Go.Compare now redirecting to the .com
Go.Compare seems to have backpedaled a little on its high-profile rebranding to a new gTLD domain name.
The domain go.compare is now bouncing visitors to the insurance comparison site’s original domain, gocompare.com.
When the company announced its rebranding from GoCompare to Go.Compare last September, there was no redirect in place.
The firm seems otherwise entirely committed to the new branding, even putting it on Welsh rugby shirts as part of a sponsorship deal recently.
The only change appears to be the new redirect — visitors will see the .com in the address bar rather than the .compare domain.
My article announcing the rebrand always seemed to get an unusually high amount of traffic on Saturday nights when Go.Compare was advertising its new name prominently on prime-time Saturday night TV, which makes me wonder whether the company was suffering from leakage related to the switch.
.compare is a GoDaddy gTLD and the go.compare domain was purchased by Go.Compare’s registrar, Lexsynergy.
Nominet looking for another director
.uk registry Nominet has opened up its 2023 elections for a new non-executive director.
The company is looking for a NED able to serve a three-year term starting at the AGM in the fourth quarter.
Director Phil Buckingham’s current three-year term is up in September.
You don’t need to be a Nominet member to apply, but you do need to be nominated and seconded by members.
The deadline for nominations is June 2 and the voting opens in September.
Elections in previous years have proved controversial, with members unhappy about the company’s direction for some time.
GoCompare makes a big bet on a new gTLD
GoCompare, one of the most recognizable online brands in the UK, is rebranding to Go.Compare, with a corresponding switch to the new gTLD domain name go.compare.
The insurance price-comparison site announced the move, which is being backed up by a three-month prime-time TV advertising campaign, during the series premiere of talent show The Voice UK, which it now sponsors, on Saturday night.
The brand may be unfamiliar to readers outside of the UK, but here it’s pretty well-known due in no small part to its relentless TV ads, which feature a fictional Italian opera singer. There can’t be many Brits who don’t recognize the jingle, once described as the “most irritating” on TV.
And that jingle now has an extra syllable in it — the word “dot”. The company described the sponsorship like this:
As part of the sponsorship, Go.Compare’s operatic tenor Gio Compario and the actor who plays him, Wynne Evans, are both in the judging chairs, auditioning to find a new voice to help them sing the new brand jingle and play the ‘dot’ in the new website URL. The series will follow Gio and Wynne on their journey to find the best ‘dot.’
This is the first ad:
The company said the rebranding, in phrasing likely to irk many in the domain industry, “means that anyone now looking to use the comparison service will be able search on any device using ‘Go.Compare’, and they will be taken directly to the website.”
It’s inviting customers to direct-navigate, but calling it “search”.
Paul Rogers, director of brand and campaigns, said in a press release:
Behind this, the decision to bring the “dot” into the mix now means that our website is easier to find – regardless of browser or device, all you need to know now is Go.Compare and you’re there. It’s basically taking out the middleman and making it easier for people to find us directly
Go.Compare has been using gocompare.com since it launched in 2006, and that domain is still live, not redirecting, and showing up as the top search result for the company. The domain go.compare does not redirect to the .com, however.
The company’s social media handles now all use the new brand.
The .compare gTLD is a pretty obscure one, that truthfully even I had forgotten exists.
It started off owned by Australian insurance provider iSelect, originally intended as a dot-brand, but sold off alongside .select to Neustar, then its back-end provider, in 2019.
GoDaddy acquired Neustar’s registry business the following year and has since then sold just a few hundred .compare domains, very few of which actually appear to be in use.
I’m not suggesting .compare is suddenly going to explode, but the rebranding and accompanying high-profile marketing effort is surely useful to the new gTLD industry in general, raising awareness that not every web site has to end in .com or .uk.
ICANN staffing up for next new gTLD round
ICANN has started hiring staff to support the next round of new gTLD applications.
The Org this week posted an ad for a “Policy Development Support Analyst” who will “track generic top-level domain policy proposals and contribute to capacity development in the civil society and noncommercial communities”.
It also appears to be still looking for a “Senior Director, New gTLD Subsequent Procedures”, with an ad first posted in June.
The latter is almost certainly a revolving-door type of opening, where somebody with deep, long-term insight into the industry and ICANN would be the likely hire.
ICANN describes it as a “highly visible role requiring a high degree of organization, leadership experience, management and communications acumen, and subject matter knowledge” where the successful candidate “will provide leadership and direction over multiple tracks of organizational activities toward implementation of a subsequent round of ICANN’s New gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain) Program”.
The newer, more junior opening appears to have a broader remit, with the focus on non-commercial stakeholder engagement as well as the new gTLD program.
The two jobs are among 35 currently being advertised by ICANN.
German motoring club dot-brand crashes out
Europe’s largest motoring club has become the latest organization to ask ICANN to tear up its dot-brand Registry Agreement.
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, which has about 21 million members, has told ICANN it no longer wishes to run .adac. As usual, no explanation was provided.
The gTLD was in use — ADAC currently has a few live non-redirecting sites, including blog.adac and presse.adac. Its primary domain is adac.de.
Group crowdfunding crypto to apply to ICANN for blockchain gTLD
Do we have our first confirmed blockchain-themed new gTLD application? Looks like it.
A group of pseudonymous individuals have announced plans to apply to ICANN for .dao in the next round, and are currently crowdfunding the project by asking for donations in the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Going by the name DomainDAO, they say they’ve raised 230 ETH so far, which appears to be worth over $430,000 at today’s rates, already probably enough for a bare-bones new gTLD application.
They want to apply for .dao, an acronym for “decentralized autonomous organization”, a type of entity where token-owning participants set the direction of the DAO via rules laid down in software and votes encoded into a blockchain.
DomainDAO’s web site takes a few pops at the likes of Verisign and Identity Digital owner Ethos Capital for alleged unethical practices and says the goal is for .dao to one day “supersede” .com.
The concept differs from other blockchain-based TLD projects, such as Unstoppable Domains, in that it’s not alt-root. The plan is to apply to ICANN to get into the authoritative, consensus DNS root, so that .dao domains can be used by all.
Unstoppable already runs .dao in its own alt-root, selling domains for $20, and has recently proven litigious when it smells a collision from a competing project.
But the main roadblock to the root may well be ICANN itself.
While the rules governing the next round of gTLD applications are not yet set in stone, it strikes me as incredibly unlikely that ICANN will entertain a bid from an applicant that is not a recognized legal entity with a named board of directors that can be subjected to background screening.
DomainDAO is itself a DAO, and the DAO concept is reportedly prone to corruption and hacking, which could make ICANN nervous.
In addition, people funding DomainDAO today are offered crypto tokens that can be redeemed for second-level domains if the TLD eventually goes live — it’s essentially already selling pre-registrations — which could interfere with rights protection mechanisms, depending on implementation.
But DomainDAO claims to have an industry Greybeard on the payroll, a senior advisor going by the handle “Speech-less”, an “Executive with 20+ years experience in domain and ICANN”.
If that’s you, we probably already know each other. Why not get in touch to tell me why this thing is going to work?
Bugatti dumps dot-brand under new owners
Bugatti, which makes incredibly expensive limited-edition sports cars, is dropping its dot-brand.
The French company asked ICANN to release it from its .bugatti registry contract about a month ago, according to ICANN documents.
Bugatti entered new ownership last November, under a joint venture between Rimac and Porsche, and recently reportedly underwent a branding overhaul.
It seems the dot-brand had no place under the new marketing strategy.
Its previous owner had been Volkswagen, which still has a (unused) dot-brand, despite dumping its Chinese-script equivalent. But Porsche had been an opponent of the new gTLD program back in 2011.
.bugatti had actually been used, albeit lightly. A couple of live, non-redirecting sites still remain.
Over 100 dot-brands have terminated their contracts to date.
Early “dot-brand” adopter wants to scrap its gTLD
One of the first adopters of the dot-brand gTLD concept, which has an active portfolio of resolving domains, has asked ICANN to tear up its registry contract.
The Australian Cancer Research Foundation said it no longer wishes to operate .cancerresearch, which it has used since 2014.
It’s a bit of a strange, possibly unique, situation, which may explain why its termination request, submitted in April, is only now being published by ICANN.
Technically, .cancerresearch was more like a closed generic than a dot-brand. It did not have a trademark on the string or the Specification 13 exceptions in its registry contract, which would make it a dot-brand.
Instead, ACRF had the TLD delegated, registered a bunch of resolving names to itself, and never officially launched. There was never even a sunrise period.
Pretty significant loophole in the rules for the 2012 application round if you ask me.
But ICANN is treating .cancerresearch as if it was a dot-brand anyway. Because nobody except ACRF ever owned any domains there, there’s no need to transition to a new registry to protect registrants.
This also means nobody else will be able to apply for the same string for two years, assuming an application window opens in that period.
ACRF still has live non-redirecting web sites on domains such as lung.cancerresearch, breast.cancerresearch and donate.cancerresearch.
It’s the first gTLD termination request since last October.
“GDPR is not my fault!” — ICANN fears reputational damage from Whois reform
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
That seems to an uncomfortable message emerging from ICANN’s ongoing discussions about SSAD, the proposed Standardized System for Access and Disclosure, which promises to bring some costly and potentially useless reform to the global Whois system.
ICANN’s board of directors and the GNSO Council met via Zoom last night to share their initial reactions to the ICANN staff’s SSAD Operational Design Assessment, which had been published just 48 hours earlier.
I think it’s fair to say that while there’s still some community enthusiasm for getting SSAD done in one form or another, there’s much more skepticism, accompanied by a fear that the whole sorry mess is going to make ICANN and its vaunted multistakeholder model look bad/worse.
Some say that implementing SSAD, which could take six more years and cost tens of millions of dollars, would harm ICANN’s reputation if, as seems quite possible, hardly anyone ends up using it. Others say the risk comes from pissing away years of building community consensus on a set of policy recommendations that ultimately don’t get implemented.
GNSO councillor Thomas Rickert said during yesterday’s conference call:
One risk at this stage that I think we need to discuss is the risk to the credibility of the functionality of the multi-stakeholder model. Because if we give up on the SSAD too soon, if we don’t come up with a way forward on how to operationalize it, then we will be seen as an organization that takes a few years to come up with policy recommendations that never get operationalized and that will certainly play into the hands of those who applaud the European Commission for coming up with ideas in NIS2, because obviously they see that the legislative process at the European and then at the national state level is still faster than ICANN coming up with policies.
NIS2 is a formative EU Directive that is likely to shake up the privacy-related legal landscape yet again, almost certainly before ICANN’s contractors even type the first line of SSAD code.
While agreeing with Rickert’s concerns, director Becky Burr put forward the opposing view:
The flip side of that is that we build it, we don’t have the volume to support it at a reasonable cost basis and it does not change the outcome of a request for access to the Whois data… We build it, with all its complexity and glory, no one uses it, no one’s happy with it and that puts pressure on the multi-stakeholder model. I’m not saying where I come out on this, but I feel very torn about both of those problems.
The ODA estimates the cost of building SSAD at up to $27 million, with the system not going live until 2027 or 2028. Ongoing annual operating costs, funded by fees collected from the people requesting private Whois data, could range from $14 million to $107 million, depending on how many people use it and how frequently.
These calculations are based on an estimated user base of 25,000 and three million, with annual queries of 100,000 and 12 million. The less use the system gets, the higher the per-query cost.
But some think the low end of these assumptions may still be too high, and that ultimately usage would be low enough to make the query fees so high that users will abandon the system.
Councillor Kurt Pritz said:
I think there’s a material risk that the costs are going to be substantially greater than what’s forecast and the payback and uptake is going to be substantially lower… I think there’s reputational risk to ICANN. We could build this very expensive tool and have little or no uptake, or we could build a tool that becomes obsolete before it becomes operational.
The low-end estimates of 25,000 users asking for 100,000 records may be “overly optimistic”, Pritz said, given that only 1,500 people are currently asking registrars for unredacted Whois records. Similarly, there are only 25,000 requests per year right now, some way off the 100,000 low-end ODA assumption, he said.
If SSAD doesn’t even hit its low-end usage targets, the fee for a single Whois query could be even larger than the $40 high-end ODA prediction, creating a vicious cycle in which usage drops further, further increasing fees.
SSAD doesn’t guarantee people requesting Whois data actually get it, and bypassing SSAD entirely and requesting private data directly from a registrar would still be an option.
There seems to be a consensus now that GDPR always requires registries and registrars to ultimately make the decision as to whether to release private data, and there’s nothing ICANN can do about it, whether with SSAD or anything else.
CEO Göran Marby jokingly said he’s thinking about getting a T-shirt printed that says “GDPR was not my fault”.
“The consequences of GDPR on the whole system is not something that ICANN can fix, that’s something for the legislative, European Commission and other ones to fix,” he said. “We can’t fix the law.”
One idea to rescue SSAD, which has been floated before and was raised again last night, is to cut away the accreditation component of the system, which Marby reckons accounts for about two thirds of the costs, and basically turn SSAD into a simplified, centralized “ticketing system” (ironically, that’s the term already used derisively to describe it) for handling data requests.
But the opposing view — that the accreditation component is actually the most important part of bringing Whois into GDPR compliance — was also put forward.
Last night’s Zoom call barely moved the conversation forward, perhaps not surprisingly given the limited amount of time both sides had to digest the ODA, but it seems there may be future conversations along the same lines.
ICANN’s board, which was in “listening mode” and therefore pretty quiet last night, is due to consider the SSAD recommendations, in light of the ODA, at some point in February.
I would be absolutely flabberghasted if they were approved in full. I think it’s far more likely that the policy will be thrown back to the GNSO for additional work to make it more palatable.
Whois reform to take four years, cost up to $107 million A YEAR, and may still be pointless
ICANN’s proposed post-GDPR Whois system could cost over $100 million a year to run and take up to four years to build, but the Org still has no idea whether anyone will use it.
That appears to be the emerging conclusion of ICANN’s very first Operational Design Phase, which sought to translate community recommendations for a Standardized System for Access and Disclosure (SSAD) into a practical implementation plan.
SSAD is supposed to make it easier for people like trademark owners and law enforcement to request personal information from Whois records that is currently redacted due to privacy laws such as GDPR.
The ODP, which was originally meant to conclude in September but will now formally wrap up in February, has decided so far that SSAD will take “three to four years” to design and build, costing between $20 million and $27 million.
It’s calculated the annual running costs at between $14 million and $107 million, an eye-wateringly imprecise estimate arrived at because ICANN has pretty much no idea how many people will want to use SSAD, how much they’d be prepared to pay, and how many Whois requests they will likely make.
ICANN had previously guesstimated startup costs of $9 million and ongoing annual costs around the same level.
The new cost estimates are based on the number of users being anywhere between 25,000 and three million, with the number of annual queries coming in at between 100,000 and 12 million.
And ICANN admits that the actual demand “may be lower” than even the low-end estimate.
“We haven’t been able to figure out how big the demand is,” ICANN CEO Göran Marby told the GNSO Council during a conference call last month.
“Actual demand is unknowable until well after the launch of the SSAD,” an ICANN presentation (pdf) states. The Org contacted 11 research firms to try to get a better handle on likely demand, but most turned down the work for this reason.
On pricing, the ODP decided that it would cost a few hundred bucks for requestors to get accredited into the system, and then anywhere between $0.45 and $40 for every Whois request they make.
Again, the range is so laughably broad because the likely level of demand is unknown. A smaller number of requests would lead to a higher price and vice versa.
Even if there’s an initial flurry of SSAD activity, that could decline over time, the ODP concluded. In part that’s because registries and registrars would be under no obligation to turn over records, even if requestors are paying $40 a pop for their queries.
It’s also because SSAD would not be mandatory — requestors could still approach contracted parties directly for the info they want, for low or no cost, if they think the price of SSAD is too high or accreditation requirements too onerous.
“There’ll always be a free version of this for everybody,” Marby said on the conference call.
In short, it’s a hell of a lot of money for not much functionality. There’s a better than even chance it could be a huge waste of time and money.
An added complication is that the laws that SSAD is supposed to address, mainly GDPR, are likely to change while it’s being implemented. The European Union’s NIS2 Directive stands to move the goalposts on Whois privacy substantially, and not uniformly, in the not-too-distant future, for example.
This is profoundly embarrassing for ICANN as an organization. Created in the 1990s to operate at “internet speed”, it’s now so bloated, so twisted up it its own knickers, that it’s getting lapped by the lumbering EU legislative process.
The ODP is set to submit its final report to ICANN’s board of directors in February. The board could theoretically decide that it’s not in the interest of ICANN or the public to go ahead with it.
Marby, for his part, seems to be thinking that there could be some benefit from a centralized hub for submitting Whois requests, but that it should be simpler than the current “too complex” proposal, and funded by ICANN.
My take is that ICANN is reluctant to move ahead with SSAD as it’s currently proposed, but because top-down policy-making is frowned upon its hands are tied to make the changes it would like to see.
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