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

.reise is first live new gTLD to hit the auction block

German domain registry Dotreise has become the first company to reveal that it wants to sell off a new gTLD.
Innovative Auctions is to handle an auction on February 27 at which Dotreise will attempt to unload the unwanted string, it emerged this evening.
The word “reise” is German for “travel”.
The gTLD has failed to capture much interest since it launched. As of today, it has just 1,254 domains in its zone file, about 1,000 of which were registered in its first week of general availability last August.
At launch, it had just a handful of registrars. Only four registrars sold more than 100 names in August.
It’s currently a relatively big-ticket TLD, which may account for the low sales. It retails for about $170 to $180 at United-Domains, the registrar that has shifted the most .reise names to date.
That would put revenue for .reise at under a quarter of a million dollars a year, based on its current volume, I guess.
It competes with Donuts’ .reisen, which has pretty much the same meaning but has been available a month longer and retails for under $25 a year; .reisen has a slightly bigger zone file, at 3,839 domains.
According to Innovative, the company behind Applicant Auction, which helps settle new gTLD contention sets with auctions:

The .REISE TLA will be a simultaneous ascending clock auction, similar to the format of the Applicant Auction. There will be no buyer commission for this auction, so no additional fees – you just pay the winning price if you win.

It’s a one-day auction.
Innovative had planned to auction off multiple live gTLDs in October, but was hit by delays.

Comment Tagged: .reise, applicant auction, dotreise, ICANN, innovative auctions, new gTLDs

Fatal timeout? A dozen dot-brands procrastinating to death

Over a dozen new gTLD applications have been iced because the applicants couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to ICANN about signing contracts before their deadlines.
Volvo and PricewaterhouseCoopers are among the 13 dot-brand applicants whose $185,000+ investments could vanish in a puff of smoke because they can’t bring themselves to sign on the dotted line, I’ve discovered.
The following gTLD applications, filed by 10 different companies, are no longer active because of contracting problems:

.select, .compare, .axis, .origins, .changiairport, .nissay, .lamer, .clinique, .pwc, .volvo, .amp, .招聘 (Chinese “.recruitment”), .wilmar

They’re all uncontested applications. They’re also all, with the exception of .招聘, envisaged having single-registrant policies (dot-brands, in other words).
All had their apps flagged by ICANN as “Will Not Proceed” in the new gTLD process late last year, having failed to sign or start negotiating their Registry Agreements in time.
Under program rules, applicants originally had nine months from the day they were invited to contract with ICANN in which to sign their RAs.
After protests from dot-brand applicants planning to sign up for so-called “Spec 13” code of conduct exemptions, ICANN last June gave such applicants an extension until July 2015, as long as they hit a September 1 deadline to respond to ICANN’s overtures.
Applicants that did not request an extension had an October 29 deadline to sign their RAs.
According to an ICANN spokesperson, a failure to hit such “interim milestones” disqualifies applicants from signing RAs.
It’s not entirely clear from the Applicant Guidebook how applicants can extricate themselves from this limbo state without withdrawing their applications, but ICANN assures us it is possible.
“Will not Proceed is not a final status,” the spokesperson cautioned. “But they are currently not eligible to sign the RA with ICANN. But if that status changes, we’ll update it accordingly on the site.”
Withdrawals would qualify the applicants for a 35% refund on their application fees, he confirmed.

6 Comments Tagged: contracting, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, pwc, volvo, will not proceed, withdrawals

Afilias cancels $100m London IPO

Afilias has cancelled its planned London Stock Exchange IPO due to “market conditions”.
It seems to be a cancellation, rather than a postponement, according to a company spokesperson.
“The final decision to cancel the IPO was based on market conditions at the time,” she told DI today.
No additional information was available, but I suspect the company was not able to drum up sufficient interest, at its target price, from institutional investors in the two-week period between its IPO filing and its due date.
Afilias said on October 28 that it planned to raise approximately $100 million selling shares on London’s Alternative Investment Market.
The flotation was expected to take place November 12, but that date came and went with no action.
AIM is currently the home of rival TLD registries CentralNic and Minds + Machines, neither of which saw any particular share price problems during that two-week window.
Afilias had revenue of $77.6 million in 2013, making an operating profit of $30.4 million and $45 million in operating cash flow, largely from selling .info and .mobi domain names.
The company is the back-end provider for almost 50 live 2012-round new gTLDs and has a couple hundred more deals with applicants whose strings have not yet been delegated.

Comment Tagged: afilias, ipo, new gTLDs

Schilling laughing as Uniregistry beats Google to .lol

Uniregistry’s portfolio of quirky new gTLDs grew today. The company seems to have beaten Google to .lol in a private deal.
The two companies were the only ones to apply for .lol, and Google’s application was formally withdrawn today.
As usual for private contention set settlements, the winning price has not been disclosed.
Uniregistry has 18 delegated gTLDs in its stable, with five more currently uncontested applications (.lol makes six) waiting in the wings.
I like .lol as a gTLD. It’s a punchy, short, meaningful string that certainly belongs to the right of the dot.
I can see it being deployed in the near term by the incessant sewer of BuzzFeed clones that are increasingly stinking up social media, which could give increased visibility and helpful viral marketing.
Longer term, there may be a worry if in future the kidz stop using “lol” and start viewing it as something their parents say, but we’re probably a ways from that yet.

4 Comments Tagged: .lol, auction, contention, google, ICANN, new gTLDs, private auction, uniregistry

NamesCon 2015 bigger, longer and more popular

NamesCon 2015 is due to kick of in Las Vegas this coming weekend with about 50% more attendees that its inaugural outing last year.
Organizers tell me that so far roughly 750 people (not including press and staff) have registered to attend the conference, which is taking place for the second year at the Tropicana hotel. That’s up from the roughly 525 registered a week before the 2014 event.
Some are expecting the final turnout to top 800.
Registrations were boosted as 2014 came to a close by the announcement that NamesCon had acquired the rights to use the longstanding DomainFest brand and domain to promote its own show.
The show is due to run from Sunday, January 11 to Wednesday, January 14, a day longer than the year-ago event.
NamesCon is a bit of a strange beast, catering heavily to domainers but with also a strong series of sessions aimed at digital brand managers and the intellectual property side of the industry.
Where else could you see sessions called “Workshop: I’m Getting Sued – What Do I Do Now?” and “Making the Most of Your .BRAND and the Evolving Internet” running side by side?
For domainers, a highlight of the week may be the live domain auction, which is being run by Right Of The Dot and SnapNames from January 13 from 1630 until 1930 local time.
There are 350 names going to auction, in an eclectic mix of legacy and new gTLDs.
Currently, slightly more than half of the 23 names with bids are new gTLD domains, though their asking prices are a lot lower than the .coms on the list — most seeing bids in the $250 range compared to a top .com bid fo $51,000 for agree.com.
Domains that do not sell during the live event will carry over to an extended auction that ends February 5.
TLD Registry, which runs a couple of Chinese-script new gTLDs, has a strong presence at NamesCon too, sponsoring a day-long session on the Chinese domain market on the Sunday.
Keynote speakers during the conference proper include Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, as well as executives from Go Daddy, Donuts, Uniregistry and others.
DI will be in attendance. I’ve agreed to do a presentation on DI PRO and industry metrics on Sunday, probably sharing the stage with another tools vendor, on Sunday, but the exact time and location have yet to be confirmed.
Conference passes are still available for $799 from the NamesCon web site. Registration on the door goes up to $849. For context, that’s still less than half the price you’d paid to go to TRAFFIC.

1 Comment Tagged: domainfest, namescon

New gTLDs pummel .net below 15 million domains

Verisign’s .net gTLD has had a disappointing start to 2015, as its zone file dipped below 15 million domains for the first time since achieving the milestone.
As of last night, .net had 14,998,404 names in its zone, a daily dip of over 10,000 domains.
That’s down by about 200,000 names from the roughly 15.2 million it had in March 2014, the earliest count for which I have records.
The gTLD first passed 15 million in August 2013, according to a celebratory blog post at the time.
Verisign has previously blamed the “confusion” created by the launch of new gTLDs for the decline, which was inexorable in 2014.
In October, CEO James Bidzos told financial analysts that “.net may be more susceptible to that confusion that swirls around new gTLDs.”
My similar view is that the existence of new gTLDs is causing people to wake up to the fact that defensive or shopping cart up-sell .net registrations are now superfluous, and that the days of .net riding on big brother .com’s coat-tails may be numbered.
There are still about 31,000 dark .net domains — registered names not present in its zone file — according to Verisign.
At the end of August 2014, .net had 15,569,398 registered names, according to the most recent available ICANN registry report.

3 Comments Tagged: .net, new gTLDs, verisign

.uk suspension problems worse than I thought

Problems validating the addresses of .uk domain registrants, which caused one registrar to dump the TLD entirely, are broader than I reported yesterday.
Cronon, which does business as Strato, announced last week that it has stopped selling .uk domain names because in more than a third of cases Nominet, the registry, is unable to validate the Whois data.
In many cases the domain is subsequently suspended, causing customer support headaches.
It now transpires that the problems are not limited to .uk second-level names, are not limited to UK registrants, and are not caused primarily by mailing address validation failures.
Michael Shohat, head of registrar services at Cronon, got in touch last night to clarify that most of its affected customers are in fact from its native Germany or from the Netherlands.
All of the affected names are .co.uk names, not .uk SLDs, he added.
And the validation is failing in the large majority of cases not due to Nominet’s inability to validate a mailing address, but rather its inability to validate the identity of the registrant.
“This is where the verification is failing. The database they are using can’t find many of our registrants’ company names,” Shohat said.
“So 30% of our registrations were being put on hold, almost all of them from [Germany] and [the Netherlands], and 90% of them because of the company name. We checked lots of them and in every single case the name of the company was correct, and the address as well,” he said.
Michele Neylon of the ICANN Registrar Stakeholders Group said that Cronon is not the only registrar to have been affected by these issues. Blacknight Solutions, the registrar Neylon runs, has been complaining about the problem since May.
According to Neylon, the Nominet policy causing the issue is its data quality policy, which covers all .uk and .co.uk (etc) names.
The policy itself is pretty vague — Nominet basically says it will work with each individual registrar to determine a baseline of what can be considered a “minimum proportion of valid data”, given the geographic makeup of the registrar’s customer base.
Domains that fail to meet these criteria have a “Data Quality Lock” imposed — essentially a suspension of the domain’s ability to resolve.
Earlier this year, Nominet did backtrack on plans to implement an automatic cancellation of the names after 30 days of non-compliance, following feedback from its registrars.
“It’s disappointing that Cronon have taken this step; we hope they will consider working with us to find a way to move forward,” a Nominet spokesperson added.
She said that the registry has over recent years moved to “more proactive enforcement” of Whois accuracy. She pointed out that Nominet takes on the “lion’s share of the work”, reducing the burden on registrars.
“However, our solution does not include non-UK data sets to cross-reference with, so it is possible that some false positives occur,” she said. “Registrars with a large non-UK registrant bases, who are not accredited channel partners, would be affected more than others.”
An Accredited Channel Partner is the top tier of the three Nominet offers to registrars. It has additional data validation requirements but additional benefits.
While .co.uk domains are not limited to UK-based registrants, all .uk SLD registrants do need to have a UK mailing address in their Whois for legal service.
The company’s inability to validate many non-UK business identities seems to mean .co.uk could also slowly become a UK-only space by the back door.

9 Comments Tagged: .uk, blacknight, cronon, nominet, validation, whois

Big registrar dumps .uk — a glimpse of Christmas future?

German registrar Cronon, which retails domains under the Strato brand, has stopped carrying .uk domains due to what it says are onerous Whois validation rules.
In a blog post, company spokesperson Christina Witt said that over one third of all .uk sales the registrar has been making are failing Nominet’s registry-end validation checks, which she said are “buggy”.
With the introduction of direct second-level registration under .uk, Nominet introduced a new requirement that all new domains must have a UK address in the Whois for legal service, even if the registrant is based overseas.
According to its web site, Nominet checks registrant addresses against the Royal Mail Postcode Address file, which contains over 29 million UK addresses, and does a confidence-based match.
If attempts to match the supplied address with a UK address in this file prove fruitless, and after outreach to the registrant, Nominet suspends the domain 30 days after registration and eventually deletes it.
It’s this policy of terminating domains that has caused Strato to despair and stop accepting new .uk registrations.
“Databases of street directories or company registers are often inaccurate and out of date,” Witt wrote (translated from the original German). “The result: addresses that are not wrong, in fact, are be found to be invalid.”
Nominet is throwing back over a third of all .uk names registered via Strato, according to the blog post, creating a customer support nightmare.
Its affected registrants are also confused about the verification emails they receive from Nominet, a foreign company of which they have often never heard, Witt wrote.
I don’t know how many .uk names the registrar has under management, but it’s reasonably large in the gTLD space, with roughly 650,000 domains under management at the last count.
If Strato’s claim that Nominet is rejecting a third of valid addresses (and how Strato could know they’re valid is open to question), that’s quite a scary statistic.
Nominet seems to be using an address database, from the Royal Mail, which is about as close to definitive as it gets. And it’s only verifying addresses from a single country.
I shudder to imagine what the false negative rate would be like for a gTLD registrar compelled to validate addresses across 200-odd countries and territories.
The latest version of the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to partially validate addresses, such as checking whether the street and postal code exist in the given city, but there’s no requirement for domains to be suspended if these checks fail.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Michele Neylon of the Registrars Stakeholder Group for the reminder that this RAA requirement hasn’t actually come into force yet, and won’t until the RrSG and ICANN come to terms on its technical and commercial feasibility.]
Where the 2013 RAA does require suspension is when the registrant fails to verify their email address (or, less commonly, phone number), which as we’ve seen over the last year leads to hundreds of thousands of names being yanked for no good reason.
If Strato’s story about .uk is correct and its experience shared by other registrars, I expect that will become and important data point the next time law enforcement or other interests push for even stricter Whois rules in the ICANN world.

5 Comments Tagged: .uk, 2013 raa, cronon, nominet, strato, validation, verification, whois