.bayern starts GA with almost 20,000 names

Bayern Connect took its .bayern new gTLD into general availability yesterday and secured close to 20,000 registrations.
This morning’s zone file count shows that at least 19,121 domains were registered during .bayern’s combined sunrise/landrush period, which ended a few weeks ago.
GA kicked off at 1300 local time yesterday.
There are no local presence requirements to register names, according to the registry’s web site.
Bayern in the German word for Bavaria, Germany’s second most-populous state. It has 12.5 million inhabitants, 1.5 million of whom live in its capital, Munich.
It’s the third most-successful geographic gTLD launch of the current round, after .london’s 35,000 names and .berlin’s 33,000.
On a per-head basis, however, the numbers don’t look so good.
While .koeln, the gTLD for the city of Cologne, had one registered domain for every 79 inhabitants at the end of its first GA day, .bayern has one domain per 663 people. The numbers for .berlin and .london were 106 and 240 respectively.

8 Comments Tagged: .bayern, bayern connect, new gTLDs

Phishers prefer free ccTLDs to new gTLDs

Domains in free and cheap ccTLDs are much more likely to host phishing attacks than new gTLDs.
That’s one of the conclusions of the latest report of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which found that Freenom’s re-purposed African ccTLDs were particularly risky.
The first-half 2014 report found 22,679 “maliciously registered” domains used in phishing attacks. That’s flat on the second half of 2013 and almost double the first half of 2013.
Only roughly a quarter of the domains used in phishing had been registered for the purpose. The rest were pointing to compromised web servers.
On new gTLDs, the APWG said:

As of this writing, the new gTLD program has not resulted in a bonanza of phishing. A few phishers experimented with new gTLD domain names, perhaps to see if anyone noticed. But most of the new gTLD domains that were used for phishing were actually on compromised web sites.

The new gTLDs .agency, .center, .club, .email and .tips were the only ones to see any maliciously registered phishing domains in the half — each had one — according to the report.
The APWG speculates quite reasonably that the relatively high price of most new gTLD domains has kept phishers away but warns that this could change as competition pushes prices down.
While .com hosts 54% of all phishing domains, small ccTLDs that give away domains for free or cheap are disproportionately likely to have such domains in their zones, the report reveals.
The Freenom-operated ccTLDs .cf (Central African Republic), .ml (Mali) and .ga (Gabon) top the table of most-polluted TLDs, alongside PW Registry’s .pw (Palau).
Freenom, which also runs .tk, offers free domains, while PW Registry has a very low registry fee.
APWG measures the risk of phishing by TLD by counting phishing domains per 10,000 registered names, where the median score is 4.7 and .com’s score is 4.1.
.cf tops the charts with 320.8, followed by .ml with 118.9, .pw with 122, .ga with 42,9 and .th (Thailand) with 27.5. These number include compromised as well as phisher-registered domains.
Read the APWG report here.

1 Comment Tagged: .pw registry, anti-phishing working group, apwg, freenom, phishing, radix

Safeway pulls all four new gTLD apps

Retail giant Safeway has removed itself from the new gTLD program entirely, last week withdrawing all four of its applications.
The $139-billion-a-year company had applied for the dot-brands .safeway, .vons, .justforu and the generic .grocery, but all four bids are now showing as withdrawn.
Now that Safeway has withdrawn, the only remaining applicant for .grocery is rival retailer Wal-Mart.
.grocery had been applied for as a “closed generic”, in which Safeway would be the only eligible registrant.
The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee had advised against closed generics on consumer protection grounds.
When ICANN pressed applicants for such strings to clarify whether they were in fact “closed generics”, Safeway denied (pdf) that .grocery was.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, said that its .grocery would be restricted to Wal-Mart and its affiliates.

22 Comments Tagged: .grocery, dot-brands, new gTLDs, safeway, wal-mart, withdrawals

Korean registrar suspended

ICANN has suspended the accreditation of Korean registrar Dotname Korea over failures to comply with Whois accuracy rules.
The company was told this week that it will lose the ability to sell names for three months.
“No new registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 7 October 2014 through 5 January 2015,” ICANN compliance chief Maguy Serad told the company (pdf).
The suspension follows breach notices earlier in the year pertaining to Dotname’s failure to show that it was responding adequately to Whois inaccuracy complaints.
Other breaches of the Whois-related parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement were also alleged.
The company has until December 16 to show compliance of face the possibility of termination.

1 Comment Tagged: compliance, dotname korea, ICANN, suspension

Iraq to get IDN ccTLD

Iraq was this week granted the right to use a new Arabic-script country-code top-level domain.
ICANN said the war-torn nation’s request for عراق., which is Arabic for “Iraq”, has passed the String Evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track program.
Like .iq, the registry will be the government’s Communications and Media Commission.
Once delegated, the Punycode inserted into the root will be .xn--mgbtx2b.
ICANN said Iraq is the 33rd nation to have an IDN ccTLD request approved. There are currently 26 IDN ccTLDs in the root. Most of them aren’t doing very well.

1 Comment Tagged: .iq, fast track, ICANN, idn cctlds, iraq, عراق.

Brewers Association backs .beer

Continuing its strategy of getting well-known anchor tenants involved in its new gTLD launches, Minds + Machines has recruited the Brewers Association to back its just-launched .beer.
The BA represents over 2,300 independent breweries in the US, according to its web site.
.beer hit general availability yesterday. Due to delays with ICANN’s zone file publishing system this morning I can’t yet bring you the first-day figures for the TLD.
The launch was timed to coincide with the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado.
Two weeks ago, M+M launched .country with backing from music legend Dolly Parton, who claimed dolly.country, dollyparton.country, queenof.country, dollywood.country and 9to5.country.
If nothing else, the endorsement reminded non-Americans that .country is supposed to relate to music, not geography.

Comment Tagged: .beer, brewers association, m+m, Minds + Machines

Second new gTLD round “possible” but not “probable” in 2016

If there are any companies clamoring to get on the new gTLD bandwagon, they’ve got some waiting to do.
Based on a sketchy timetable published by ICANN this week, it seems unlikely that a second application round will open before 2017, and even that might be optimistic.
While ICANN said that “based on current estimates, a subsequent application round is not expected to launch until 2016 at the earliest”, that date seems unlikely even to senior ICANN staffers.
“The possibility exists,” ICANN vice president Cyrus Namazi told DI, “but the probability, from my perspective, is not that high when you think about all the pieces that have to come together.”
Here’s an ICANN graphic illustrating these pieces:

As you can see, the two biggest time-eaters on the road-map, pushing it into 2017, are a GNSO Policy Development Process (green) and the Affirmation of Commitments Review (yellow).
The timetable envisages the PDP, which will focus on what changes need to be made to the program, lasting two and a half years, starting in the first quarter 2015 and running until mid-2017.
That could be a realistic time-frame, but the GNSO has been known to work quicker.
An ICANN study in 2012 found that 263 days is the absolute minimum amount of time a PDP has to last from start to finish, but 620 days — one year and nine months — is the average.
So the GNSO could, conceivably, wrap up in late 2016 rather than mid-2017. It will depend on how cooperative everybody is feeling and how tricky it is to find consensus on the issues.
The AoC review, which will focus on “competition, consumer trust and consumer choice” is a bit harder to gauge.
The 2009 Affirmation of Commitments is ICANN’s deal with the US government that gives it some of its authority over the DNS. On the review, it states:

If and when new gTLDs (whether in ASCII or other language character sets) have been in operation for one year, ICANN will organize a review that will examine the extent to which the introduction or expansion of gTLDs has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice, as well as effectiveness of (a) the application and evaluation process, and (b) safeguards put in place to mitigate issues involved in the introduction or expansion.

The AoC does not specify how long the review must last, just when it must begin, though it does say the ICANN board must react to it within six months.
That six-month window is a maximum, however, not a minimum. The board could easily take action on the review’s findings in a month or less.
ICANN’s timeline anticipates the review itself taking a year, starting in Q3 2015 and broken down like this:

Based on the timelines of previous Review Team processes, a rough estimate for this process is that the convening of the team occurs across 3-5 months, a draft report is issued within 6-9 months, and a final report is issued within 3-6 months from the draft.

Working from these estimates, it seems that the review could in fact take anywhere from 12 to 20 months. That would mean a final report would be delivered between September 2016 and July 2017.
If the review and board consideration of its report take the longest amount of time permitted or envisaged, the AoC process might not complete until early 2018, a little over three years from now.
Clearly there are a lot of variables to consider here.
Namazi is probably on safe ground by urging caution over the hypothetical launch of a second round in 2016.
Given than new gTLD evaluations were always seen as a “rolling” process, one of the things that the GNSO surely needs to look into is a mechanism to reduce the delay between rounds.

2 Comments Tagged: affirmation of commitments, aoc, ICANN, new gTLDs, second round

Is Verisign’s .net in trouble?

The zone file for Verisign’s .net gTLD has shrunk by almost 100,000 domains in the last few months.
I’ve been tracking .com and .net’s zone numbers since mid-March, shortly after the current wave of new gTLDs started going live, and while .com seems to be still growing strong, .net is definitely trending down.
The bulk of .net’s decline seems to have happened of the last three months. Its zone file count has decreased by 95,590 domains in the last 90 days, according to my numbers.
Here’s a chart, which you can click to enlarge, to illustrate what I’m talking about:

I don’t have comparable figures from previous years, so I can’t be certain that the downturn is not related to summer seasonality.
But if there is seasonality, it doesn’t appear to have affected .com, which has added over a million names to its zone over the last 90 days.

The last formal registry transactions report we have from Verisign for .net shows a decline of a little over 7,000 names under management in May.
Are these the early signs of trouble ahead for .net?
The TLD has always been a bit of an oddity. Originally designed for network operators, it was opened up and pitched in the 1990s by Network Solutions as a catch-all that should be acquired alongside .com.
That “Oh, I may as well buy the .net while I’m here” mentality stuck in the primary market, and I’ve often encountered the “I’ll throw in the .net for free” mentality in the secondary market.
But in a world of hundreds of new gTLDs I wonder whether .net’s brand caché will shrink.
If a registrant decides they can clearly do without defensively registering the .guru, the .pics, the .horse and the .wtf, perhaps they’ll start wondering why they bother to register the .net too.
Is .net on the verge of an unprecedented drop-off in registrations?
I’ll have to reserve judgement — that last 90 days might be a blip, and it only represents 0.63% of the .net business — but it’s going to be worth keeping an eye on, I think.
With 15 million names, the .net business is worth about $93 million a year in registry fees to Verisign.

7 Comments Tagged: .net, verisign

Afilias loses Chinese .info as seven more new gTLD auctions conclude

Today news has reached us via various channels that seven new gTLD contention sets have been settled, all is seems via private auction.
Notably, Afilias has lost the opportunity to run the Chinese-script version of its 14-year-old .info TLD to Beijing Tele-info Network Technology Co, the only other applicant.
The Beijing company’s application says the string .信息 means: “knowledge or message in the form suitable for communications, storage, or processing, which is closely related to notions of form, meaning, pattern, perception, representation, and entropy.”
Afilias said it means “info”.
Separately, in a press release today, Minds + Machines said that it has won the auctions for two gTLDs — .law and .vip — and lost the auctions for several more.
In .law it beat NU DOT CO, Donuts, Radix, Merchant Law Group and Famous Four Media. In .vip it beat Google, VIP Registry, Donuts, I-Registry and Vipspace Enterprises.
From the auctions M+M said it lost we can infer that .design and .realestate contention sets are also now settled, but we haven’t seen any withdrawals yet so we don’t know the winners.
M+M said it netted $6.2 million cash by winning .law and .vip and losing .design, .flowers, .group, .realestate and .video.
From today’s new withdrawals we can see that Uniregistry won .auto against Fegistry, Donuts and Dot Auto, while Donuts won .memorial against Afilias and dotCOOL.
UPDATE: Thanks to Jim in the comments for the reminder that the “Chinese .info” auction happened back in June. The TLD fetched $600,000 at an ICANN last-resort auction.

3 Comments Tagged: afilias, auctions, new gTLDs, private auctions

M+M turns profit on the back of gTLD auctions

Minds + Machines posted an operating profit of almost £3 million ($4.9 million) for the first half of the year, almost entirely driven by the proceeds of losing new gTLD auctions.
The registry record a profit to June 30 of £2.9 million on revenue of $68,000.
The “profit on gTLD auctions” line item that permitted that seemingly impossible profit number was £7.1 million ($11.6 million), based on M+M losing eight out of 12 private auctions.
The company had £22 million ($36 million) in cash and other current assets on its balance sheet at the end of the period.
None of M+M’s big TLDs had launched in the first half, hence the low revenue. Since the half ended, .london has proven successful and several more new gTLDs wholly or partially owned by M+M have also launched.
In his statement to the market, chair Fred Krueger said:

A key variable in our financial position is the dynamic of private auctions, which we have embraced, and which has worked tremendously to our advantage. We believe that our current still contested strings represent significant assets which we have the potential to monetize either to further our existing new TLDs or to purchase additional new TLDs at auction.

He also reiterated CEO Antony Van Couvering’s call for a new metric to track gTLD registry health that is based on revenue-per-domain rather than simple volumes.
His outlook for new gTLDs was arguably less cautious than his counterpart at CentralNic, which reported its half-year numbers yesterday and talked of demand “falling short of industry expectations”.
Krueger said:

Name registration data available to-date indicates a strong opening for a variety of new products/domains, and also shows that we are still very early in the adoption curve for new TLDs. We expect that the growth of almost all new TLDs will likely follow an “S curve”, as it historically has for newly launched TLDs, rather than a straight line.

He also reconfirmed that M+M plans to aggressively pursue its new integrated registrar business as a means to drive growth in its gTLDs, rather than simply relying on the channel.

4 Comments Tagged: m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs