of over $39 million and retail renewal prices bottoming out at around $39 a year, it seems quite possible that the TLD’s domains under management has reached seven digits.

When Afilias paid $70 million for ICB in 2017, it had turnover of $7 million and domains were reported at 270,000.

ICB’s gross margins are terrible — one can only assume its registry services deal with Identity Digital is rather generous to its parent — at 4.4%, with £28 million being paid out as cost of sales.

With another £3 million of unelaborated “administrative expenses”, ICB reported a 2023 net loss of £404,000 compared to a 2022 profit of £1.7 million. It paid £17,660 in UK tax, down from £277,703. It had just $69,000 cash on hand at the end of the year.

While ICB also runs .ac (Ascension Island) and .sh (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha), it’s only .io that has seen broad uptake among the global domain-registering public. Tech firms like it because I/O means “input/output”.

.io is the ccTLD for the contested British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, which is administered from the UK and used almost exclusively to house a strategically important US military base.

Comment Tagged: afilias, biot, chagos, financials, icb, identity digital, io

After five years, “useless” TLD has two web sites

An IDN ccTLD criticized as “useless” by locals when it was approved five years ago has fewer domains today than it did at launch, and a portfolio of web sites even a Simpson could count on one hand (twice).

The Greek-script .ευ (.xn--qxa6a) is one of two internationalized domain name versions of the European Union’s .eu, operated by EURid. It was approved by ICANN in September 2019 and went live two months later.

Today, it has just 2,561 domains under management, about 200 fewer than it did at the end of 2019, just a month after launch, according to stats on EURid’s web site.

A quick google on Google for .ευ domains returns results for only two indexed web sites, while googling on Bing returns four, of which two are undeveloped placeholders.

It’s not much of a result for a TLD that ICANN spent nine years twisting itself in knots to approve over the concerns of evaluators who thought it was visually too confusing to other two-letter strings.

Greek domainers criticized .ευ upon its approval, with Konstantinos Zournas calling it the “worst extension ever”, due largely to the fact that “EU” in Greek is εε, not ευ.

Comment Tagged: .eu, .xn--qxa6a, .ευ, eurid, ICANN, idns

Verisign agrees to .com takedown rules

Verisign has agreed to take down abusive .com domains under the next version of its registry contract with ICANN.

The proposed deal, published for public comment yesterday, could have financial implications for the entire domain industry, but it also contains a range of changes covering the technical management of .com.

Key among them is the addition of new rules on “DNS Abuse” that require Verisign to respond to abuse reports, either by referring the domain to its registrar or by taking direct action

Abuse is defined with the now industry-standard “malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam (when spam serves as a delivery mechanism for the other forms of DNS Abuse listed in this definition)”.

The language is virtually identical to the strengthened DNS abuse language in the base Registry Agreement that almost all other gTLD registries have been committed to since their contracts were updated this April. It reads:

Where Registry Operator reasonably determines, based on actionable evidence, that a registered domain name in the TLD is being used for DNS Abuse, Registry Operator must promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s) that are reasonably necessary to contribute to stopping, or otherwise disrupting, the domain name from being used for DNS Abuse. Such action(s) shall, at a minimum, include: (i) the referral of the domains being used for the DNS Abuse, along with relevant evidence, to the sponsoring registrar; or (ii) the taking of direct action, by Registry Operator, where Registry Operator deems appropriate.

The current version of the .com contract only requires Verisign to publish an abuse contact on its web site. It doesn’t even oblige the company to respond to abuse reports.

In domain volume terms, .com is regularly judged one of the most-abused TLDs on the internet, though newer, cheaper gTLDs usually have worse numbers in terms of the percentage of registrations that are abusive.

Verisign will also get an obligation that other registries don’t have — to report to ICANN “any cyber incident, physical intrusion or infrastructure damages” that affects the .com registry.

ICANN won’t be able to reveal the details of such incidents publicly unless Verisign gives its permission, but in a side deal (pdf) the two parties promise to work together on a process for public disclosure.

Verisign will also have to implement two 20-year-old IETF standards on “Network Ingress Filtering” that describe methods of mitigating denial-of-service attacks by blocking traffic from forged IP addresses.

The contract is open for public comment.

Comment Tagged: .com, dns abuse, ICANN, ra, renewal, takedowns, verisign

New .com contract could see ALL domain prices go up

Verisign will retain its power to increase .com prices by 7% a year, and prices in other gTLDs could well go up too, under a new proposed registry contract designed to help patch up ICANN’s budget.

The proposed .com Registry Agreement was posted for public comment this evening, and the pricing terms within could have broad implications for all registrants of gTLD domains.

For starters, as usual the deal lets Verisign raise .com prices, currently $10.26 a year, by 7% in the final four years of the six years of its term. This is an option Verisign has never failed to exercise in the past.

But the deal would also give ICANN the power, in its sole discretion, to raise the per-transaction fees Verisign pays it for each added, renewed, or transferred .com domain, in line with the latest US inflation numbers.

The fee is currently $0.25 per transaction, and it hasn’t gone up ever, as far as I recall.

The proposed text on inflation is pretty much the same as found in all post-2012 gTLD Registry Agreements, but adds a clause saying that ICANN cannot raise the .com fees unless it also raises fees in “multiple other registry agreements”.

Yet another clause strongly suggests that ICANN intends to exercise its existing right to increase its fees, again according to the US Consumer Price Index, across other gTLDs — presumably all of them — rather soon:

ICANN and Registry Operator hereby agree that if ICANN delivers notice of a fee adjustment to other registry operators after November 1, 2024 and prior to the Effective Date, ICANN may concurrently deliver such fee adjustment notice to Registry Operator, in which case the provisions of Section 7.2(d) shall be deemed to have applied at the time such notice was sent.

Translated, this means that ICANN can put Verisign on notice that its fees are going up even before the contract is signed, but only if it also raises the fees on other registries at the same time.

It’s difficult to imagine why this language is there unless it’s describing something ICANN is actually planning to do.

Unlike Verisign, other gTLD operators do not have regulated pricing, so any ICANN fee increase on them could very well be passed on to registrars and ultimately registrants with increased wholesale prices.

The new contract is being proposed a few months after ICANN laid off staff because its budget was $10 million light, and CEO Sally Costerton said the Org was “evaluating ICANN’s fee structure to ensure it scales realistically with inflation”.

Verisign, and .com in particular, is ICANN’s biggest single source of funding, contributing $47.3 million of its $145.5 million in revenue in its last fiscal year.

The proposed new .com contract and public comment opportunity can be found here.

5 Comments Tagged: .com, ICANN, pricing, registry agreement, renewal, verisign

Investing in .ad domains may be risky

Domain investors may shoulder additional risk when they register domains in the relaunching .ad TLD, judging by the registry’s new cybersquatting policy.

Andorra Telecom, which will make .ad names generally available globally October 22, has signed up with WIPO to implement an adapted version of the UDRP that is a lot less friendly to domainers.

The new adDRP specifically calls out domaining as an example of “bad faith”, something a complainant must prove if they want to seize a domain matching their trademark. Panels can find bad faith if they see:

circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to another person for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name

The adDRP also tweaks the usual three-pronged cybersquatting test found in UDRP to make it easier for complainants to get a win, by lowering the evidential bar on registrants’ rights.

Instead of having to prove the registrant has “no rights or legitimate interests” to the domain, adDRP complainants merely need to “declare” that, “to the best of the Complainant’s knowledge”, the registrant has no rights or legitimate interests.

The adDRP also broadens the types of intellectual property rights complainants must have from registered trademarks to, for example, famous personal names and geographical names related to Andorra.

Andorra Telecom announced its relaunch, assisted by Fundació puntCAT and CORE Association, a few months ago. GA pricing is expected to be €15 ($16) a year.

While Andorra is among the world’s smallest nations, its ccTLD is of course an abbreviation of “advertisement” or “advertising” in English and therefore may have broader appeal.

The registry recently launched an English language version of its web site and a bunch of registrars serving the Anglophone market are already signed up.

The plural gTLD version, .ads, belongs to Google but has not yet launched.

Comment Tagged: .ad, addrp, andorra telecom, cybersquatting, trademarks, wipo

Plurals ban policy handed to ICANN board

The GNSO Council has approved a blanket ban on singular and plural versions of the same word being delegated as gTLDs in future and passed it to the ICANN board of directors for final consideration.

The proposed policy would prevent anyone applying for the singular/plural equivalent of an existing gTLD, and would put future applications for single/plural clashes into contention sets where only one would survive.

The ban would prevent a future .kitchens, for example, because there’s already a .kitchen, and there could be no .motorcycle gTLD because there’s already a .motorcycles.

It would also mean that if there are future applications in the same round for .podcast and .podcasts, for example, they would be placed in the same contention set, likely go to auction, and only one would be delegated.

Applicants would also be banned from applying for singular/plural variants of the few dozen strings found on a “limited blocked name list” that comprises mainly the names of internet policy organizations including ICANN, the IETF and the GNSO.

That list also includes dictionary words such as “onion”, “invalid”, “test”, “internal” and “local”, so there could never be a .onions or .locals gTLD under the policy.

ICANN would decide whether two strings are “the singular or plural version of the same word in the same language” by reference to a dictionary.

The idea behind the ban is mitigating abusive registrations that could be used in, for example, phishing attacks, as well as lazy gTLD applicants that might hope to piggyback on the success of their single/plural rival.

The policy recommendation was written by a “Small Team Plus” of 15 community volunteers after the ICANN board last year rejected the GNSO’s original singular/plural policy, which would have made exceptions to the ban based on the applicant’s “intended use” of the gTLD.

An example given was that if one applicant applied for .spring to represent the meteorological season and another applied for .springs to represent flexible coils of metal, the latter would not be judged a plural of the former.

But the board was worried that if ICANN had to make a call on “intended use”, ICANN would also have to monitor and enforce the use of the gTLD in future, breaking its bylaws promise not to regulate internet content.

Under the revised policy recommendation, .spring and .springs would be ruled as singular/plural equivalents of each other, regardless of how they were going to be marketed.

While the Small Team was not unanimous in its consensus recommendation, the GNSO Council was unanimous in approving it at its monthly meeting last week. The language will now be sent to the ICANN board for approval or rejection.

1 Comment Tagged: gnso, ICANN, new gTLDs, plural, string confusion

Three .now domains sell at premium EAP prices

Amazon’s Early Access Periods for the new .now and .deal gTLDs have so far netted at least three premium-priced sales.

Zone files reveal that so far .now has three new EAP domains but .deal has none.

The .now domains are, perhaps predictably, porn.now and news.now, which were both registered via Gandi, and free.now, which was registered via Secura.

All three were registered shortly after 1300 UTC yesterday, when the switchover from day one to day two pricing occurred, according to Whois records.

That means they likely sold for in excess of $3,300 each, judging by the EAP retail price list published by 101domain. Day one pricing would have been roughly double that.

Amazon may have sold more EAP domains that for one reason or another don’t yet show up in the zone files.

Regular general availability pricing kicks in at the weekend.

1 Comment

ICANN confirms new gTLD application fee

It’s $227,000. That’s the minimum ICANN expects to charge for each new gTLD application in the Next Round.

The Org confirmed the price, which is $42,000 more than it charged in 2012, in a blog post this afternoon.

It’s toward the low end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range discussed in June, but up on the $220,000 number being circulated a few weeks ago.

ICANN is able to put a tentative price on applications now because its board has now squared away all the outstanding policy items that could have substantially affected its evaluation costs.

That includes its new process for evaluating potential name collisions, which I wrote about just a few hours ago.

The fee is based on an estimate that ICANN will receive 1,500 applications, where $227,000 will allow it to recover its development, implementation, and operations costs. It may issue rebates if there are more applications.

The $227,000 fee is just a baseline. Applicants will be expected to pay more for extra services, such as if they want a Community Priority Evaluation or want to operate a dot-brand, ICANN said.

ICANN has previously said that most of the price increase over 2012 is due to inflation. But this hasn’t stopped grumbling that the fee is too high, given efficiencies such as technical back-end operations being evaluated separately.

Less well-financed wannabe applicants from certain countries — mostly outside Europe and North America — will have the chance to apply for a fee subsidy under the Applicant Support Program.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs