ICANN audit claims two more registrar scalps

Two tiny registrars — WebZero and Black Ice Domains — have had their registrar accreditations terminated for a failure to respond to a routine ICANN audit.
Israel-based Black Ice had just a couple thousands gTLD domains under management; US-based WebZero had fewer than 100.
Both registrars stood accused of not providing documents to ICANN in response to an audit, per their Registrar Accreditation Agreements.
ICANN will now look for a registrar or registrars to take over these registrars’ domains.

Comment Tagged: black ice, compliance, ICANN, termination, webzero

A quarter of registrar’s names are “illicit pharmacies”

One in four of the domain names registered with the registrar NetLynx are linked to current, past or potential future rogue drug sites, according to online pharmacy monitor LegitScript.
The Mumbai-based registrar was hit with a breach notice by ICANN Compliance last week, over an alleged failure to investigate an abuse complaint about a single customer domain, tnawsol24h.com.
NetLynx did not adequately respond to ICANN’s calls from November 26 to January 5, according to the notice (pdf).
While ICANN did not identify the source or nature of the complaint, according to LegitScript it was filed by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and it claimed that the domain was being used as a “rogue internet pharmacy”.
LegitScript did some research into NetLynx’s domains under management and now claims that it is not an isolated case.
Company president John Horton blogged:

at least a quarter of the registrar’s business is dependent on rogue Internet pharmacy registrations, with roughly 3,000 of the 12,000 domain names under the registrar’s portfolio taggable as current, past or “holding sites” for illicit online pharmacies.

Horton clarified for DI that the 3,000 number is extrapolated from the fact that LegitScript managed to categorize 1,820 out of the 7,000 NetLynx domains it could find as problematic.
Of those, 820 were “online and active” rogue pharmacies, he said. He gave canadian-drug-pharmacy.com, pills-delivery.net and pillsforlife.net as examples.
Another 780 were hosting rogue pharmacies in the past but have since been shut down, he said.
Finally, LegitScript categorized 220 as “meeting known patterns” for “holding sites” where illicit pharmacies may be launched in future. Horton said:

many of the spam pharma organizations use “holding domain names” (not all are online at any one time), so if the website was NOT currently online, we looked to a variety of data — known domain name patterns, screenshots, known rogue name servers, known rogue IP addresses, etc. — to determine the likelihood that a domain name is likely to be a rogue Internet pharmacy, and gave NetLynx the benefit of the doubt if there was any lack of certainty

LegitScript classifies online pharmacies as “rogue” if they offer to ship medicines without a prescription to people in jurisdictions where prescriptions are required.
Horton is now calling for ICANN to look into terminating NetLynx’s accreditation.

Comment Tagged: compliance, fake pharma, ICANN, legitscript, netlynx

.top says Facebook shakedown was just a typo

Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology, the .top registry, is blaming a typo for a Facebook executive’s claim that it wanted $30,000 or more for facebook.top.
Information provided to the ICANN GNSO Council by Facebook domain manager Susan Kawaguchi yesterday showed that .top wanted RMB 180,000 (currently $29,000) for a trademarked name that previously had been blocked due to ICANN’s name collisions policy.
But Mason Zhang, manager of the registry’s overseas channel division, told DI today that the price is actually RMB 18,000 ($2,900):

We were shocked when seeing that our register price for TMCH protected names like Facebook during Exclusive Registration Period is changed from “eighteen thousand” into what is written, the “one hundred and eighty thousand”.
I think that might be a type mistake from our side, and we checked and we are certain that the price is CNY EIGHTEEN THOUSAND.

The 18,000-yuan sunrise fee is published on the registry’s official web site, as I noted yesterday.
The registry email sent to Facebook is reproduced in this PDF.
I wondered yesterday whether a breakdown in communication may to be blame. Perhaps I was correct.
While $3,000 is still rather high for a defensive registration, it doesn’t stink of extortion quite as badly as $30,000.
Still, it’s moderately good news for Facebook and any other company worried they were going to have to shell out record-breaking prices to defensively register their brands.

9 Comments Tagged: .top, collisions, facebook, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise, trademarks

New gTLD extortion? Registry asks Facebook for $35,000 to register its brand

More Chinese weirdness, or just plain old trademark owner extortion?
The registry for the new gTLD .top is asking Facebook to cough up $35,000 in order to defensively register one of its trademarks as a .top domain — probably facebook.top — according to a Facebook executive.
The registry’s demand — which some are cautiously likening to “extortion” — is linked to the release of name collision domains in .top, which is due to start happening today.
Nanjing, China-based registry Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology runs the .top gTLD.
It has been in general availability since November 18 and currently has just shy of 40,000 names in its zone file, making it the 16th-largest new gTLD.
I haven’t checked whether they’re all legitimate buyer registrations, but given the shape the new gTLD industry is in right now I have my doubts.
From today, Jiangsu Bangning is running a month-long “Exclusive Registration Period”, according to ICANN records.
But Facebook domain manager Susan Kawaguchi today complained on an ICANN GNSO Council call that the registry had asked for $4,500 for a Sunrise period registration and now wants an extra RMB 180,000 ($30,000) because the desired domain is on its collisions block-list.
UPDATE: The registry says the price is just RMB 18,000. It blames a typo for the error.
I don’t know for sure what domain Facebook wants — I’ve reached out to Kawaguchi for clarification — but I rather suspect it’s facebook.top, which appeared on the list of 30,205 name collisions that Jiangsu Bangning was obliged by ICANN to block.
Name collisions are domains that were already receiving traffic prior to the launch of the new gTLD program. ICANN forces registries to block them for a minimum of 90 days in order to mitigate potential security risks.
According to the registry’s web site, Sunrise registrations cost RMB 18,000 per name per year. That’s about $3,000 a year for a defensive registration, a ridiculously high sum when compared to most new gTLDs.
There’s no mention on its site that I can find of the additional RMB 180,000 collision release fee, but Kawaguchi forwarded an email to the GNSO Council that strongly suggests that trademark owners with brands on the .top collisions list face the inexplicable extra $30,000.
Sunrise prices, just like regular general availability prices, are not controlled by ICANN in new gTLDs.
There are no rules I’m aware of governing pricing for collision names, nor am I aware of any registry costs that could justify a $30,000 fee to register one. A premium generic string may be worth that much, but asking that amount for a trademark smacks of extortion.
So, assuming this isn’t just a breakdown of communication, is the registry trying to screw Facebook in a targeted fashion, knowing it has deep pockets and a cybersquatting target painted on its back, or is it applying a $30,000 fee to every domain coming off its collisions list this week?
Facebook isn’t the only big tech company with its primary trademark on the list — Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Amazon also appear on it, along with many other famous brands.
Kawaguchi said she’s taken her complaint to ICANN Compliance.

1 Comment Tagged: .top, facebook, Jiangsu Bangning, name collisions, new gTLDs, sunrise

New gTLD registries talk up marketing plans at NamesCon

This week’s NamesCon conference here in Las Vegas, which ended yesterday, offered several new domain registries the chance to talk about their efforts past and future to market new gTLDs.
One theme to emerge was how registries need to work with each other and with their registrar channel partners to raise awareness of alternatives to .com.
Donuts VP Dan Schindler said during a Tuesday keynote that the company plans to ramp up its marketing in 2015.
“There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done by all the beneficiaries in this process,” he said, saying that Donuts intends to carry out a “broad education and awareness program over course of 2015 and beyond”.
He said the company is pursuing co-marketing efforts with some of its registrar partners at trade shows and such and “possibly including television”.
Schindler also spoke out against paid placement — where registries pay popular registrars for prominent shelf space — “not because we’re cheap”, but because Donuts doesn’t believe it offers registrants the best choice of relevant TLDs.
Here’s a photo of Schindler talking, offered for no other reason than it just cost me £6 to upload from my phone. Note the juxtaposition of a) the extensive Verisign .com/.net sponsorship, b) the Donuts “Not Com Revolution” messaging, and c) my thumb.

Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said in his keynote an hour later that he expected “more marketplace collaboration… where it is in our best interest to collaborate” on new gTLD promotion.
But he offered a somewhat dissenting tone with regards what he called the “dog and pony shows” of marketing new gTLDs.
Saying the company is “bootstrapping” some of its strings, he said big marketing spends now would lead to Uniregistry needing to raise its prices in two to three years to cover today’s costs.
Instead, he pointed to efforts such as its decision to release most of .click’s available names for a flat, cheap registration fee at launch, which he said should get names into the hands of users more quickly.
Contrarily, .CLUB Domains CEO Colin Campbell boasted during a brief pre-auction address on Tuesday of his company’s $2.2 million marketing spend for 2014, which he said would increase to $3.5 million in 2015.
Another recurring theme emerging from the conference (and from every other new gTLD event I’ve ever been to) was, as Schindler put it, that “use begets use”. The more high-profile sites a gTLD gets, the more likely it is to gain mindshare and sell more domains.
DotStrategy, the .buzz registry, is to be the beneficiary of such customer marketing.
Howard Lefkowitz, CEO of travel site operator One Degree World (which revealed it paid $100,000 for vegas.club earlier this week) revealed during NamesCon that some of his company’s city-related .buzz domains, such as sydney.buzz, are to feature for two weeks on the US TV game show Wheel Of Fortune as prize sponsors.
Will we see a bump in .buzz sales as a result? The gTLD currently has fewer than 8,500 names in its zone file, so if the TV time bears fruit it should be fairly easy to spot.

5 Comments Tagged: .club domains, donuts, dotstrategy, namescon, uniregistry

Seller’s remorse despite .club leading $1m NamesCon auction

The Right Of The Dot and SnapNames auction here at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas last night raised just shy of $1 million, in what attendees broadly seem to agree was a successful event.
The grand total was $990,851, with 87 out of the 134 lots hitting their reserve and selling during the live/online bidding.
Leading the pack was homecare.com, which sold for $350,000.
But that deal actually closed before the live event began, leaving .CLUB Domains’ wine.club at the top of the sold list with a winning $140,000 bid.
Despite the sale, registry CEO Colin Campbell — evidently disappointed he had not placed a higher reserve on the name, expressed some seller’s remorse on Twitter this morning.

After selling .CLUB for 140,000 in auction I was a bit depressed. Is this normal? It was my favorite. #namescon pic.twitter.com/xMRIIzTFiT

— Colin.club (@ColinDotClub) January 14, 2015

.CLUB also offloaded reserved names weed.club ($16,000), fight.club ($13,500) and tequila.club ($8,000), among others.
.com of course had the best night, with carauctions.com going for $90,000, susan.com going for $34,000 and tik.com and vil.com both going for $33,000.
Organizer Mike Berkens took a $76,000 hit on sexeducation.com, which he purchased for $100,000 and sold without reserve for $24,000.
Also noteworthy was what I believe was the biggest bid of the night — a $1.2 million in-room bid for auctions.com, owned by .xyz registry CEO Daniel Negari.
The domain failed to meet its reserve, however, and will join the other unsold names in an extended online auction that begins this weekend.

1 Comment Tagged: .club, namescon, right of the dot, rotd, snapnames

.xyz press release yanked for “encouraging cybersquatting”

XYZ.com has withdrawn a month-old press release following allegations that it encouraged cybersquatting in .xyz.
The December 3 release concerned the release of 18,000 .xyz domains that were previously blocked due to ICANN’s policy on name collisions.
The release highlighted “trademarked names such as Nike, Hulu, Netflix, Skype, Pepsi, Audi and Deloitte” that were becoming available, according to World Trademark Review, which reported the story yesterday.
Five of the seven brands highlighted have since been registered by apparent cybersquatters, WTR reported.
The .xyz press release has since been withdrawn from the web sites on which it appeared, and registry production manager Shayan Rostam told WTR that the intention was to encourage brand owners to register, rather than cybersquatters.
“Cybersquatting has a negative effect on our business and we would never take any action to encourage cybersquatting,” he reportedly said.
Read the WTR article here.

Comment Tagged: .xyz, cybersquatting, name colllisions, xyz.com

Here’s how the new number two new gTLD got so big so quick

Attentive DI readers will recall my journalistic meltdown last week, when I tried to figure out how the Chinese new gTLD .网址 managed to hit #2 in the new gTLD zone file size league table, apparently shifting a quarter of a million names in a week.
Well, after conversations with well-placed sources here at NamesCon in Las Vegas this week, I’ve figured it out.
.网址 is the Chinese for “.url”.
Its rapid growth — hitting 352,000 names today — can be attributed primarily to two factors.
First, these weren’t regular sales. The registry, Knet, which acquired original applicant Hu Yi last year, operates a keyword-based navigation system in China that predates Chinese-script gTLDs.
The company has simply grandfathered its keyword customers into .网址, I’m told.
The keyword system allows Latin-script domains too, which explains the large number of western brands that appear in the .网址 zone.
The second reason for the huge bump is the fact that many of the domains are essentially duplicates.
Chinese script has “traditional” and “simplified” characters, and in many cases domains in .网址 are simply the traditional equivalents of the simplified versions.
I understand that these duplicates may account for something like 30% of the zone file.
I’ve been unable to figure out definitively why the .网址 Whois database appeared to be so borked.
As I noted last week, every domain in the .网址 space had a Knet email address listed in its registrant, admin and technical contact fields.
It seems that Knet was substituting the original email addresses with its own when Whois queries were made over port 43, rather than via its own web site.
Its own Whois site (which doesn’t work for me) returned the genuine email addresses, but third-party Whois services such as DomainTools and ICANN returned the bogus data.
Whether Knet did this by accident or design, I don’t know, but it would have almost certainly have been a violation of its contractual commitments under its ICANN Registry Agreement.
However, as of today, third-party Whois tools are now returning the genuine Whois records, so whatever the reason was, it appears to be no longer an issue.

Comment Tagged: hu yi, ICANN, idns, keywords, knet, new gTLDs, whois, 网址

Vegas.club sells for $100,000

.CLUB Domains said today it has sold the domain vegas.club for $100,000, and will help in its promotion as a members-only site for deals related to Las Vegas.
The deal was announced here at the NamesCon conference at the Tropicana hotel in Vegas.
The buyer is One Degree World Systems, a local company that develops booking sites for tourist destination cities worldwide.
I’m not sure the deal would be reportable as a straightforward domain-only sale, given that .CLUB said the companies have a “partnership” to develop the domain.
According to a company press release, the upcoming site will offer “members-only deals on nightclubs, hotels, shows, attractions and tours as well as concierge services, VIP status at local attractions, and white glove services like personal assistants on the ground, butler and nanny services and more.”
.CLUB had a similar relationship with its first big anchor tenant, the rapper 50 Cent, for the fan site 50inda.club.
It’s the second .club name the registry has sold for a six-figure sum. It sold coffee.club, also for $100,000, last year.
Right Of The Dot helped broker the vegas.club deal, the registry said.

1 Comment Tagged: .club, namescon, new gTLDs, vegas.club

The new massive number two new gTLD has me paralyzed with confusion

The Chinese-script gTLD .网址 powered to the number two spot in the new gTLD rankings by zone file size this week, but it’s doing some things very strangely.
.网址 is Chinese for “.site”, “.url” or “.webaddress”.
The registry is Hu Yi Global, ostensibly a Hong Kong-based registrar but, judging by IANA’s records, actually part of its Beijing-based back-end Knet.
I’m going to come out and admit it: even after a few hours research I still don’t know a heck of a lot about these guys. The language barrier has got me, and the data is just weird.
These are the things I can tell you:

• .网址 has 352,727 domains in its zone file today, up by about a quarter of a million names since the start of the week.
• The names all seem to be using knet.cn name servers
• I don’t think any of them resolve on the web. I tried loads and couldn’t find so much as a parking page. Google is only aware of about eight resolving .网址 pages.
• They all seem to have been registered via the same Chinese registrar, which goes by the name of ZDNS (also providing DNS for the TLD itself).
• They all seem to be registered with “nameinfo@knet.com” in the email address field for the registrant, admin and technical contacts in Whois, even when the registrants are different.
• That’s even true for dozens of famous trademarks I checked — whether it’s the Bank of China or Alexander McQueen, they’re all using nameinfo@knet.cn as their email address.
• I’ve been unable to find a Whois record with a completed Registrant Organization field.
• Nobody seems to be selling these things. ZDNS (officially Internet Domain Name System Beijing Engineering Research Center) is apparently the only registrar to sell any so far and its web site doesn’t say a damn thing about .网址. The registry’s official nic.网址 site doesn’t even have any information about how to buy one either.
• ZDNS hasn’t sold a single domain in any other gTLD.
• News reports in China, linked to from the registry’s web site, boast about how .网址 is the biggest IDN TLD out there.

So what’s going on here? Are we looking at a Chinese .xyz? A bunch of registry-reserved names? A seriously borked Whois?
Don’t expect any answers from DI today on this one. I’ve been staring at Chinese characters for hours and my brain is addled.
I give up. You tell me.

11 Comments Tagged: hu yi, ICANN, idns, knet, new gTLDs, whois, zdns, 网址