.xxx has its ICANN fees slashed and adopts URS

ICM Registry is to see its .xxx ICANN registry fees hugely reduced in contractual amendments approved by ICANN last week.
The changes also mean that .xxx will now become subject to the Uniform Rapid Suspension anti-cybersquatting mechanism, despite it being a pre-2012 gTLD.
.xxx becomes the latest pre-2012 gTLD to move to a contract more closely aligned with the standard Registry Agreement from the new gTLD program.
Under the complex new deal, its per-transaction fee could be reduced from $2 to $0.25 by mid-2018.
Its quarterly fixed fee will go up from $2,500 to $6,250.
ICM has also agreed to take on many aspects of the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, the most controversial of which is the URS.
The domainer group the Internet Commerce Association was fiercely critical of this addition to the contract, as it has been when URS was brought to .jobs, .travel, .cat, .pro and .mobi.
ICA is largely concerned that URS will also be pushed upon Verisign’s .net, which is up for contract renewal this year, and eventually .com.

Comment Tagged: fees, ica, ICANN, icm registry, uniform rapid suspension, urs

ICANN’s Empowered Community to get its first test-drive after appeals panel vote

ICANN’s post-transition bylaws have only been in effect for a few months, but the board of directors wants to change one of them already.
The board last week voted to create a new committee dedicated to handling Requests for Reconsideration — formal appeals against ICANN decisions.
But because this would change a so-called Fundamental Bylaw, ICANN’s new Empowered Community mechanism will have to be triggered.
The Board Governance Committee, noting that the number of RfR complaints it’s having to deal with has sharply increased due to fights over control of new gTLDs, wants that responsibility split out to be handled by a new, dedicated Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee.
It seems on the face of it like a fairly non-controversial change — RfRs will merely be dealt with by a different set of ICANN directors.
However, it will require a change to one of the Fundamental Bylaws — bylaws considered so important they need a much higher threshold to approve.
This means the untested Empowered Community (which I’m not even sure actually exists yet) is going to get its first outing.
The EC is an ad hoc non-profit organization meant to give ICANN the community (that is, you) ultimate authority over ICANN the organization.
It has the power to kick out directors, spill the entire board, reject bylaws changes and approve Fundamental Bylaws changes.
It comprises four or five “Decisional Participants” — GNSO, the ccNSO, the ALAC, the ASO and (usually) the GAC.
In this case at least three of the five Decisional Participants must approve the change, and no more than one may object.
The lengthy process for the EC approving the proposed bylaws change is outlined here.
I wouldn’t expect this proposal to generate a lot of heated discussion on its merits, but it will put the newly untethered ICANN to the test for the first time, which could highlight process weaknesses that could be important when more important policy changes need community scrutiny.

Comment Tagged: empowered community, iana, ICANN, reconsideration, rfr, transition

Tucows says eNom may be shrinking as Melbourne IT drives 2016 growth

Tucows yesterday reported an 11% increase in revenue for 2016, driven partly by an acquisition, but warned that its more recent acquisition, eNom, may be shrinking.
The company reported revenue for 2016 of $189.8 million, up from $171 million in 2015. Net income was up 41% at $16 million.
For the fourth quarter, revenue was up 9% year-on-year at $48.8 million. Net income was down 9% at $2.8 million.
In a conference call, executives linked some of the growth to the April 2016 acquisition of Melbourne IT’s reseller business, which added 1.6 million domains to Tucows’ DUM.
While Tucows also operates its Ting mobile phone service, the majority of its revenue still comes from domains and related services.
In the fourth quarter, revenue was $30 million for this segment. Of that, $23.1 million came from domains sold via its wholesale network and $3.8 million came from Hover, its retail channel.
CEO Elliot Noss noted that the acquisition of the eNom wholesale registrar business from Rightside last month made Tucows easily the second-largest registrar after GoDaddy, but made eNom sound like a neglected business.
“The eNom business is a flat, potentially even slightly negative-growth business in terms of gross margin dollars,” he told analysts.
eNom’s channel skews more towards European and North American web hosting companies, which are a growth challenge, he said. He added:

We acquired a mature retail business and associated customers which for the past few years has been more about maintaining and servicing eNom’s existing customers as opposed to growth. It has not been actively promoted and as a result has a flat to declining trajectory. It’s something we don’t intend to change in the short-term, but as we look under the hood and get a better sense of the platform as we will with all of the operations, the long-term plan might be different.

The acquisition was “overwhelmingly about generating scale and realizing cost efficiencies”, Noss said.
Tucows paid $83.5 million for eNom, which has about $155 million in annual revenue and is expected to generate about $20 million in EBITDA per year after efficiencies are realized.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, earnings, enom, hover, melbourne it, rightside, tucows

Donuts sticks with Rightside despite Google support

Donuts has renewed its back-end registry services contract with Rightside, Rightside has announced.
That’s despite indications a few months ago that it might have been preparing for a switch to Google’s new Nomulus platform.
Rightside said yesterday that the deal, which has seen Rightside handle the registry for Donuts’ portfolio of almost 200 gTLDs for the last five years, has been extended.
It’s a “multi-year” deal, but the length of the extension has not been revealed.
Donuts had suggested last October that it might be ready to move to Nomulus instead.
The company revealed then that it had been quietly working with Google for 20 months on the software, which uses Google’s cloud services and is priced based on resource usage.
Then-CEO Paul Stahura said Nomulus “provides Donuts with an alternative back-end with significant benefits.”
Now-CEO Bruce Jaffe said yesterday that “Rightside’s registry platform has the right combination of innovative features, ease-of-operation, scalability, and highly responsive customer support”.

Comment Tagged: back-end, donuts, google, nomulus, rightside

GoDaddy Super Bowl ad results “best ever”

GoDaddy said its Super Bowl commercial, which aired yesterday, resulted in its “best ever” Sunday for new customers.
The company said in a press release it had seen its “its best-ever Sunday for attracting new customers in the books”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it sold more domains than its previous Super Bowl efforts, nor that it made more money.
It seems the web site builder service GoCentral, which is currently offered with a free trial period, accounted for “about half” of these new customers.
GoCentral was the subject of the ad, in which the abstract concept of “The Internet” is embodied as an irritating hipster. It can be viewed here:

1 Comment Tagged: gocentral, godaddy, super bowl

ICANN to host DNS event in Madrid

ICANN is to hold a “DNS Symposium” in Madrid this May.
The event will “explore ICANN’s current initiatives and projects relating to DNS research, operations, threats and countermeasures and technology evolution”, according to ICANN.
It’s a one-day event, focused specifically on DNS, rather than the domain name registration business.
The Symposium immediately follows the GDD Summit, the annual ICANN industry-focused intersessional event designed for registrars, registries and the like.
The Summit runs from May 9 to 11 and the Symposium is on May 13.
Both events will be held at the Hotel NH Collection Madrid Eurobuilding in Madrid and will be webcast.
ICANN is currently looking for corporate sponsors for the Symposium.

Comment Tagged: dns, dns symposium, gdd summit, ICANN

.club financing option sees early traction with $150k sales

.CLUB Domains said it has seen some early successes with its new 0% financing option, selling $150,000 worth of premium .club domains in its first week.
The registry announced that it sold 39 premiums for a total of $149,480, and that 37 of those names were sold using the financing option.
This option allows registrants to spread the cost of their domains over five years — 60 monthly payments — for names priced over $1,000.
The scheme was announced at the NamesCon conference in conjunction with a new brokers program, which gives brokers the ability to pass on 10% discounts to their clients and earn 15% commissions.
Seventeen of the 39 names were sold via brokers.
The results of the the first seven days of these programs compare favorably to other periods. In the fourth quarter of 2016, .CLUB said premium sales were $112,000.
For the whole of 2016, the registry sold $941,000 of reserved premium names, making a total of $4.3 million since .club launched May 2014.

Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, brokers, financing, new gTLDs, premium

ICANN’s divorce from the US cost $32 million

The IANA transition cost ICANN a total of $32 million, according to documentation released today.
The hefty bill was racked up from the announcment of the transition in March 2014 until the end of 2016, according to this presentation (pdf).
A whopping $15 million of the total went on lawyers.

Another $8.3 million went on other third-party services, including lobbying, PR and translation.
More than half of the overall expenses — $17.8 million — was incurred in ICANN’s fiscal 2016, which ended last June.

3 Comments Tagged: iana, ICANN, transition

Complaints about registrars dip in 2016

There were slightly fewer complaints about domain name registrars in 2016, compared to 2015, according to newly published ICANN data, but complaints still run into the tens of thousands.
There were 43,156 complaints about registrars to ICANN Compliance in 2016, compared to 45,926 in 2015, according to the data (pdf). That’s a dip of about 6%.
The overall volume of complaints, and the dip, can be attributed to Whois.
About three quarters of the complaints directed at registrars in 2016 were for Whois inaccuracy — 32,292 complaints in total, down from 34,740 in 2015.
The number of complaints about gTLD registries was pretty much flat at 2,230, despite hundreds of new gTLDs being delegated during the year.
The vast majority of those gTLDs were dot-brands, however, with nowhere near the same kind of potential for abuse as generally available gTLDs.
The biggest cause for complaint against registries, representing about half the total, was the Zone File Access program. I’ve filed a few of these myself, against dot-brands that decide the ZFA policy doesn’t apply to them.
Formal, published breach notices were also down on the year, with 25 breaches, four suspensions and four terminations, compared to 32 breaches, six suspensions and eight terminations in 2015.
That’s the second consecutive year the number of breach notices was down.

Comment Tagged: compliance, ICANN, whois

Thick Whois policy for .com is now live

The domain name industry is kicking off one of its most fundamental shifts in its plumbing this week.
Over the next two years, Verisign and every registrar that sells .com domains will have to rejigger their systems to convert .com from a “thin” to “thick” Whois.
This means that by February 1, 2019, Verisign will for the first time control the master database of all Whois records for .com domains, rather than it being spread piecemeal across all registrars.
The switch comes as a result of a years-in-the-making ICANN policy that officially came into force yesterday. It also applies to .com stablemates .net and .jobs.
The first big change will come August 1 this year, the deadline by which Verisign has to give all of its registrars the ability to submit thick Whois records both live (for new regs) and in bulk (for existing ones).
May 1, 2018 is the deadline for all registrars to start submitting thick Whois for new regs to Verisign, but they can start doing so as early as August this year if they want to.
Registrars have until February 1, 2019 to supply Verisign with thick Whois for all their existing registrations.
There’s a process for registrars who believe they would be violating local privacy laws by transferring this data to US-based Verisign to request an exemption, which may prevent the transition going perfectly uniformly.
Some say that the implementation of this policy may allow Verisign to ask for the ability to ask a for an increase in .com registry fees — currently frozen at the command of the US government — due to its inevitably increased costs.
Personally, I think the added costs will likely be chickenfeed compared to the cash-printing machine that is .com, so I think it’s far from a slam-dunk that such fee increases would be approved.

4 Comments Tagged: .com, .jobs, .net, ICANN, thick, verisign, whois