.hiv’s innovative, dangerous business model

.hiv, the first charity gTLD, is set to go to general availability at 2pm UTC tomorrow with one of the strangest and riskiest business models of any new gTLD to date.
While registrants will be able to use .hiv domains more or less as they please, as with any other gTLD, Berlin-based registry dotHIV is banking on an innovative microdonation system to set the space apart.
When you buy a .hiv domain, you’ll be sent an invitation by the registrar or registry to join an optional Click-Counter service, according to dotHIV chief marketing officer Michael Twist.
If you join the service, every time somebody visits your .hiv web site, dotHIV will donate a tenth of a US cent to one of four (initially) HIV/AIDS-related charity projects.
The donation will come from a pool of cash set aside by the registry from its registration fees.
While .hiv names are going to be sold, by 80 to 100 registrars at launch, for close to $200 per year, $120 of each registration or renewal fee will go into this charitable pool.
This business model is unprecedented in the domain name space, and it’s leading to the registry behaving in ways you wouldn’t expect from a new gTLD business.
For starters, dotHIV isn’t overly concerned about promoting its end users in a big way right out of the gates. It needs to refill its diminished cash pool to be able to cover the microdonations.
At first, it’s more concerned about volume and premium domain sales.
This problem is more pressing because of the longer-than-expected process of getting the .hiv application through the ICANN evaluation and delegation process.
“The microdonation system only works if we’ve got money in the pot,” said Twist. “The delay in the ICANN process has eaten up some of the funds.”
With a $120 donation from each sale, any given .hiv domain would only need to generate 1.2 million clicks in any given year to render it ‘unprofitable’ — ie, taking more from the pot than it put in.
dotHIV therefore needs time to ensure the pot of money from registrations is big enough to cover any big traffic spikes — what if a .hiv link goes viral, or a big-brand company starts using one? — before promoting the end-user sites in any meaningful way.
“First we need to push for registrations, and then traffic,” said Twist. “We can’t get too many people clicking before we hit a critical mass to support what we’re trying to do.”
There’s also the other possibility: that dotHIV, which is a registered charity, may wind up sitting on a pile of cash from registrations that is not going to its designated causes due to a lack of clicks on its users’ sites.
There’s risk in both directions, which begs the question: why not just donate the $120 to charity at the point of registration?
“More than just trying to raise funds what we’re doing is trying to raise awareness,” said Twist.
By encouraging (eventually) viral, click-based fund-raising, the registry hopes to put a spotlight back on the virus, which perhaps isn’t as trendy a cause as it once was due to the development of drugs that can delay the onset of AIDS by decades.
dotHIV is launching with some premium sales and some big-name anchor tenants under its belt.
Twist said that a “handful” of $10,000 names, which he declined to identify, have already been sold to pharmaceuticals companies involved in the development of HIV drugs.
There are about 10,000 reserved premiums in the space, he said, with a starting price of $5,000. Premium buyers will have to commit to usage rules including a commitment to use the Click-Tracker.
Keep a Child Alive, the charity founded by musician Alicia Keys, is among those committed to be early adopters and the Federation of Gay Games will use sport.hiv.
From the domain world, corporate registrars Mark Monitor and IP Mirror are to use .hiv domains.
There are no rules preventing domainers registering in .hiv (perhaps even treating it as a donation rather than an investment) but Twist said the registry would be disappointed to see large numbers of parked sites.

Comment Tagged: .hiv, aids, dothiv, new gTLDs

Straat-backed bidder beats Donuts and Afilias to .health

DotHealth has won the four-way contention set for the controversial new gTLD .health.
Afilias and Donuts both withdrew their competing applications this week. Famous Four withdrew its application over a month ago.
DotHealth is backed by Straat Investments, the investment vehicle chaired by .CO Internet’s Juan Calle.
The new gTLD will run on a Neustar (which now owns .CO) back-end.
.health is likely to be restricted, or at least policed, to ensure fake pharmacies are scrubbed from the zone.
DotHealth is supported by, among other health groups, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) which often targets registries and registrars in its campaigns against bogus online pharmacies in the US.
The company plans to use LegitScript to monitor its namespace.
.health will compete against the unrestricted .healthcare, which has been delegated to Donuts.
All four applicants for .health faced adverse Governmental Advisory Committee advice and unsuccessful public interest objections from the Independent Objector.

Comment Tagged: .health, afilias, contention, donuts, dothealth, new gTLDs, private auctions, straat

Biggest dot-brand? .realtor to give away half a million domains

Up to 500,000 card-carrying members of North American real estate associations will be given a free one-year .realtor domains, according to the registry.
The National Association of Realtors said its members and members of the Canadian Real Estate Association will be able to claim their names at claim.realtor.
The offer will become active October 23.
As “realtor” is a registered trademark belonging in the US to the NAR, there’s a pretty good chance .realtor could very soon become the largest dot-brand by volume.
The organization says it has a million members. The CREA, which owns the Canadian trademark on the term, has 100,000 members and will have 10,000 free registrations to hand out.

Comment Tagged: .realtor, national association of realtors, new gTLDs

After slamming the ccNSO, India joins it

India has become the newest member of ICANN’s country-code Supporting Organization, the ccNSO, just one month after the local registry slammed the group for not representing its interests.
The National Internet Exchange (NIXI), which runs .in, became the 152nd ccNSO member yesterday, according to a note on its website.
I haven’t reported on the first 151 ccTLDs to join, but this one’s interesting because NIXI’s mononymed CEO, Dr Govind, led a charge of criticism against the ccNSO for excluding non-members from the IANA transition review.
In July, Govind complained that a “significant section of the ccTLD Registry operator community do not share the objectives of the ccNSO membership are now excluded from the process.”
By joining the ccNSO, registries agree to follow the policies it creates for ccTLDs (though I understand they may opt out), which has led 103 ccTLDs to stay out of it completely.
Some ccTLDs are primarily concerned that the ccNSO does nothing to dilute or overturn RFC 1591, the 20-year-old standards document that states ccTLDs can only be redelegated with the consent of the incumbent.

Comment Tagged: ccnso, iana transition, ICANN, national internet exchange, nixi

Panel slaps ICANN in .africa case

A panel of arbitrators had some stern words for ICANN as it handed controversial .africa gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica another win in its Independent Review Process case.
In a 33-page procedural ruling (pdf) published by ICANN late Friday, the IRP panel disagreed with ICANN’s lawyers on almost every argument they made, siding with DCA instead.
The panel strongly indicated that it believes ICANN has attempted to render the IRP toothless, after losing the first such case against ICM Registry a few years ago.
The ruling means that ICANN’s top executives and board may have to face hostile cross-examination by DCA lawyers, rather than simply filing written statements with the panel.
It also means that whatever the IRP panel ultimately decides will in all likelihood be binding on ICANN.
DCA filed the IRP with the International Center for Dispute resolution after ICANN, accepting Governmental Advisory Committee advice, rejected the company’s application for .africa.
The ICDR panel has not yet ruled on the merits of the case — personally, I don’t think DCA has a leg to stand on — but last week’s ruling is certainly embarrassing for ICANN.
On a number of counts, ICANN tried to wriggle out of its accountability responsibilities, the ruling suggests.
Primarily, ICANN lawyers had argued that the eventual outcome of the IRP case should be advisory, rather than binding, but the panel disagreed.
The panel noted that new gTLD applicants sign away their rights to sue when they apply for a gTLD, meaning IRP is their last form of appeal against rejection.
It also called into question ICANN’s ability to police itself without a binding decision from an independent third party, pointing to previously reported accountability problems (my emphasis):

The need for a compulsory remedy is concretely shown by ICANN’s longstanding failure to implement the provision of the Bylaws and Supplementary Procedures requiring the creation of a standing panel. ICANN has offered no explanation for this failure, which evidences that a self-policing regime at ICANN is insufficient. The failure to create a standing panel has consequences, as this case shows, delaying the processing of DCA Trust’s claim, and also prejudicing the interest of a competing .AFRICA applicant.
Moreover, assuming for the sake of argument that it is acceptable for ICANN to adopt a remedial scheme with no teeth, the Panel is of the opinion that, at a minimum, the IRP should forthrightly explain and acknowledge that the process is merely advisory. This would at least let parties know before embarking on a potentially expensive process that a victory before the IRP panel may be ignored by ICANN.

The decision is the opposite of what the IRP panel found in the ICM Registry case, which was ruled to be “non-binding” in nature.
While deciding that its own eventual ruling will be precedential, the panel said it did not have to follow the precedent from the ICM case, due to changes made to the IRP procedure in the meantime.
ICANN had also argued against the idea of witnesses being cross-examined, but the panel again disagreed, saying that both parties will have the opportunity “to challenge and test the veracity of statements made by witnesses”.
The hearing will be conducted by video ink, which could reduce costs somewhat, but it’s not quite as streamlined as ICANN was looking for.
Not only will ICANN’s top people face a grilling by DCA’s lawyers, but ICANN’s lawyers will, it seems, get a chance to put DCA boss Sophia Bekele on the stand.
I’d pay good money for a ticket to that hearing.

Comment Tagged: accountability, africa, dotconnectafrica, ICANN, icdr, independent review, irp

New gTLD registries increasingly attacking .com

Is .com “silly” and “meaningless”?
That’s what some new gTLD registries would have you believe.
In separate blog posts over the last week, Donuts and ARI Registry Services have gone on the offensive, dismissing .com as an irrelevant relic of a bygone age.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis branded .com as “meaningless and unintuitive” in a post slamming the Board of Racing Victoria, an Australian horse-racing organization, for the purchase of racing.com for (he claimed) $500,000.
New gTLDs with more semantic relevance to horse racing or geographic regions will make this purchase look “silly” in future, he said.

Take for instance .racing which is set to launch soon. It would offer a more creative and relevant domain name such as horses.racing, victorian.racing or vichorses.racing.

He also said that most Australians are conditioned to visit .com.au (for which ARI provides the registry back-end), which will lead to traffic leakage from racing.com to racing.com.au.

The problem is that racing.com does not have an intrinsic connection with Victorian horse racing that would lend itself to intuitive navigation and recall.

Donuts had a similar message in a blog post last week.
Donuts vice president Mason Cole said on that company’s blog that .com is “diluted and meaningless” when compared to more vertically oriented TLDs such as Donuts’ .photography and .bike.

It adds nothing to an identity. Except perhaps to say, “I’m on the Internet somewhere.” .COM is “1999” — not “today,” and definitely not the future. New .COM registrations are extraordinarily long and much less meaningful when compared to a new registration in a new gTLD. And with its recent price decreases on new registrations (which apparently is necessary to match their low quality), .COM now means “low quality and cheap.”

It will be interesting to see whether this kind of messaging will be carried over from lightly trafficked corporate blogs into more mainstream new gTLD marketing by registries.
What do you think? Do Donuts and ARI have a point? Is .com meaningless? Will it fall out of fashion? Is going negative on legacy gTLDs a wise strategy for new gTLD companies?

19 Comments Tagged: .com, ari, donuts

Governments to get more power at ICANN

Governments are to get more power to influence ICANN’s board of directors.
Under a proposal launched late Friday, ICANN plans to make it harder for the board to reject the often-controversial advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee.
Today, the board is able to reject GAC advice with a simple majority vote, which triggers a consultation and reconciliation process.
Following the proposed changes to the ICANN bylaws, the threshold would be increased to a two-thirds majority.
The change is to be made following the recommendations of the Board-GAC Recommendations Implementation Working Group, made up of members of the board and the GAC.
The new rule would bring the GAC into line with the multistakeholder Generic Names Supporting Organization. The ICANN board also needs a two-thirds vote to reject a formal GNSO recommendation.
The differences between the GAC and the GNSO include the lack of detailed industry awareness GAC members regularly demonstrate during their public meetings, and the fact that GAC advice regularly comprises deliberately vague negotiated language that ICANN’s board has a hard time interpreting.
That disconnect may improve in future due to the recent creation of a GAC-GNSO liaison position, designed to keep the GAC up to date with policy goings-on between the thrice-yearly ICANN meetings.
The proposed bylaws change is open for public comment, but appears to be a fait accompli; the board has already said it will use the higher voting threshold if called to make a decision on GAC advice prior to its formal adoption.

Comment Tagged: bylaws, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN

EasyDNS changes take-down policy after man dies

Canadian registrar EasyDNS has amended its take-down policy after a customer of one of its registrants died of an overdose.
In a frank blog post today, CEO Mark Jeftovic said that the man had died using a “controlled substance” ordered online. The web site in question used a domain registered via EasyDNS.
As a result of the death, and conversations with ICANN and the US Food and Drug Administration, EasyDNS has changed its policy.
It will now turn off any domain used for a pharmacy web site unless the registrant can produce a license permitting it to sell pharmaceuticals in the territories it sells to.
Previously, the company would only turn off a pharmacy-related domain with a court order.
It’s a notable U-turn for the company because Jeftovic is an outspoken critic of unilateral take-down notices.
In January, he referred to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy as a “batch of clowns” for demanding that EasyDNS and other registrars take down unlicensed pharmacies without court orders.
He also has an ongoing beef with the UK police over its repeated requests for file-sharing and counterfeiting-related domains to be taken down without judicial review.
Jeftovic blogged today:

[I]n one case we have people allegedly pirating Honey Boo Boo reruns and on the other we have people dying. We don’t know where exactly, but the line goes somewhere in between there.
We have always done summary takedowns on net abuse issues, spam, botnets, malware etc. It seems reasonable that a threat to public health or safety that has been credibly vetted fits in the same bucket.
As a private company we feel within our rights to set limits and boundaries on what kinds of business risk we are willing to take on and under what circumstances. Would we tell the US State Department to go to hell if they wanted us to take down ZeroHedge? Absolutely. Do we want to risk criminally indicted by the FDA because of unregulated vicodin imports? Not so much.

You can read his full blog post here.

1 Comment Tagged: easydns, fake pharma, ICANN, takedowns

Reported mass exodus from .com explained

Did Verisign suffer from a massive 2,600% increase in the number of deleted .com domain names this April?
Not quite, although the bizarre spike in deletes may have highlighted an area where the company was previously out of compliance with its ICANN Registry Agreements.
April’s .com registry report, filed with ICANN and published last week, shows 2.4 million domains were deleted, compared to just 108,000 in March and 90,000 in April 2013.

The spike looks surprising, and you may be tempted to think it is in some way related to the arrival of new gTLDs.
But look again. Could .com, a registry with over 116 million domains under management, really only see roughly 100,000 deletes every month? Clearly that number is far too low.
So what’s going on? I asked Verisign.
The company said that it has implemented “voluntary” changes to its reporting of deleted domains, based on the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, which specifies what must be reported by new gTLD registries.
It said:

Prior to the April 2014 monthly reports, and per the ICANN gTLD registry reporting guidelines, Verisign reported on only deleted domains outside of any grace period.

There are five “grace periods” permitted by ICANN contracts: the Add Grace Period, Renew/Extend Grace Period, Auto-Renew Grace Period, Transfer Grace Period, and Redemption Grace Period.
The familiar Add Grace Period allows registrars to cancel registrations within a week of registration if the registrant made a typo, for example, and asked for a refund.
The Redemption Grace Period covers domains that have expired and do not resolve, but can still be restored for 30 days at the request of the registrant.
According to Verisign, before April, domains that were deleted outside of any of the five grace periods were reported as “deleted-domains-nograce”.
From April, the company is reporting domains only as “deleted-domains-nograce” if they delete outside of the Add Grace Period.
According to my reading of the .com contract, that’s what Verisign should have been doing all along.
The contract, which Verisign and ICANN signed in late 2012, defines “deleted-domains-nograce” only as “domains deleted outside the add grace period”. There’s no mention of other grace periods.
The same definition can be found in the 2006 contract.
It appears to me that Verisign may have been under-reporting its deletes for quite some time.
Verisign said in response that it does not believe it has a compliance issue. A spokesperson said: “[We] voluntarily updated our reporting of deleting domain names so that our reporting is aligned with ICANN’s reporting clarifications for the new gTLDs.”

2 Comments Tagged: .com, deletes, new gTLDs, verisign

Infosys withdraws dot-brand bids

Indian consulting giant Infosys has dropped its bids for two dot-brand new gTLDs.
It withdrew its applications for .infosys and .infy this week, leaving it with no remaining applications.
Both bids were straightforward dot-brands applications with no objections or contention. Both had passed Initial Evaluation and were just awaiting contract signing.
Infosys, which provides business and IT consulting services and outsourcing, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and had revenue of $8.4 billion in its last reported year.

2 Comments Tagged: dot-brands, infosys, infy, withdrawals