Correction: Sinha’s seat is safe

Last Friday, I speculated that, based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, ICANN chair Tripti Sinha could find herself ineligible to continue on the ICANN board of directors this November, due to geographic diversity quotas.

My calculations were incorrect, it turns out. While she still needs to be reappointed by the Nominating Committee, Sinha is not limited by the geographic diversity limits. I’ve deleted the article and apologize for the error.

Comment Tagged: aso, board, elections, ICANN, nomcom

Chinese domains plummet again in 2023

There was almost no movement in the number of .cn domain names registered in 2023, according to the registry.

CNNIC had 20,125,764 .cn names under management at the end of last year, compared to 20,101,491 at the end of 2022, according to its recently published end-of-year report.

That’s an increase of under 25,000 domains, about a tenth as many net regs as fellow leading ccTLD .de, the domain for far less-populous Germany.

CNNIC also tracks the overall number of domains registered in-country, regardless of TLD, and that dropped dramatically again, following the trend of years.

There were 31,595,563 domains registered in China at the end of December, compared to 34,400,483 a year earlier, according to the report.

Comment Tagged: .cn, cnnic

GoDaddy price increases lead to revenue growth

GoDaddy last night reported domains revenue ahead of forecasts after it raised its prices and sold more higher-priced domains on the aftermarket.

The company’s Core Platform segment, which includes domains and hosting, reported first-quarter revenue up 4% compared to a year ago at $725 million, with domains revenue driving growth, up 7% percent to $532 million.

Domains under management was 84.6 million at the end of March 31.

“Our growth was driven by strong demand for domains in the primary and secondary market, increased pricing in the primary market and a higher average transaction value in the secondary market,” CFO Mark McCaffrey said in prepared remarks.

Aftermarket revenue was up 12% to an unspecified amount.

Including the company’s other revenue streams, GoDaddy reported net income of $401.5 million on revenue up 7% at $1.1 billion.

Verisign, the .com registry, last week reported stagnating .com growth that it blamed in part on US registrars raising their retail prices, leading to lower first-year sales and renewals.

Comment Tagged: .com, earnings, financials, godaddy, verisign

D3 announces seventh blockchain gTLD client

D3 Global has announced yet another likely new gTLD applicant from the blockchain space.

The specialist consultancy said it has partnered with MAKE and the Casper Foundation, a software developer and its non-profit backer respectively, to apply for .cspr when ICANN opens its long-awaited next round of new gTLD applications in a couple years.

It’s the seventh such deal D3, which says it can help blockchain companies link their alternative namespaces to the DNS, has announced since its launch late last year.

It is also working with partners to apply for .ape, .core, .vic, .near, .gate, and .shib.

Comment Tagged: .cspr, casper foundation, d3, ICANN, make, new gTLDs

Taylor Swift applies for her .post domain

A back-up in case the whole music thing doesn’t work out?

Taylor Swift has become the first celebrity to attempt to defensively register her name in the .post gTLD, which is currently in the middle of a newly extended and incredibly belated sunrise period.

According to the registry’s web site, the domain taylorswift.post has been applied for by DNStination, a MarkMonitor subsidiary used to register names on behalf of clients.

The .post relaunch is pretty unusual in that all sunrise period applications are being published on the registry’s new web site, with a user-friendly form for challenging them.

About 60 domains have been approved since sunrise kicked off in mid-March and about the same amount are currently in their 30-day challenge period. For context, .post had barely 400 domains under management prior to the current relaunch, despite having been live in the DNS for 12 years.

The usual suspects such as Meta, Google and Amazon, as well as many national postal services, have all participated in the sunrise, which is open to all trademark holders regardless of their nexus to the logistics or postal industries.

But after the sunrise period is over and the new general availability regime begins, .post is only supposed to be for any entity “interested in participating in the postal, logistics or supply chain sectors”, so it’s difficult to see how a future cybersquatter might have been able to abuse Swift’s brand.

It’s probable that MarkMonitor is under instruction to “just register everything”. Swift is a multi-billion-dollar brand and the internet has no shortage of scumbags trying to rip off her millions of adoring fans.

That said, Swift’s domain application has another two weeks left on the challenge clock, so if you’re Team Kanye, or simply find her music nauseating…

Comment Tagged: .post, sunrise, taylor swift

.ad domains to go global soon

Andorra’s ccTLD is to become the latest potential domain hack for the Anglophone world, when the local registry massively liberalizes its registration policies later this year.

.ad domains are due to become available to any registrant globally starting in October, via an as-yet-unpublished list of approved registrars. General availability wholesale prices appear to be €15 ($16) a year.

Currently, the domains are only available to Andorrans manually going through the government trademark office, but it seems the registry, Andorra Telecom, has moved to a standardized EPP back-end with all the usual business logic that entails.

Before GA, starting May 22, there will be a gradual ramp-up period that seems to combine elements of typical sunrise and landrush periods. Foreign trademark owners will be able to apply during this period.

Interestingly, it seems that you may also be able to register a .ad that matches your domain in another TLD, without a matching trademark, during this period.

.ad is of course an abbreviation of “advertisement” in English, which may make it attractive to registrants outside Andorra.

The attractiveness is perhaps enhanced by the fact the the plural, .ads, is one of many gTLDs that Google owns but has so far refused to launch.

Andorra is a tiny nation, with a population about the same as Grimsby, nestled in the mountains between France and Spain. The national language is Catalan, as is the new registry web site.

3 Comments Tagged: .ad, andorra, landrush, sunrise

Single-letter .com case back in court

The domainer trying to get his hands on all the remaining single-character .com and .net domain names has re-filed his lawsuit against ICANN.

Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com (dba First Place Internet) has filed an amended complaint in a California court, after the judge threw out his initial complaint in March. He alleges deceptive trade practices and breach of contract, among other things.

His claim is that he has sole rights to all unregistered single-character .com and .net domains, such as 1.com and a.net, because he’s registered the matching domains in Verisign’s internationalized domain name transliterations, such as the Hebrew קום. or the Korean/Hangul .닷컴.

He paid Verisign, via registrar CSC Global, $25,285 for 1.닷넷 back in 2017 and reckons he was also buying the exclusive rights to 1.com and 1.net. The same arguments applies to the dozens of other ASCII.IDN domains he registered, according to the complaint.

The argument rests almost entirely on a letter (pdf) from Verisign to ICANN in 2013, in which the registry sets out some of its plans for its IDN gTLDs.

The letter is imprecisely worded, to the point where if you squint a bit, drop some acid, and hit your head against the wall a few times, you might be persuaded that Verisign is saying it would be willing to sell the rights to 1.com for 25 grand.

The complaint says this letter is “ICANN policy”, and the rest of its arguments are pretty much based on that incorrect premise.

ICANN has already filed a demurrer, asking the court to throw out the complaint again, largely on the grounds that the letter is not “policy” and ICANN doesn’t have a contract with any of the plaintiffs that it could be accused of breaching anyway.

The latest filings can be found here.

1 Comment Tagged: first place internet, ICANN, idns, scdns, verandaglobal, verisign

ICANN to slash costs as Verisign’s magic money tree dries up

ICANN is looking for $8 million of cost savings, $3 million more than it expected a quarter ago, amid gloomy predictions about the domain industry’s likely performance this year.

The Org last week told community members that it’s having to revise its expected revenue down by $3 million to $145 million after it became clear domain sales won’t be as good as previously thought. The new budget is due to be approved by the board this coming weekend.

“ICANN faces an inflation of its costs and also happens to face a lack of inflation of its funding,” CFO Xavier Calvez said on one of two conference calls explaining the changes.

ICANN’s bean counters are now predicting a 4% decline in transaction fees from legacy gTLDs — a line item mostly comprising .com — for ICANN’s fiscal 2025, which begins this July. Back in December, when the first draft of the budget was published, the prediction was for 0% growth.

The grim numbers match Verisign’s own growth story for the rest of the calendar year. Company bosses last week predicted .com/.net to grow at between 0.25% and negative 1.75%, a downwards revision on its guidance in February.

Talking to Verisign and other registries and registrars and looking at the monthly transaction data they file is the main way ICANN formulates its budget predictions.

“We gauged very strong expectations of a contraction in domain name registrations,” ICANN programs director Mukesh Chulani said.

Meanwhile, ICANN estimates transaction fees for new gTLDs will increase 7% in FY25, obviously from a much lower base then legacy, compared to the December estimate of 2% growth.

ICANN was already expecting its funding to miss its spending requirements by $5 million, but that figure is now $8 million. But rather than run ops at a loss, ICANN has instead put this number on a line labelled “Cost Savings Initiatives” in order to present a balanced bottom line.

Where these cost savings might come from doesn’t seem to have been figured out yet, and there’s some community worry that services might be affected by cuts.

There was some talk of finding efficiencies in the travel budget or with contractors, but those budgets are $13 million and $24 million respectively, so any cuts there could be swingeing.

By far the largest expenditure line item is staff, which costs $90 million. But there’s been no change to the expected number of ICANN full-timers in the budget, so layoffs don’t seem to be on the cards just yet.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, verisign

Community revolts over ICANN’s auction proceeds power grab

Parts of the ICANN community have revolted over ICANN’s move to make it easier to turn off the mechanisms used to appeal its decisions.

Both registries and registrars, along with their usual opponents in the business and intellectual property communities, have told the Org that a proposal to change its foundational bylaws are overly broad and creates new powers to diminish ICANN’s accountability.

Meanwhile, the Intellectual Property Constituency seems to have escalated its beef with ICANN related to the proposals, entering into a Cooperative Engagement Process with ICANN. CEP is usually, but not always, a precursor to an expensive, quasi-judicial Independent Review Process case.

The row relates to the Grant Program, which launched a month ago and will see ICANN hand out $217 million it gained from auctioning registry contracts during the 2012 new gTLD program application round.

The rules of the program were developed by the Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds.

The CCWG was afraid that ICANN might wind up frittering away most of the money on legal fees unless unsuccessful grant applicants, and third parties, were banned from appealing grant decisions they didn’t like. So its Recommendation 7 proposed a bylaws amendment that would prevent the Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration process from being used with reference to the Grant Program.

What ICANN came up with instead is a bylaws amendment that could be applied not only to the Grant Program, but also potentially to any future activities.

Specifically, ICANN’s proposed amendment gives future CCWGs, assuming they have sufficient community representation, the ability to recommend exceptions to the accountability mechanisms, which ICANN could then accept without having the amend the bylaws every time.

But almost every constituency that has filed an opinion on the proposals so far thinks ICANN has gone too far.

The IPC said says ICANN’s proposal is “unacceptably broad and exceeds what is necessary to give effect to Recommendation 7” adding:

The IPC is also concerned that making such a broad Bylaws amendment could have the consequence of normalizing the idea of removing access to accountability mechanisms, rather than this being an exceptional event. This is not something that should be encouraged.

The Registries Stakeholder Group said the proposal “creates an alternative path for amending the Bylaws that contradicts the existing amendment processes”

“The Accountability Mechanisms are foundational to ICANN’s legitimacy. Access to Accountability Mechanisms should be prevented only in rare circumstances with the clear support of the Empowered Community,” it added.

The Registrar Stakeholder Group concurred, writing:

Robust Accountability Mechanisms are a lynchpin of ICANN’s broader accountability structure. They should only be disallowed, if ever, in very specific circumstances, and as a result of the full bylaw amendment process. The proposed bylaws amendment vests CCWGs with the power to disallow Accountability Mechanisms which we believe is inappropriate.

Several commenters pointed out that CCWGs are less formal ICANN policy-making structure, with fewer checks and balances than regular Policy Development Processes.

The only dissenting view came from the At-Large Advisory Committee, which said it “strongly supports” ICANN’s proposed amendment, writing:

Although any limitation in accountability is potentially onerous, the ALAC is comfortable that the three conditions proposed in the amendment only allow such limitations in situations where a more specific Bylaw limitation would also be approved by the Empowered Community.

In a related development, the IPC has taken the highly unusual move of entering CEP with ICANN, suggesting it is on the IRP path.

The IPC had filed a Request for Reconsideration late last year, at a time when it appeared that ICANN had outright rejected Recommendation 7 (having previously approved it), but ICANN’s board threw it out mostly on the grounds that the IPC could not show it had been harmed, which the IPC found curious.

If the IPC were to go to IRP, it would be unprecedented. The mechanism has only ever been used by companies defending their commercial interests, never by one of ICANN’s own community groups on a matter of principle.

Comment Tagged: accountability, alac, auctions, bylaws, ccwg, gnso, grant program, ICANN

Two seats up for grabs on Nominet board

The .uk registry, Nominet, has opened up its call for nominations for its 2024 non-executive director elections.

There are two seats up for grabs this year, currently occupied by Simon Blackler of Krystal Hosting and Ashley La Bolle of Tucows, both of whom were originally elected in 2021 and are eligible for reelection if they choose to stand again.

Blackler, you may recall, was the instigator of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which resulted in a boardroom bloodbath three years ago.

The seats represent half of the member-elected NEDs on Nominet’s board.

Non-members are eligible for nomination but only members may nominate and vote. Votes are weighted so the members with the most domains under management get the most votes, albeit with a cap to avoid capture by the largest players.

The deadline for nominations is July 7, and the vote takes place in September. Elections have historically reliably highlighted divisions in the .uk community.

Comment Tagged: .uk, election, nominet