Gay.com, “worth $7 million”, donated to gay blog

The domain name gay.com has reportedly been donated for free to a gay rights group despite claims it is worth $6.9 million.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center said late last week that it is to take ownership of the domain, which will direct visitors to a recently launched blog.
The Center says it is the world’s largest provider of services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The donation comes from VS Media, which acquired the domain last year and seems to run it as a community hub slash dating site. It runs an adult webcam site called Flirt4Free.
Gay.com apparently gets 200,000 visits per month.
According to the Center, gay.com will shortly begin pointing to a blog currently published at VanguardNow.org.
Chief marketing officer Jim Key said in a press release:

We’ve only just begun to think about future possibilities for the domain. But for now, the traffic from Gay.com to our new blog will help even more people learn how we’re building a world where LGBT people thrive as healthy, equal, and complete members of society.

The company decided to give the domain away to a worthy cause and invited five major gay charities to make proposals, the Center said.
The $6.9 million valuation comes from a VS Media appraisal, but does not seem to me like a hugely implausible number.
Whois records do not show a change of ownership recently, but the domain has been using a privacy service for some time so changes may not be obvious.

Iran rep reported to ICANN Ombudsman, again

Iran’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative has found himself reported to ICANN’s Ombudsman for alleged bad behavior for the second time in just a few months.
Outspoken GACer Kavouss Arasteh was referred to Ombudsman Herb Waye by consultant John Laprise, according to posts on mailing lists and social media.
Both men serve on an ICANN volunteer working group that is looking at matters related to the jurisdiction in which ICANN operates.
The group’s discussions have recently become extremely fractious, largely due to a series of combative emails and teleconference interventions from Arasteh.
Laprise eventually said on the list that Arasteh was being a “bad actor”, adding that “his tone, manner, and insinuations are detrimental and indeed hostile to the process.”
He later said on Facebook that he had reported the matter to the Ombudsman.
The spat centered on an August 1 teleconference in which members of the so-called WS2-Jurisdiction working group heard a briefing from ICANN lawyers on the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees international trade sanctions in the US.
As well as enforcing sanctions against countries including Iran, OFAC maintains a list of people and organizations, many of them Iranian, that American companies are forbidden from doing business with.
It impacts ICANN because the organization in its normal course of business is often obliged to deal with ccTLD registries in sanctioned nations, for which it needs to apply for OFAC licenses.
Arasteh initially complained multiple times that the meeting had been rescheduled for August 1 — apparently with his initial consent — which is a national holiday in his home nation of Switzerland.
He also fought for ICANN lawyers to be asked to provide, at very short notice, a written briefing paper on OFAC, answering the group’s questions, prior to the teleconference taking place.
On neither issue did he receive support from fellow volunteers, something for which he seemed to blame group chair Greg Shatan, an intellectual property lawyer.
Arasteh’s criticisms of an increasingly weary Shatan sometimes seemed to border on conspiracy theory. All other working group members who publicly expressed an opinion said Shatan was doing a fine job herding this particular set of cats.
During the teleconference itself, Arasteh ate up the first five or six minutes of allotted time with a rambling, barely comprehensible complaint about the format of the meeting, compelling Shatan to eventually ask for his mic to be cut off.
In emails over the next 48 hours, the GAC rep continued his tirade against what he perceives as Shatan’s bias against him and called again for ICANN legal to provide a formal set of written answers to questions.
Some fellow group members believe Arasteh’s defensive and confrontational approach is merely a clash of cultures between his usual style of government diplomacy and the staid, tediously polite style of ICANN working group interactions.
Others are less charitable.
Still, the question of whether the latest WG friction has infringed any of ICANN’s “Expected Standards of Behavior” now appears to be in the hands of the Ombudsman.
Arasteh was also reported to Waye back in May, when he accused the chairs of a different ICANN working group of trying to exclude governmental voices from new gTLD policy-making by scheduling teleconferences at times he found inconvenient.
Waye subsequently reported that the complaint had been resolved between the parties.
In June, he said he was proactively monitoring a third working group mailing list after receiving allegations of harassment. That was unrelated to Iran.

EFF recommends against new gTLDs

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recommended that domain registrants concerned about intellectual property “bullies” steer clear of new gTLDs.
The view is expressed in a new EFF report today that is particularly critical of policies in place at new gTLD portfolio registries Donuts and Radix.
The report (pdf) also expresses strong support for .onion, the pseudo-TLD available only to users of the Tor browser and routing network, which the EFF is a long-term supporter of.
The report makes TLD recommendations for “security against trademark bullies”, “security against identity theft and marketing”, “security against overseas speech regulators” and “security against copyright bullies”.
It notes that no one TLD is “best” on all counts, so presents a table explaining which TLD registries — a broad mix of the most popular gTLD and ccTLD registries — have which relevant policies.
For those afraid of trademark “bullies”, the EFF recommends against 2012-round new gTLDs on the basis that they all have the Uniform Rapid Suspension service. It singles out Donuts for special concern due to its Domain Protected Marks List, which adds an extra layer of protection for trademark owners.
On copyright, the report singles out Donuts and Radix for their respective “trusted notifier” schemes, which give the movie and music industries a hotline to report large-scale piracy web sites.
These are both well-known EFF positions that the organization has expressed in previous publications.
On the other two issues, the report recommends examining ccTLDs for those which don’t have to kowtow to local government speech regulations or publicly accessible Whois policies.
In each of the four areas of concern, the report suggests taking a look at .onion, while acknowledging that the pseudo-gTLD would be a poor choice if you actually want people to be able to easily access your web site.
While the opinions expressed in the report may not be surprising, the research that has gone into comparing the policies of 40-odd TLD registries covering hundreds of TLDs appears on the face of it to be solid and possibly the report’s biggest draw.
You can read it here (pdf).

.blog tops 100,000 names, 66,500 blogs

The new gTLD .blog has gone through the 100,000 registered domain mark, according to its registry.
Knock Knock Whois There said that the milestone was reached with the registration of kitchenmagic.blog today.
It’s a pretty good start for the gTLD, which went into general availability last November, making for an average of 12,500 names added per month.
While KKWT has offered discounts and volume incentives to registrars, its wholesale prices have not approached levels low enough to start attracting abusive use en masse. We’re talking around the $8 mark at the cheapest, I hear.
In fact, the registry said today that it reckons 66.5% of its domains — 66,500, in other words — “have a unique website associated with them”, compared with an industry average under 40%.
Both of those statistics seem to have been supplied by Pandalytics, the DomainsBot service to which KKWT subscribes, and do not appear to be publicly available.
If accurate, 66.5% usage is a much better statistic to brag about than 100,000 registrations, in my view. Usage, of course, drives the virtuous circle that leads to more sales.

Billionaire Elon Musk reacquired x.com

Billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal founder Elon Musk has reacquired the domain name x.com for an undisclosed sum.
X.com was the domain he acquired in 1999 and originally used for PayPal, before its 2001 rebrand.
Musk, who currently runs private space travel trailblazer SpaceX, confirmed the purchase in a tweet today:

Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017

The deal was first spotted by domainer/blogger Elliot Silver, who noticed the Whois change.
Musk also seemed to say in a subsequent tweet that he had originally bought x.com back from its original owner in 1999 for stock in the nascent company, which 18 years later would presumably be worth an absolute fortune.

It was a tough negotiation, but they seemed like good guys. I hope they kept the stock. Would be worth a lot today.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017

While the price of the 2017 purchase was not disclosed, one has to assume it would be worth millions; pocket change to a man reportedly worth over $15 billion today.

.blog renewal prices will not go up, registry promises

Knock Knock Whois There, the .blog registry, has promised not to raise its wholesale fees on existing registrations.
The company, which is affiliated with WordPress, seems to have made the move in response to ongoing registrar discomfort following Uniregistry’s plan to significant raise the price of several of its new gTLDs (which has since been backpedaled).
The promise has been baked into the Registry-Registrar Agreement under which all of its registrars can sell .blog names.
The new RRA reads (with the new text in italics):

5.1.1. Registrar agrees to pay Registry Operator or its designee in accordance with the fee schedule set forth in Exhibit A for initial and renewal registrations and other services provided by Registry Operator to Registrar (collectively, “Fees”). Registry Operator reserves the right, from time to time, to modify the Fees in a manner consistent with ICANN policies and Registry Policies. However, once a domain is registered, Registry Operator will not modify the Renewal Fee of that domain.

This of course leaves the door open for KKWT to increase the price of a new registration, but it seems renewal prices are frozen.
I believe the current wholesale .blog fee starts at $16 per year.
The new RRA also adds ICANN-mandated language concerning the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy and a clarification about registrar legal indemnifications, KKWT said.

Ombudsman steps in after harassment claims in Whois group

ICANN Ombudsman Herb Waye has started monitoring an ICANN mailing list after multiple complaints of disrespectful behavior.
Waye this week told participants in the Registration Data Services working group that he is to trawl through their list archives and proactively monitor the group following “multiple complaints regarding behavior that contravenes the ICANN Expected Standards of Behavior and possibly the Community Anti-Harassment Policy”.
The RDS working group is exploring the possibility of replacing the current Whois system, in which all data is completely open, with something “gated”, restricting access to authenticated individuals based on their role.
Law enforcement agencies, for example, may be able to get a greater level of access to personal contact information than schmucks like me and you.
Privacy advocates are in favor of giving registrants more control over their data, while anti-abuse researchers hate anything that will limit their ability to stop spam, phishing and the like.
It’s controversial stuff, and arguments on the RDS WG list have been been very heated recently, sometimes spilling over into ad hominem attacks.
The Expected Standards of Behavior requires all ICANN community members to treat each other with civility.
I haven’t seen anything especially egregious, but apparently the disrespect on display has been sufficiently upsetting that the Ombudsman has had to step in.
It’s the first time, that I’m aware of, that the ICANN Ombudsman has proactively monitored a list rather than simply responding to complaints.
Waye said that he plans to deliver his verdict before ICANN 59, which kicks off in a little over a week.

About that $3,800 emoji domain sale…

The debate over the age of the emoji domain name ☮.com may have been settled. It probably is as old as it was claimed to be.
You may recall that last week I blogged about the €3,400 ($3,816) sale of the domain to an end user. It wasn’t a big sale or a big story, but it’s so rare to see an emoji name sell I thought it was worth a few paragraphs.
It had been claimed, and I reported, that the name was 16 years old, having been registered in April 2001.
Later that day, ICANN principle technologist Paul Hoffman, who was co-author of the IDNA2003 standard that governed how non-ASCII domains were represented in the DNS, questioned whether the name could possibly be that old.
Under IDNA2003, IDNs are encoded with the “xn--” prefix. While applications may render ☮.com as the “peace” symbol, in the DNS it is in fact xn--v4h.com.
Hoffman told me that the prefix had been picked more or less at random in March 2003, so there was no way a speculator could have known in April 2001 how to register a domain that would have no meaning for another two years.
In addition, the Punycode standard that converts non-Latin characters to ASCII was not finalized until 2003 either.
It seemed more likely that the creation date in the Whois record was incorrect, so I updated the original blog post with the new information.
That kicked off a bit of a debate in the comments about scenarios in which the creation date was correct. Some commenters wondered whether the original buyer had registered many domains with different prefixes with the hope of getting lucky.
What none of us considered was that the domain itself changed between 2001 and 2003. Given new information Hoffman supplied over the weekend, that now strikes me as the most plausible scenario.
What most of us had forgotten was that Verisign launched an IDN registration test-bed all the way back in December 2000 (archive.org link).
That roll-out, controversial at the time, encoded the domains with Punycode predecessor RACE and used the bq– prefix.
However, after the IDNA2003 and Punycode standards were published in 2003, Verisign then converted all of the existing IDN .com domains over to the two new standards. Names beginning bq– were changed to xn--, and the encoding of the subsequent characters was changed.
So ☮.com very probably was registered in 2001, but in ASCII it was a completely different domain name back then.
We seem to have a rare(ish) case here of the creation date in the Whois being “right” but the domain name itself being “wrong”.
There may be as many as half a million .com domains with similar issues in their Whois.
I hope this clears up any confusion.

Three-million-domain .au deal up for grabs

auDA has formally launched the process that will could see it replace .au back-end provider Neustar with an in-house registry by the end of June 2018.
The Australian ccTLD operator has opened a “Request for Expressions of Interest” as the first stage of a procurement process for software and/or services to support its recently announced Registry Transformation Project.
It’s looking for companies that can provide all the major pieces of a domain name registry — EPP registry, Whois, DNS, etc — and my reading of the REOI reveals a preference towards a system owned and operated by auDA.

Respondents can respond with products, technology and / or services for all or part of the elements of the Registry Transformation Project, and are free to partner with other respondents to put together combined proposals.
auDA intends to establish a dedicated .au registry, and have all arrangements in place to support this, by 30 June 2018.

The organization even talks about eventually becoming one of ICANN’s approved Emergency Back-End Registry Operators.
.au has grown to over 3 million domains over the 15 years it was being managed by AusRegistry, which was acquired by US-based Neustar in 2015. This deal is due to expire next year.
So it’s a big contract, and one that is likely to attract a lot of interest from players big and small.
That said, registry solutions are typically offered very much on a service basis. The market for licensed registry software is not exactly bustling, and auDA also requires source code access as a condition of any deal.
auDA said the deadline for responses to the REOI is June 26. It will decide upon its next steps, which could be a formal request for proposals, in the last week of July.
Further details can be found here.

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.