You might be surprised how many new gTLDs have changed hands already

At least 86 new gTLD registry contracts have changed hands since the end of 2013, I have discovered.
ICANN calls the transfer of a Registry Agreement from one company to another an “assignment”. Global Domains Division staff said in Buenos Aires last week that it’s one of the more complex and time-consuming tasks they have to perform.
So I thought I’d do a count, and I discovered some interesting stuff.
Donuts/Rightside
The biggest beneficiary of incoming assignments so far is of course Rightside, aka United TLD Holdco, which has so far taken over 23 of the gTLDs applied for by Donuts.
The two companies have had an agreement since the start that allows Rightside to take on as many as 107 of Donuts’ original 307 applications.
Interestingly, Rightside sold .fan to AsiaMix Digital after Donuts had transferred the gTLD to it.
Amazon
We also discover that Amazon is repatriating its gTLD contracts en masse.
So far, 21 gTLDs applied for by Amazon EU Sarl — the Luxembourg-based company Amazon uses to dodge tax in other European countries — have been transferred to US-based Amazon Registry Services Inc.
Amazon EU has made money losing new gTLD auctions.
Given the company’s usual MO, I have to wonder whether Amazon Registry Services, under the US tax regime, plans to make any money at all from its new raft of gTLDs.
Subsidiary changes
Speaking of tax, four gTLDs associated with the Hong Kong-based Zodiac group of applicants have been transferred to new Cayman Islands companies with similar names.
A bunch of the other assignments appear to be registries shifting contracts between various subsidiaries.
IG Group, a large UK derivatives trader, has assigned seven gTLDs (such as .forex, .markets and .spreadbetting) to newly created UK subsidiaries, for example.
Also, Ireland-based Afilias transferred the .green RA to a new Irish subsidiary, while Germany-based .srl applicant mySRL has sent its contract to a Florida-based sister company from the InternetX stable.
There are several other example of this kind of activity.
Actual acquisitions
As best as I can tell, there have been only eight actual post-contracting acquisitions so far: .trust, .fan, .meet, .reise, .xn--ses554g, .rent, .theatre, and .protection.
The only one of those I didn’t know about — and haven’t seen reported anywhere — was .meet, which Afilias seems to have sold to Google back in February.
It should be noted that while I’ve counted 86 assignments, I may have missed some. At least one — XYZ.com’s acquisition of .security from Symantec, does not appear have been completed yet, judging by ICANN’s web site.

3 Comments Tagged: .meet, acquisitions, ICANN, new gTLDs

Bulgaria looking for an IDN registry operator

The Bulgarian government is looking for a company to run the registry for its recently awarded .бг internationalized domain name.
.бг is the Cyrillic equivalent of .bg, the nation’s existing ccTLD.
After a tortuous battle through ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track process — where it was repeatedly rejected for looking too much like Brazil’s .br — the string was finally approved after an appeal last October.
The RFP is being carried out by the Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications and will be open for the next 90 days.
MTITC says the winner will be registry whose proposal most closely adheres to a “principles and requirements” document, which is currently a dead link on the ministry web site.
There’s no government money on offer, but the winner will be supported in its request to IANA for delegation of the TLD.
I gather that the bidding is open to any European Union company.

Comment Tagged: .bg, .бг, cctlds, fast track, ICANN, idn

Go Daddy advertising privacy petition on Facebook

Go Daddy appears to be putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to arguments about domain privacy.
The company is paying for “sponsored” posts on Facebook that promote the ongoing petition against proposed changes to Whois policy at ICANN.
This has been appearing on Facebook for me all day, seriously interrupting my Farmville time:

Clicking the ad takes you directly to the Save Domain Privacy petition, rather than a Go Daddy sales pitch.
As I reported last week, thousands of internet users have blasted ICANN with template comments complaining about proposed limits on Whois privacy.
There are currently over 10,000 such comments, I estimate, with over a week left until the filing deadline.
Registrars, Go Daddy among them, are largely concerned about a minority proposal emerging from in a proxy/privacy service accreditation working group that would ban transactional e-commerce sites from having private registrations.
They’re also bothered that intellectual property owners could get more rights to unmask privacy users under the proposals.
Despite Go Daddy’s outreach, Repect Our Privacy, letter-writing campaign, backed by NameCheap and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seems to be responsible for most of the comments filed to date.
Not that it’s necessarily relevant today, but NameCheap and Go Daddy were on opposing sides of the Stop Online Piracy Act debate — a linked controversy — a few years back.

1 Comment Tagged: eff, go daddy, ICANN, namecheap, ppsai, privacy, sopa, whois

Afilias promises cash for LGBT cause with .lgbt sales

Afilias has promised to donate a slice of .lgbt registration fees to a LGBT organization for the next few months.
The company, which acts as registry for .lgbt, said it will give $20 to the It Gets Better Project for every name registered through October 11.
It Gets Better is a US-based non-profit devoted to supporting LGBT people through their often rough teenage years.
Afilias said the promotion is meant to celebrate the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the US and Ireland.
The October 11 end date was picked because that is National Coming Out Day in the US.
.lgbt names currently retail for roughly $45 to $60 a year.

Comment Tagged: .lgbt, afilias, it gets better, new gTLDs

First example of .sucks cybersquatting?

The .sucks domain has been generally available for a little over a week now, and I’ve found what may be the first example of somebody attempting to sell one to a brand owner.
amherstcollege.sucks is one of only a handful on non-registry-owned .sucks domains to have a web site already indexed by Google.
The site solicits commentary about Amherst College — a liberal arts university in Massachusetts that owns a US trademark on “Amherst” — but does not yet publish any such criticism.
However, the phrases “AMHERSTCOLLEGE.SUCKS DOMAIN NAME + WEBSITE IS FOR SALE” and “IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PURCHASING THIS DOMAIN AND WEBSITE CONTACT US” appear prominently on the bare-bones WordPress blog currently running at the site.
The Whois record shows “THIS DOMAIN IS FOR SALE” as the registrant organization.
Under the UDRP, offering a domain for sale is usually considered enough to meet the “bad faith” part of the three-prong cybersquatting test.
I doubt it’s the only example of a .sucks domain matching a brand currently listed for sale by a third-party registrant, but it is the first one showing up in Google.
It’s still early days; the other .sucks domains with sites and a Google presence are a mix of redirects, mirroring and placeholders.
Microsoft-owned microsoft.sucks is one of them. It redirects to a Bing search results page.
The $250-a-year .sucks gTLD, managed by Vox Populi registry, currently has fewer than 5,700 domains in its zone file. Growth has ground almost to a halt over the last few days.

4 Comments Tagged: amherst college, cybersquatting, new gTLDs, sucks, vox populi

Registrars open floodgate of Whois privacy outrage

A letter-writing campaign orchestrated by the leading domain registrars has resulted in ICANN getting hit with over 8,000 pro-privacy comments in less than a week.
It’s the largest volume of comments received by ICANN on an issue since right-wing Christian activists deluged ICANN with protests about .xxx, back in 2010.
The comments — the vast majority of them unedited template letters — were filed in response to the GNSO Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues (PPSAI) Working Group Initial Report.
That report attempts to bring privacy and proxy services, currently unregulated by ICANN, under ICANN’s contractual wing.
There are two problematic areas, as far as the registrars are concerned.
The first is the ability of trademark and copyright owners to, under certain circumstances, have the registrant of a privately registered name unmasked.
Upon receiving such a request, privacy services would have 15 days to obtain a response from their customer. They’d then have to make a call as to whether to reveal their contact information to the IP owner or not.
Possibly the most controversial aspect of this is described here:

Disclosure cannot be refused solely for lack of any of the following: (i) a court order; (ii) a subpoena; (iii) a pending civil action; or (iv) a UDRP or URS proceeding; nor can refusal to disclose be solely based on the fact that the request is founded on alleged intellectual property infringement in content on a website associated with the domain name.

In other words, the privacy services (in most cases, also the registrar) would be forced make a judgement on whether web site content is illegal, in the absence of a court order, before removing Whois privacy on a domain.
The second problematic area is an “additional statement” on domains used for commercial activity, appended to the PPSAI report, penned by MarkMonitor on behalf of Facebook, LegitScript, DomainTools, IP attorneys Smith, Gambreall & Russell, and itself.
Those companies believe it should be against the rules for anyone who commercially transacts via their web site to use Whois privacy.
Running ads on a blog, say, would be fine. But asking for, for example, credit card details in order to transact would preclude you from using privacy services.
The PPSAI working group didn’t even approach consensus on this topic, and it’s not a formal recommendation in its report.
Regardless, it’s one of the lynchpins of the current registrar letter-writing campaigns.
A page at SaveDomainPrivacy.org — the site backed by dozens of registrars big and small — describes circumstances under which somebody would need privacy even though they engage in e-commerce.
Home-based businesses, shelters for domestic abuse victims that accept donations, and political activists are all offered up as examples.
Visitors to the site are (or were — the site appears to be down right now (UPDATE: it’s back up)) invited to send a comment to ICANN supporting:

The legitimate use of privacy or proxy services to keep personal information private, protect physical safety, and prevent identity theft
The use of privacy services by all, for all legal purposes, regardless of whether the website is “commercial”
That privacy providers should not be forced to reveal my private information without verifiable evidence of wrongdoing

The content of the site was the subject of a sharp disagreement between MarkMonitor and Tucows executives last Saturday during ICANN 53. I’d tell you exactly what was said, but the recording of the relevant part of the GNSO Saturday session has not yet been published by ICANN.
Another site, which seems to be responsible for the majority of the 8,000+ comments received this week, is backed by the registrar NameCheap and the digital civil rights groups the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight For The Future.
NameCheap appears to be trying to build on the reputation it started to create for itself when it opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act a few years ago, going to so far as to link the Whois privacy reforms to SOPA on the campaign web site, which says:

Your privacy provider could be forced to publish your contact data in WHOIS or even give it out to anyone who complains about your website, without due process. Why should a small business owner have to publicize her home address just to have a website?
We think your privacy should be protected, regardless of whether your website is personal or commercial, and your confidential info should not be revealed without due process. If you agree, it’s time to tell ICANN.

The EFF’s involvement seems to have grabbed the attention of many reporters in the general tech press, generating dozens of headlines this week.
The public comment period on the PPSAI initial report ends July 7.
If it continues to attract attention, it could wind up being ICANN’s most-subscribed comment period ever.
Do geeks care about privacy more than Christians care about porn? We’ll find out in a week and a half.

2 Comments Tagged: blacknight, ICANN, icann 53, markmonitor, ppsai, privacy, proxy, tucows, whois

Puerto Rico to host ICANN meeting next year

ICANN is to host its first second ever public meeting on a Caribbean island.
The organization’s board of directors yesterday voted in favor of holding ICANN 57 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Technically, this fulfills ICANN’s commitment to hold the meeting in North America, even though physically Puerto Rico is in the Caribbean.
The island is one of those oddities in terms of territories in that it inherits its ICANN region from its political overlords.
Puerto Rico is a US territory, which puts it in ICANN’s North American region. The neighboring British Virgin Islands is, according to ICANN, in Europe.
ICANN 57 will be held from October 29 to November 4 2016, at the tail end of Puerto Rico’s hurricane season. It’s the second time ICANN has visited the island, the first since 2007.
There’s no word yet on where ICANN 56, June 2016, will be held. It’s a designated slot for an Latin American/Caribbean host nation.
ICANN 55 will be held in Marrakech next March, ICANN’s board confirmed yesterday, rescheduled from March this year due to the Ebola scare.
Dublin will host ICANN 54 this coming October.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 56

Posh Spice takes down porn site

Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has used UDRP to take down a porn site bearing her name.
victoria-beckham.biz was owned by a Ukrainian, who had set up a site “at which adult and/or pornographic images and services are offered”, according to the UDRP panelist.
It was pretty much a slam-dunk case.
While not all celebrities own trademarks on their names, Beckham does. The squatter, who registered the name in December 2014, did not even attempt a response.
Based on archived screenshots and Whois records, it looks like victoria-beckham.biz has been around as a rather harmless fan site since about 2006.
It was only after the domain expired late last year and was re-registered did it become a porn site, attracting the attention of Beckham’s lawyers.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, udrp

Donuts: glitch revealed price we would pay for gTLDs

The recently discovered security vulnerability in one of ICANN’s web sites revealed how much Donuts was willing to pay for contested gTLDs at auction.
This worrying claim emerged during a meeting between registries and the ICANN board of directors at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires yesterday.
“We were probably the largest victim of the data breach,” Donuts veep Jon Nevett told the board. “We had our financial data reviewed numerous times, dozens of times. We had our relative net worth of our TLDs reviewed, so it was very damaging information.”
He was referring to the misconfiguration in the new gTLD applicants’ portal, which allowed any user to view confidential application attachments belonging to any applicant.
ICANN discovered the problem in February, two years after the portal launched. The results of a security audit were revealed in late April.
But it was not until late May that it emerged that only one person, dotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, was suspected by ICANN of having deliberately viewed data belonging to others.
Nevett said communication should have been faster.
“We were in the dark for a number of weeks about who saw the data,” he told the board. “That was troubling, as we were going to auctions in that interim period as well.”
Donuts, which applied for over 300 new gTLDs, is known to have taken a strictly numbers-driven approach to string selection and auction strategy.
If a rival in a contention set had known how much Donuts was prepared to pay for a string, it would have had a significant advantage in an auction.
In response to Nevett’s concerns, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said that ICANN had to do a thorough investigation before it could be sure who saw what when.

1 Comment Tagged: auctions, donuts, dotberlin, gdd, glitch, ICANN, portal, security

AlpNames claims to be second-largest new gTLD registrar

A little-known registrar with close ties to Famous Four Media says it is now the second-largest seller of new gTLD domains, after Go Daddy.
AlpNames said it has 500,000 new gTLD domains under management, overtaking Network Solutions into the number-two position.
Its number for February, the last month for which registry reports are available, has the registrar with a DUM of under 50,000.
The vast majority of the names it sells or gives away are in gTLDs in the Famous Four portfolio — namely .science, .party and .webcam.
It’s currently selling those for $0.49 each, a $0.24 markup on the current promotional registry fee.
Factoring out the ICANN transaction fee, AlpNames has a margin of just a few cents per name.
Previously, it has given away .science names for free.
AlpNames is Famous Four’s neighbor in Gibraltar and owns domains such as register.science, indicating a very close relationship between the two companies.

Comment Tagged: alpnames, Famous Four Media, new gTLDs