.shop among four gTLDs heading to auction

The new gTLDs .shop, .shopping, .cam and .phone are all set to go to auction after their various delays and objections were cleared up.
It seems that .shop and .shopping contention sets remain merged, so only one string from one applicant will emerge victorious.
That’s due to a completely mad String Confusion Objection decision that ruled the two words are too confusingly similar to coexist in the DNS.
That SCO ruling was made by the same guy who held up both sets of applications when he ruled that .shop and .通販 (“.onlineshopping”) were also too confusingly similar.
The two rulings combined linked the contention sets for all three strings.
.通販 applicant Amazon appealed its SCO loss using a special process that ICANN created especially for the occasion, and won.
But .shop and .shopping applicants were not given the same right to appeal, meaning the auction will take place between nine .shop applicants and .shopping applicants Uniregistry and Donuts.
Donuts is an applicant for .shop and .shopping, meaning it will have to make its mind up which string it prefers, if it intends to win the auction.
If it’s a private auction, Donuts would presumably qualify for a share of its own winning bid. Weird.
(UPDATE: That was incorrect).
The other contention set held up by an inconsistent SCO decision was .cam, which was originally ruled too similar to .com.
Rightside won its appeal too, meaning it will be fought at auction between Famous Four, Rightside and AC Webconnecting.
.phone had been held up for different reasons.
It’s a two-way fight between Donuts and Dish DBS, a TV company that wanted to run .phone as a closed generic. Like almost all closed generic applicants, Dish has since changed its plans.

2 Comments Tagged: .cam, .phone, .shop, .shopping, .通販, auction, donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs, string confusion objection

Aussie government slams .food closed generic bid

The Australian government is among those asking ICANN deny a request to make .food a “closed generic” gTLD.
Eight people have filed comments opposing Lifestyle Domain’s application for Specification 13 status for its .food registry contract, which would allow the company to keep all .food domains for itself, since we reported the news earlier this month.
The Aussies are arguably the highest-profile opponent, and the one most likely to be taken seriously by ICANN.
Governmental Advisory Committee rep Annaliese Williams wrote:

The Australian Government issued an Early Warning to Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc on the grounds that ‘food’ is a common generic term, and that restricting common generic strings, such as .food, for the exclusive use of a single entity could have a negative impact on competition…
The Australian Government does not consider that Lifestyle Domain Holdings’ application to operate .food for its exclusive use serves a public interest goal.

Lifestyle Domain is a subsidiary of Scripps Networks, the company that runs the Food Network TV stations and Food.com web site.
The company claims that it has trademark rights to the word “food” that should allow it to run .food as a dot-brand gTLD.
That would mean nobody but Scripps, which won the right to .food at auction, would be able to register .food domains.
ICANN has also received negative comments from employees of registrars (both retail and corporate) and registries.
One comment, taken at face value, appears to be pro-Scripps, but I’m fairly confident it’s actually just extreme sarcasm.
The decision about whether to allow Scripps to add Spec 13 to its contract will be made by ICANN legal staff.
ICANN told me this week that there’s no ETA on a decision yet.

4 Comments Tagged: .food, closed generics, dot-brand, ICANN, lifestyle, new gTLDs, scripps, spec 13

Credit card hack cost Web.com millions

Web.com is taking a $1 million per-quarter hit to its revenue as a result of August’s hacking attack.
It also incurred $400,000 in consulting, legal and credit monitoring fees in the third quarter as a result of the breach, CEO David Brown told analysts last night.
Some 93,000 credit card numbers were stolen during the attack, a small portion of its 3.3 million customers.
A number of customers jumped ship as a result of the attack, moving their domains elsewhere, which increased Web.com’s churn rate.
“Due to the subscription nature of our business, in the fourth and subsequent quarters we expect the breach will have about a $1 million negative impact on revenue per quarter due to the shortfall from Q3,” Brown said.
It added 15,000 customers in the quarter, lower than the 21,000 it added in Q2.
Net income for the quarter was $6.1 million, reversing a $3.4 million loss in the year-ago period, on revenue that was basically flat at $136.8 million, compared to $137.4 million a year ago.
In response to an analyst question, Brown also commented on the success, or lack thereof, of the company’s new gTLD business. He said:

That continues to be positive, but we’re not doing back-flips here. It’s not that positive. We think it’s good for the market, good for consumers and businesses to have more choices. But they’re not flying off the table. .com and .net and the original extensions still are the force in the marketplace. But as we see more gTLDs and as the market understands them and see the opportunity, we continue to believe that this will be a positive trend. But at this point, it’s not moving the needle in our business or likely in anyone’s business.

Web.com owns registrars including Network Solutions and Register.com.

1 Comment Tagged: earnings, hack, new gTLDs, security, web.com

.cars domains to start at $45,000, retail for $2,500

Cars Registry has set pricing for .car, .cars and .auto domains at crazy-high levels.
If you want to buy a domain in any of the three gTLDs on day one, it will cost you a whopping $45,000.
If you buy one during regular general availability, it’s likely to set you back $2,500.
The registry, a partnership of Uniregistry and XYZ.com, has set its registry fee at $2,000, according to an email sent to registrars this week.
That’s a buck higher than .sucks, one of the most expensive new gTLDs to launch to date.
The sunrise fee will be $3,000 — made up of the regular $2,000 fee plus an added $1,000. Again, that’s higher than .sucks.
The Early Access Period — which, as reported yesterday, has replaced the more usual landrush — will run for nine days with prices ranging from $45,000 to $5,000.
Compared to the usual models of XYZ.com and Uniregistry, which tend towards the mass-market, these prices are colossal.
I wonder how much the pricing was influenced by the fact that the registry has the car-related gTLD market almost entirely sewn up.
Its only potential competitor is .autos, which has been delegated for almost 18 months but has yet to even reveal its launch plans and probably isn’t going to be available to the mass market anyway.
Sunrise for all three gTLDS is due to start December 9, ending January 12. EAP will begin that day, and GA will start January 20.

10 Comments Tagged: .auto, .autos, .car, .cars, cars registry, eap, new gTLDs, sunrise, uniregistry, xyz.com

Now Uniregistry shifts to Early Access launch model

Uniregistry has become the latest registry to adopt the Early Access Period model for some new gTLD launches.
.cars, .car and .auto will all use the EAP, in place of the more typical landrush period, when they launch in January.
Technically, while Uniregistry is running the back-end, the three gTLDS are all being offered by Cars Registry, a partnership between Uniregistry and .xyz registry XYZ.com.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said it was felt that EAP was needed due to the “stupendous cost” of acquiring the strings.
EAP is a period lasting usually about a week in which the price of registering any domain descends daily from a very high fee on day one — usually above $10,000 at the storefront — to maybe a hundred bucks when the period closes.
The model was pioneered by portfolio registries Donuts and Rightside, but has since been adopted by the likes of Minds + Machines, Radix and XYZ.com.
It’s rapidly becoming the de facto industry standard for new gTLD launches, replacing the auction-based approach to landrush most registries have used in the past.
The driving factor for the industry switch is surely revenue.
Donuts told us late last month that it had sold 48,381 EAP domains across all of its launches to date, where registry prices are believed to start at around the $10,000 mark.
M+M said yesterday that it sold $1.18 million after it chose to use EAP with its recently launched .law gTLD, where registration restrictions suggest many of the sales will have been to legit end users.
Registrars also get a bigger slice of the pie. In an auction model they might wind up with just the regular registration fee, but with EAP they can mark up day one domains by thousands of dollars.
Cars Registry says its EAP is targeted at “OEMs, dealerships, vendors”, but it will almost certainly get a healthy chunk of domainer interest too.

Comment Tagged: cars registry, eap, early access period, Minds + Machines, uniregistry, xyz.com

.gay applicant appeals community loss, again

dotgay LLC has appealed its Community Priority Evaluation defeat again, filing a new Request for Reconsideration with ICANN this week.
It’s an unprecedented second use of the RfR process to appeal its CPE loss, in which the Economist Intelligence Unit panel decided the applicant’s definition of “gay” was far too broad to award dotgay enough points to pass the evaluation.
But dotgay wants ICANN to initiate a third CPE, to be carried out by anyone other than the EIU.
The EIU panel said earlier this month that it had “determined that the applied-for string does not sufficiently identify some members of the applicant’s defined community, in particular transgender, intersex, and ally individuals”.
Basically, EIU was pointing out, for the second time, that transgender people and straight “allies” aren’t “gay”.
It awarded dotgay 0 out of the possible 4 points available on “Nexus” criteria, meaning the applicant failed to hit the 14 points required to win.
While the RfR dodges the transgender issue altogether, dotgay has some interesting arguments in response to the “ally” question.
It’s now claiming that “ally” refers to companies and organizations that support the equal rights cause (because non-human legal entities don’t have a gender identity or sexual preference) and to proxy registrars:

Now, since an organization or company in itself can impossibly be “lesbian” or “gay”, Requester has been seeking for a way to also position these companies and organizations in this community definition. For this reason, Requester has referred to these organizations as “allies” in the context of the LGBTQIA definition.
Furthermore, as stated in the Application, LGBTQIAs are a vulnerable group in many countries and societies, and too often still the subject of prosecution for who they are. In order to put in place safeguards for those gay community members who do not wish to be directly associated with a domain name registration, organizations and companies who in essence cannot be “non-heterosexual” should have the possibility to act as a proxy service, which is common practice in the domain name industry.
In any case, any such “ally” must be approved by an Authentication Partner in order to be able to register a domain name in its own name or in the name or on behalf of a third party who meets the LGBTQI requirements.

It’s an interesting argument, but I can’t see anything in its original application that would support such a position.
dotgay may be on stronger ground with its claim that it unfairly lost one point on the “Opposition” criteria of the CPE.
Two points were available there. Applicants could lose one point immediately if there was a single letter of opposition from a relevant, non-negligible organization.
The EIU seems to have been in possession of such a letter, though its CPE ruling does not name the opponent.
dotgay thinks the opponent was the Q Center, a community center in Portland, Oregon, which opposed dotgay in writing in 2014 but, following a change in its board of directors, retracted that opposition (pdf).
So it may be the case that dotgay unfairly lost a point.
Regaining that point would not be enough to give the company a winning CPE score, but if the EIU screwed up that may be grounds for ICANN to initiate another rerun of the CPE.
However, it’s quite rare for ICANN’s board of directors to approve an RfR.
If dotgay loses, it will either have to go to auction against its rival applicants or file an Independent Review Process complaint, its final avenue of appeal.
Read its RfR here.

1 Comment Tagged: .gay, community, community priority evaluation, cpe, dotgay, eiu, ICANN, new gTLDs

Verisign’s silly .xyz lawsuit thrown out

Verisign has had its false advertising lawsuit against the .xyz gTLD registry thrown out of court.
XYZ.com this week won a summary judgement, ahead of a trial that was due to start next Monday.
“By granting XYZ a victory on summary judgement, the court found that XYZ won the case as a matter of law because there were no triable issues for a jury,” the company said in a statement.
The judge’s ruling does not go into details about the court’s rationale. XYZ’s motion to dismiss has also not been published.
So it’s difficult to know for sure exactly why the case has been thrown out.
Verisign sued in December, claiming XYZ and CEO Daniel Negari had lied in advertising and media interviews by saying there are no good .com domain names left.
Many of its claims centered on this video:

XYZ said its ads were merely hyperbolic “puffery” rather than lies.
Verisign also claimed that XYZ had massively inflated its purported registration numbers by making a shady $3 million reciprocal domains-for-advertising deal with Network Solutions.
XYZ general counsel Grant Carpenter said in a statement: “These tactics appear to be part of a coordinated anti-competitive scheme by Verisign to stunt competition and maintain its competitive advantage in the industry.”
While Verisign has lost the case, it could be seen to have succeeded in some respects.
XYZ had to pay legal fees in “the seven-figure range”, as well as disclose hundreds of internal company documents — including emails between Negari and me — during the discovery phase.
Through discovery, Verisign has obtained unprecedented insight into how its newest large competitor conducts its business.
While I’ve always thought the lawsuit was silly, I’m now a little disappointed that more details about the XYZ-NetSol deal are now unlikely to emerge in court.

9 Comments Tagged: .xyz, false advertising, lawsuit, network solutions, new gTLDs, verisign, xyz.com

Registrars warn of huge domain suspension scam

Customers of at least half a dozen large registrars been targeted by an email malware attack that exploits confusion about takedown policies.
The fake suspension notices have been spammed to email addresses culled from Whois and are tailored to the registrar of record and the targeted domain name.
Customers of registrars including eNom, Web.com, Moniker, easyDNS, NameBright, Dynadot and Melbourne IT are among those definitely affected. I suspect it’s much more widespread.
The emails reportedly look like this:

Dear Sir/Madam,
The following domain names have been suspended for violation of the easyDNS Technologies, Inc. Abuse Policy:
Domain Name: DOMAIN.COM
Registrar: easyDNS Technologies, Inc.
Registrant Name: Domain Owner
Multiple warnings were sent by easyDNS Technologies, Inc. Spam and Abuse Department to give you an opportunity to address the complaints we have received.
We did not receive a reply from you to these email warnings so we then attempted to contact you via telephone.
We had no choice but to suspend your domain name when you did not respond to our attempts to contact you.
Click here and download a copy of complaints we have received.
Please contact us by email at mailto:abuse@easydns.com for additional information regarding this notification.
Sincerely,
easyDNS Technologies, Inc.
Spam and Abuse Department
Abuse Department Hotline: 480-124-0101

The “click here” invitation leads to a downloadable file, presumably containing malware.
Of course, the best way to check whether your domain name has been genuinely suspended or not is to use it — visit its web site, use its email, etc.
As domain suspensions become more regularly occurrences, due to ICANN policies on Whois accuracy for one reason, we can only expect more scams like these.

3 Comments Tagged: malware, phishing, security, spam

Three new ICANN directors started today

A former Dutch politician, a cable company VP and a Latin American ccTLD manager joined the ICANN board of directors today.
The three new directors took their seats at the conclusion of the ICANN 54 public meeting in Dublin.
Two were Nominating Committee appointees, the third was selected by the Address Supporting Organization to replace six-year veteran Ray Plzak.
Lousewies van der Laan is possibly the highest-profile new director.
She is a former politician who has sat as a member of both Dutch national and European parliaments.
She was a member of the super liberal D66 party in the Netherlands, briefly leading whilst it was part of a governing coalition before a leadership vote defeat and her subsequent retirement from politics in 2006.
Wikipedia has her as a former party spokesperson for “foreign policy, higher education, justice, technology, European affairs and gay rights”
Since then, she has spent time as chief of staff of the president of the International Criminal Court and an independent public affairs consultant.
She’s the second former MEP to sit on the current ICANN board, after German Facebook lobbyist Erika Mann.
The other NomCom appointee is Rafael “Lito” Ibarra, who runs SVNet, the ccTLD manager for El Salvador’s .sv domain.
According to ICANN, he is known as the “father of the Internet” in El Salvador, due to his contributions over the last couple of decades.
He seems to have received the .sv delegation from Jon Postel himself, in the pre-ICANN days.
He’s also on the board of LACNIC, the Latin American IP address registry.
The ASO appointee is Ron da Silva, VP of network engineering at US cable giant Time Warner Cable.
His previous employers include AOL and Sprint. He’s also been chair of ARIN’s advisory council.
The NomCom also reappointed incumbent George Sadowsky, who already has six years of ICANN board service under his belt.
The other two departing directors were Wolfang Kleinwachter and Gonzalo Navarro.

3 Comments Tagged: board, dublin, ICANN, icann 54

Why did the GNSO fail to pick a new leader?

Political infighting between sections of the Generic Names Supporting Organization seems to be responsible for the GNSO Council’s failure to elect a new chair yesterday.
Rumor has it that Contracted Parties House pick James Bladel, a VP at Go Daddy, only lost because of ructions in the Non-Contracted Parties House.
I stress these are just rumors — nobody with any first-hand knowledge of the situation was prepared to go on-record with me today — but they come from multiple sources.
As I reported earlier today, Bladel failed to secure the support of over 60% of the NCPH — the threshold to be elected chair — despite having the unanimous support of the CPH.
Roughly 47% of the NCPH chose to vote for “none of the above” instead, resulting in the GNSO Council now lacking a chair.
But I gather that this was not a diss against Bladel, his employer, or the CPH per se.
Rather, the story I’m hearing is that some councilors gave an empty chair their votes as a result of disagreements between the commercial and non-commercial sides of the NCPH.
Some say a deal had been made under which NCPH candidate Heather Forrest would receive at least 60% of the vote in round one, but some voters reneged on the deal, meaning she was knocked out of the running.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what it implies is that some votes that would have otherwise gone to Bladel in round two of voting were withheld, essentially out of spite.
Bladel only needed one additional NCPH vote to hit his 60%.
If this sounds like childish bickering, you may be right, but it wouldn’t be the first time a GNSO constituency has disrupted the council in order to make a point.
The last time that happened to a significant degree was over three years ago, when non-commercial users exploited a timing issue to protest new rights protection mechanisms for the Olympics, risking the new gTLD program timeline.
That led some at the time to predict the “death” of the GNSO.
That’s not happening this time. If anything, the wagons are circling.
Hastily reappointed council vice chair Volker Greimann, who became de facto chair at least for today, described the current situation as “business as usual” today, pointing out that ICANN bylaws envisaged and accounted for this kind of power vacuum.
The next vote on the chair’s position will take place at least a month from now.

1 Comment Tagged: dublin, election, gnso, ICANN, icann 54