Verisign to keep price increase power under new .net contract

The wholesale price of a .net domain is likely to top $15 by 2023, under a proposed renewal of its ICANN contract revealed today.
ICANN-imposed price caps are staying in the new Registry Agreement, but Verisign retains the right to increase its fees by 10% in each of the six years of the deal’s lifespan.
But domain investors do have at least one reason to be cheerful — while the contract adds many features of the standard new gTLD registry agreement, it does not include a commitment to implement the Uniform Rapid Suspension anti-cybersquatting procedure.
The current .net annual fee charged to registrars is $8.95 — $8.20 for Verisign, $0.75 for ICANN — but Verisign will continue to be allowed to increase its portion by up to 10% a year.
That means the cost of a .net could hit $15.27 wholesale (including the $0.75 ICANN fee) by the time the proposed contract expires in 2023.
Verisign has form when it comes to utilizing its price-raising powers. It exercised all six options under its current contract, raising its share of the fee from $4.65 in 2011.
On the bright side for volume .net holders, the prices increases continue to be predictable. ICANN has not removed the price caps.
Also likely to cheer up domainers is the fact that there are no new intellectual property protection mechanisms in the proposed contract.
Several post-2000 legacy gTLDs have agreed to incorporate the URS into their new contracts, leading to outrage from domainer organization the Internet Commerce Association.
ICA is worried that URS will one day wind up in .com without a proper ICANN community consensus, opening its members up to more risk of losing valuable domains.
The fact that URS is not being slipped into the .net contract makes it much less likely to be forced on .com too.
But Verisign has agreed to several mostly technical provisions that bring it more into line with the standard 2012-round new gTLD RA.
For example, it appears that daily .net zone files will become accessible via ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service before the end of the year.
Verisign has also agreed to standardize the format of its data escrow, Whois and monthly transaction reports.
The company has also agreed to start discussions about handing .net over to an emergency back-end operator in the event it files for bankruptcy.
The current contract is due to expire at the end of June and the proposed new deal would kick in July 1.
It’s now open for public comment until June 13.

3 Comments Tagged: .net, ica, ICANN, pricing, urs, verisign

ICANN loosens Whois privacy rules for registrars

ICANN has made it easier for registries and registrars to opt-out of Whois-related contractual provisions when they clash with local laws.
From this week, accredited domain firms will not have to show that they are being investigated by local privacy or law enforcement authorities before they can request a waiver from ICANN.
Instead, they’ll be also be able to request a waiver preemptively with a statement from said authorities to the effect that the ICANN contracts contradict local privacy laws.
In both cases, the opt-out request will trigger a community consultation — which would include the Governmental Advisory Committee — and a review by ICANN’s general counsel, before coming into effect.
The rules are mainly designed for European companies, as the EU states generally enjoy stricter privacy legislation than their North American counterparts.
European registrars and registries have so far been held to a contract that may force them to break the law, and the only way to comply with the law would be to wait for a law enforcement proceeding.
ICANN already allows registrars to request waivers from the data retention provisions of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement — which require the registrar to hold customer data for two years after the customer is no longer a customer.
Dozens of European registrars have applied for and obtained this RAA opt-out.

Comment Tagged: data retention, gac, ICANN, law enforcement, privacy, whois

Pirate Bay founder launches piracy-friendly domain privacy service

The founder of controversial BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay has entered the domain name market with a new proxy service.
It’s called Njalla, it’s based in a Caribbean tax haven, and it says it offers a higher level of privacy protection than you get anywhere else.
The company described itself in its inaugural blog post today like this:

Think of us as your friendly drunk (but responsibly so) straw person that takes the blame for your expressions. As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you’re not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech, your political weird thinking, your kinky forums and whatever.

Founder Peter Sunde was reluctant to describe Njalla as a proxy registration service, but it’s difficult to think of another way of describing it.
When you buy a domain via the company’s web site, the name is registered by Njalla for itself. You can still use the domain as you would with a regular registrar, but the name is “owned” by Njalla (1337 LLC, based in Saint Kitts & Nevis).
The company is a Tucows reseller via OpenSRS, and it supports almost all gTLDs and several ccTLDs (it’s declined to support Uniregistry due to recent price increase announcements).
Prices are rather industry standard, with a .com setting you back €15 ($16).
The big difference appears to be that the service doesn’t want to know anything about its registrants. You can sign up with just an email address or, unusually, an XMPP address. It doesn’t want to know your name, home address, or anything like that.
This means that whenever Njalla receives a legal request for the user’s identity, it doesn’t have much to hand over.
It’s based on Nevis due to the strong privacy laws there, Sunde said.
Under what circumstances Njalla would suspend service to a customer and hand over their scant private information appears to be somewhat vague and based on the subjective judgement or politics of its management.
“As long as you don’t hurt anyone else, we’ll let you do your thing,” Sunde said.
Child abuse material is verboten. Spam is in a “gray zone” (although forbidden by Njalla’s terms of service).
Copyright infringement appears to be just fine and dandy, which might not be surprising. Sunde founded The Pirate Bay in 2003 and spent time in prison in Sweden for assisting copyright infringement as a result.
“You don’t hurt people by putting a movie online,” Sunde said. “You do hurt someone by putting child porn or revenge porn or stuff like that… If you look at any statistics on file sharing, it proves that the more people file-share the more money goes into the ecosystem of the media.”
While this is likely to upset the IP lobby within the domain name community, I think there’s a possibility that existing ICANN policy will soon have an impact on Njalla’s ability to operate as it hopes.
ICANN is in the process of implementing a privacy/proxy services accreditation program that will require registrars to only work with approved, accredited proxy services.
Sunde thinks Njalla doesn’t fall into the ICANN definition of a proxy service, and said his lawyers agree.
Personally, I can’t see the distinction. I expect ICANN Compliance will probably have to make a call one way or the other one day after the accreditation system comes online.

12 Comments Tagged: copyright, ICANN, njalla, piracy, privacy, proxy, the pirate bay

IANA boss quits ICANN

The head of IANA is to leave the organization, ICANN announced this week.
Elise Gerich, currently vice president of IANA Services at ICANN and president of Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), will leave in October, according to a blog post.
She’ll stick around long enough to oversee the DNS root’s first DNSSEC Key-Signing Key rollover, which is due to go ahead October 11.
Gerich has been VP of IANA since May 2010, and took on the job of PTI president last October when the IANA function was restructured to remove the US government from the mix.
ICANN said it will start the hunt for her replacement shortly.

Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, iana, ICANN, pti, transition

Mystery buyer pumps $500,000 into MMX gTLDs

MMX has inked a deal to sell 90,000 domain names to a mystery buyer.
The company formerly known as Minds + Machines today disclosed to the markets that the deal is worth $500,000 in the first year, and that the names will be registered at some point over the coming 12 months.
CEO Toby Hall declined to identify the buyer or the gTLDs concerned, but told DI that it’s an end-user buyer rather than a domain investor, and that the buyer is not Chinese.
It’s unrelated to the $1.3 million a Chinese domain investor paid for 200,000 .vip domains a couple weeks ago.
In both cases, the sales were disclosed to the market because they were financially material.
In this case, the 90,000 domains will cause a 37% uptick in MMX’s total registration base, if you exclude .vip from the portfolio.
The names are not registry-reserved, and are not premium-priced.
It works out to about $5.55 per domain, which is a first-year discount MMX agreed to with the undisclosed registrar that brought in the business. If they renew, they will renew at whatever the standard renewal price is at the time.
Hall said he did not know exactly when the domains will be registered, but MMX’s statement to the market said that it would be within the next 12 months.
Quite how the buyer can commit to buying 90,000 names without even knowing whether the names it wants will be available when it comes to register them, I’m not sure.
It’s all a bit mysterious, but my gut feeling is that we’re probably looking at one of those networks of low-quality, machine-aggregated, niche-content portals that spring up from time to time.
Previous efforts linked to the gTLD industry, such as Zip.pro and Socium Networks, haven’t exactly set the world alight.
But it this case it appears to buy a genuine third-party buyer, not a registry front.
Hall said that he was unaware of whether the buyer has also made large-scale purchases from other registries that do not have the same disclosure requirements, but said it was certainly possible.

2 Comments Tagged: mmx, new gTLDs

Uniregistry and Neustar have TLDs approved in China

China’s April batch of approved TLDs has been released, featuring three domains from Neustar and Uniregistry.
Neustar had its longstanding, 2000-round .biz pass regulatory scrutiny, while Uniregistry’s .link and .auto have also been approved.
While .auto is managed by Cars Registry, a joint venture with XYZ.com, its stablemates .car and .cars do not appear to have yet been approved.
The rubberstamping was made by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which administers the country’s stringent regulatory framework.
Clearance means that customers of Chinese registrars will actually be able to deploy and use the names they buy.
The registries have also agreed to strict takedown policies for Chinese registrants.
While MIIT appears to be announcing newly approved TLDs on a monthly basis, it’s a slow drip-feed. I believe there are still fewer than 20 Latin-script gTLDs currently cleared for use in China.

Comment Tagged: .car, .link, cars registry, china, miit, neustar, uniregistry

.club premium sales approaching $5 million

.CLUB Domains sold half a million dollars worth of reserved premium names in the first quarter, bringing its cumulative to-date total to almost $5 million, the registry reported at the weekend.
Q1 sales were $505,139, the company said, bringing its total since launch to $4,844,428.
There were 475 premium sales in total, sold via auctions, registrars and aftermarket platforms, it said.
Headline sales in the period included seniors.club and pet.club for $18,000 apiece, and photo.club for $10,000.
The numbers may indicate that its broker program and financing options, introduced in January, may be taking off.
The registry’s Q1 sales amount to more than half of what it sold in the whole of 2016.
More sales figures are available in the .CLUB Domains blog post.

2 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, new gTLDs, premiums

Chinese to invade .africa? CEO thinks so

While .africa finally went on sale last week after years of legal fights, it seems Africans may find themselves in the minority of registrants.
A combination of awareness, pricing and anticipated interest from Chinese domain investors, means that Africans could account for as few as 1 in 10 .africa registrations, according to Lucky Masilela, CEO of .africa registry ZA Central Registry.
The domain went into its sunrise period last week, and has a multi-phased launch planned out that will last until July 1, 2018.
After the trademark owners have had their crack at the domain — Masilela tells us that South Africa brands such as Nando’s are among the first to grab theirs — there will be five phases in which domains will be open to all but priced at a premium.
Starting June 5 there will be five landrush periods of five day, each a kind of hybrid between the traditional landrush period and the kind of Early Access Period offered by Donuts and others.
Each landrush will see all names priced at a certain amount, with the amount going down at the start of each period — $5,000 to $2,000 to $1,000 to $500 (all USD).
In the event that any name is claimed by more than one registrant, there will be an auction for that name at the end of the period.
Then on July 4 comes the first period of “general availability”, from which point all domains will be first-come, first-served.
But for the first 28 days of GA, domains will be priced at $150, other than domains categorized by the registry as premium.
Domains then come down to a more affordable $18 wholesale.
But that’s not the end. ZACR has baked in a price reduction to $12.50 wholesale, due to kick in July 1 2018. From then on out, it’s business as usual.
Unlike similar TLDs such as .eu, there are to be no geographic restrictions on who can register .africa names, and Masilela said he expects registrants from Africa to be in a minority.
“I think were are looking at about 10% from the continent, growing gradually over the years,” Masilela said. “The next wave is going to be international registrars.”
“We have a big suspicion that we will probably see a huge uptake coming from the east, which is the China market,” he said. “They’ll probably come in and grab a large number of domain names.”
He said that Chinese investment in Africa offline is likely to be mirrored online.
Pricing is also likely to be a factor. While .africa will bottom out, ignoring periodic discounts, at $12.50, that’s still quite a lot more than you’d expect to pay for African ccTLDs. ZACR’s own .za costs about $4 per year.
The relatively high price of becoming ICANN accredited has also meant that while Africa has 50-something countries, there are currently only about half a dozen gTLD registrars based there.
ZACR proposes to counter this by offering a gateway service rather like the one it already offers in .joburg and .capetown, that would help bring its own .za registrars on board.

2 Comments Tagged: africa, china, eap, landrush, sunrise, zacr

Companies losing $10 BILLION by ignoring new gTLDs — report

The world economy is “conservatively” losing out on almost $10 billion of annual revenue due to a lack of support for new gTLDs and internationalized domain names, according to an ICANN-commissioned research report.
The report, conducted by Analysys Mason for the semi-independent Universal Acceptance Steering Group, calculated that patchy new gTLD support means $3.6 billion of activity is lost, with lack of IDN support costing $6.2 billion.
Despite “new” gTLDs being around for a decade and a half, there are still plenty of web sites and apps that incorrectly assume that all TLDs are either two or three characters. Others don’t support non-Latin scripts.
This leads to internet users abandoning transactions, the report says, when their email addresses are rejected as invalid.
Mason calculated the $3.6 billion number by multiplying the estimated number of email addresses using new gTLD domains (152 million) by the estimated average annual revenue generated per email address ($360), then calculating what portion of these transactions cannot happen due to incomplete TLD support.
Earlier research by .CLUB Domains suggests that 13% of sites do not support new gTLDs, so that’s the number Mason used. The researchers then cut the number in half, to account for the 50% of people it reckons would simply switch to an email address in a legacy TLD name.
That gets you to $3.6 billion of potential revenue lost for want of gTLD support.
Another, more cynical way to spin this would be to say that new gTLDs are causing $3.6 billion of economic damage. After all, if everyone were to use legacy TLDs there would be no problem.
For the IDN number, Mason calculated how many users of five major language groups (Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Indian languages) are not currently online, then estimated how much revenue would be generated if just 5% of these users (17 million people) were persuaded online by the existences of IDN TLDs.
The report was commissioned in order to raise awareness of the financial benefits of universal acceptance.
The UASG has spent most of its efforts so far focusing on UA as a “bug fix” to be communicated to engineers, so the report is intended to broaden its message to catch the attention of the money people too.
The report, which goes into much more detail about how the numbers were arrived at, can be downloaded here.

12 Comments Tagged: analysys mason, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, uasg, universal acceptance

.feedback threatens to shut off MarkMonitor

Top Level Spectrum, the controversial .feedback gTLD registry, has threatened to de-accredit MarkMonitor unless it apologizes for “breaching” its registrar contract.
The move is evidently retaliation for the MarkMonitor-coordinated complaint about .feedback’s launch policies, which last month led to TLS being found in breach of its own ICANN contract.
De-accreditation would mean MarkMonitor would not be able to sell .feedback domains any more, and its .feedback names would be transferred to another registrar.
In a letter to MarkMonitor (pdf) yesterday, TLS informs the registrar that it breached its Registry-Registrar Agreement by releasing said RRA to “the press” as part of the exhibits to its Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Policy complaint.

The problem we take issue with is that your exhibit should have redacted the “Confidential RRA Agreement” prior to being handed over to ” the press ” and it should have been marked in an appropriate way so ICANN would not publicly disclose it. As we can tell no precautions were taken and as a party to the action we find that you violated the confidentiality of the agreement.

I understand “the press” in this case includes DI and others. We published the document last October. We were not asked to keep anything confidential.
The RRA section of the document is marked as “private and confidential” and contains terms forbidding the disclosure of such information, but the name of the registrar is redacted.
TLS believes the undisclosed registrar is actually Facebook, a MarkMonitor client and one of the several parties to the PICDRP complaint against .feedback.
While Facebook may not have actually signed the RRA, MarkMonitor certainly did and therefore should not have released the document, TLS says.
The letter concludes that the “breach… seems incurable” and says: “Please let us know what actions you will take to cure this breach with us or we will have no other option but to de-accredited your Registrars.”
Despite this, TLS CEO Jay Westerdal tells us that an apology will be enough to cure the alleged breach.
The threat is reminiscent of a move pulled by Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, last year. Vox deaccredited MarkMonitor rival Com Laude in June for allegedly leaking a confidential document to DI (I was never able to locate or identify the allegedly leaked document, and had not published any document marked as confidential).
TLS was found in breach of the Public Interest Commitments in its ICANN contract last month by a PICDRP panel. It was the first registry to suffer such a loss.
The PICDRP panel found that .feedback’s launch had not been conducted in a transparent way, but it stopped short of addressing MarkMonitor’s complaints about “fraudulent” behavior.

1 Comment Tagged: .feedback, breach, facebook, ICANN, markmonitor, picdrp, top level spectrum