Guy wants to be ICANN CEO and turn off 1.5 million Iranian domains
With the role of ICANN CEO opening up for applicants following the resignation of Göran Marby in December, the CEO of VPN.com appears to have thrown his hat in the ring.
In an unusual and ambiguous press release, “VPN.com CEO Reviews ICANN CEO Opening”, Michael Gargiulo strongly suggests he’s thinking about applying for the gig, currently filled on an interim basis by Sally Costerton.
“Stepping away from VPN.com to lead a global organization like ICANN that aligns with our mission of freedom and a secure Internet for all is something I have considered before, but the timing was not right,” he writes.
“ICANN does not need an empty suit filling this position; it needs someone with vision, ability to address lingering problems that ICANN has faced for extended periods of time, and the guts to stand up to countries like Russia,” he writes.
VPN.com is an strange hybrid of VPN review site and domain brokerage, formed after Gargiulo bought the domain for $1 million in 2017.
The press release is odd in that Gargiulo not only gets a couple of basic facts about ICANN wrong, but also draws attention to an occasion in 2019 when he called for Marby and President Trump to delete Iran’s .ir ccTLD from the DNS root in protest at the country’s human rights violations
The release refers to ICANN’s chair as Maarten Botterman, which hasn’t been true since September, and its headcount of “140 employees”, which is about 260 short of the actual number.
But it’s the opinion that Iran’s human rights violations, surely more acutely felt today than in 2019, should lead to the suspension of .ir’s 1.5 million domain names is surely a disqualifying position for a would-be ICANN CEO.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, ICANN faced calls to punish Putin by turning off .ru, which it resisted to broad community support.
Gargiulo did not respond to a request for clarification.
ICANN kicks the can on .org price cap defeat
ICANN has deferred action on its recent Independent Review Process defeat over price caps on .org and .info, instead referring the decision to one of its committees.
The IRP panel ruled in late December that ICANN broke its own bylaws when it approved the removal of price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts in 2019. It recommended that ICANN look into ways to restore the caps.
The ICANN board of directors at the weekend voted to ask its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) to “review, consider, and evaluate” the IRP decision and recommend next steps.
The IRP was fought by the registrar Namecheap.
No masks required at ICANN Cancun
ICANN is considerably loosening up its Covid-19 restrictions for its next meeting, due to take place in Cancun, Mexico, in March.
The Org said last night that face masks will no longer be compulsory inside the venue, though they will still be provided for free and are “strongly recommended”. Testing kits will also be handed out.
It also won’t need to see your vaccination papers any more. You’ll merely need to check a box confirming that you’re fully up-to-date on your shots at time of registration.
Also gone are proof-of-vaccination wrist-bands, though the color-coded lanyard system, which allows people to indicate their comfort level with social proximity, will remain in place.
The meeting will take place from March 10 at the Cancun Center, but you have to register online before March 8. You can’t just rock up on the day and register on the door like you could pre-pandemic.
sex.com for sale, but it’s not a domain deal
The owners of sex.com, which for many years was the highest-price domain sale ever recorded, have put the site on sale.
The unidentified sellers say they will accept minimum bids of $20 million, with at least $10 million up front, in an auction that began yesterday and will run until January 31.
The domain alone sold for $13 million in 2013, but this offer is for the full site, so don’t expect it to make it to any domain sales league tables.
The sellers say the site is an “innovative blend of popular social platforms”. That appears to mean it’s a blend of features borrowed from TikTok and OnlyFans.
In the name of journalistic integrity I checked it out.
The main page is basically a feed of short teaser videos of porn models posing or performing sex acts, accompanied by invitations to subscribe to their feeds for modest monthly subscription fees.
The site’s sellers say they receive 20% of the subscription fees, with the models taking the rest.
They say they get over a million daily unique visitors. Most appear to be to the legacy “pin” business, which allows users to create collections of porn content, the site’s primary business prior to July 2021.
Interested bidders can sign up at sex.com/auction.
Update: when tweeting a link to this post, I discovered Twitter won’t allow links to sex.com (which Twitter had auto-linked from the headline) because it thinks the site is “potentially harmful”.
ICANN to be told to stop pussyfooting on new gTLDs
The GNSO Council is expected to tell ICANN’s board of directors that it needs to stop lollygagging and set the wheels in motion for the next round of new gTLDs.
The Council plans to send a letter to the board ahead of its retreat this weekend, urging it to approve the GNSO’s new gTLD policy recommendations — the so-called SubPro Final Report — which turn two years old today.
There may also be some harsh critique of ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment for the program, which put an unexpectedly enormous price tag and years-long runway on the next round.
An early draft of the letter urges the board to approve the SubPro report “as soon as practicable” and “quickly” form an Implementation Review Team, which is the next stage of turning policy recommendations into systems and processes.
The ODA had provided two options for the next round. One would take five years and cost $125 million before a single application fee is collected. The second would cost about half as much and take 18 months.
The key differences were that Option 1 would see a lot of automation, with ICANN scratch-building systems for handling applications, objections, contention resolution and such, whereas Option 2 would cut some corners and rely more on manual processing.
But the GNSO, at least judging by the early draft of its letter, seems to regard this as a false dichotomy, instead proposing a third way, leaning on configurable third-party software and existing ICANN systems.
Option 1 is “overly aggressive… overly complex, time and resource intensive, and much more expensive than is necessary”, the draft letter says.
There wasn’t enough information in the ODA for the Council to figure out exactly how the two options differ, it says.
The letter is expected to tell the board that it doesn’t need to pick between the two options. Rather, it should just approve the SubPro’s recommendations and leave it to the ICANN staff and community members on the IRT to work out the details.
While the letter doesn’t come out and say it outright, the subtext I infer is that the ODA, which took a year and cost $9 million, was a waste of time and money. If the Council can’t figure out what it means, how is the board (its intended audience) supposed to?
The Council also expresses bafflement that the proposed Registry Services Providers Pre-Evaluation program, which was meant to streamline the program by accrediting RSPs in advance of the application window opening, is predicted by the ODA to be incredibly expensive and time-consuming, the exact opposite of its intended purpose.
The letter was composed by a “small team” subset of the Council and is likely to be edited over the next few days as other members weigh in. The Council is expected to discuss it at its monthly meeting tomorrow and send it to the board before it discusses the ODA on Sunday.
New ICANN boss makes encouraging noises on new gTLDs
ICANN’s new interim CEO Sally Costerton addressed the community in her new role for what I believe was the first time last Thursday, in a call with the GNSO Council.
The hour-long call was meant to discuss the outcomes of the Council’s Strategic Planning Session a month ago, but it also served as a Q&A between councilors and Costerton.
The last 15 minutes are of particular interest, especially if you’re one of the people concerned about ICANN’s devolution into a “do-nothing” organization over the last several years.
At that mark, Thomas Rickert of the trade group eco addressed the issue in a lengthy comment in which he pointed out that ICANN has been moving so slowly of late that even lumbering governmental institutions such as the European Union have come to realize that it’s faster to legislate on issues such as Whois than to wait for ICANN to sort it out.
He also pointed to the community’s pain of waiting a year for the recent Operational Design Assessment for the next round of new gTLDs, and its shock that the ODA pointed to an even more-expensive round that could take five years or more to come to fruition.
“I’ve heard many in the community say that the operational design reports come up with a level of complexity and diligence that stands in the way of being efficient,” he said. “So maybe the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
ICANN should be brave, dig its heels in, and get stuff done, he remarked.
Costerton seemed to enjoy the critique, suggesting that the recording of Rickert’s comments should be circulated to other ICANN staff.
She described herself as a “pragmatist rather than an ideologue”.
“I so want to say you’re absolutely right, Thomas, I completely agree with you 100%, we should just get it done,” she said. “Good is good enough. Perfect is the enemy of the good — I like that expression, I think it very often is.”
But.
Costerton said she has to balance getting stuff done with threats from governments and the risk of being “overwhelmed by aggressive litigation”. She said that ICANN needs “a framework around us that protects us”.
Getting that balance right is the tricky bit, she indicated.
Costerton, who took her new role at the end of last year following Göran Marby’s unexpected resignation, did not tip her hand on whether she plans to apply to have the “interim” removed from her job title. It is known that she has applied at least once before.
Verisign loses prestige .gov contract to Cloudflare
Cloudflare is to take over registry services for the US government’s .gov domain, ending Verisign’s 12-year run.
It seems .gov manager CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, opened the contract up for bidding last August and awarded it to Cloudflare in mid-December.
The deal is worth $7.2 million, Cloudflare said in a press release on Friday, which is more than twice as much as Verisign charged when it took over the .gov back-end in 2011.
But it seems the deal includes Cloudflare providing authoritative DNS for .gov domains, something Verisign does not currently provide the TLD, in addition to managing the zone file, registry, Whois, etc.
It’s not clear who’s running the exclusive .gov registrar, but CISA appears to be building a new one.
.gov domains are only available to US federal, state, tribal and local government organizations, and there was a $400-a-year fee until April 2021, when CISA made them free to register.
There are about 8,600 .gov domains today. Not a lot, but the deal comes with bragging rights.
CISA took over .gov from the General Services Administration in March 2021 and dropped the fees a month later.
It’s not clear whether Verisign had bid for a renewed contract or simply walked away, as it did when it conceded .tv to GoDaddy last year. I’ve asked the company for comment.
The loss of .gov is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to .com, which continues to make Verisign one of world’s most-profitable companies.
While it’s an ICANN-accredited registrar, I believe this is Cloudflare’s first foray into registry services. Might we see the company as an emergent threat to the established players in the next new gTLD round? It’s certainly looking that way.
Wanted: a gTLD to ban
ICANN may have failed so far to deliver a way for the world to create any more gTLDs, but it’s about to pick a string that it will resolve to never, ever delegate.
It’s going to designate an official “private use” string, designed for organizations to use behind their own firewalls, and promise that the chosen string will never make it to the DNS root.
IP lawyers and new gTLD consultants might want to keep an eye on this one.
The move comes at the prompting of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which called for ICANN to pick a private-use TLD in a September 2020 document (pdf).
ICANN hasn’t picked a string yet, but it has published its criteria for public comment:
1. It is a valid DNS label.
2. It is not already delegated in the root zone.
3. It is not confusingly similar to another TLD in existence.
4. It is relatively short, memorable, and meaningful.
The obvious thing to do would be to pick one of the 42 strings ICANN banned in the 2012 new gTLD round, which includes .example, .test and .invalid, or one of the three strings it subsequently decided were too risky to go in the root due to their extensive use on private networks — .corp, .mail and .home.
The SSAC notes in its document that ICANN’s two root server constellations receive about 854 million requests a day for .home — the most-used invalid TLD — presumably due to leaks from corporate networks and home routers.
But .homes (plural) is currently in use — XYZ.com manages the registry — so would .home fail the “confusingly similar” test? Given that it’s already established ICANN policy that plurals should be banned in the next round, .home could be ruled out.
ICANN’s consultation doesn’t make mention of whether gTLDs applied for in subsequent rounds would be tested for confusing similarity against this currently theoretical private-use string, but it seems likely.
Anyone considering applying for a gTLD in future will want to make sure the string ICANN picks isn’t too close to their brands or gTLD string ideas. Its eventual choice of string will also be open for public comment.
There don’t seem to be a massive amount of real-world benefits to designating a single private-use TLD string.
Nobody would be obliged to use it in their kit or on their networks, even if they know it exists, and ICANN’s track record of reaching out to the broader tech sector isn’t exactly stellar (see: universal acceptance). And even if everyone currently using a different TLD in their products were to switch to ICANN’s choice, it would presumably take many years for currently deployed gear to cycle out of usage.
Interview: Sandeep Ramchandani on 10 years of Radix and new gTLDs
It’s over a decade since ICANN’s last new gTLD application round, and naturally enough many companies in the industry are celebrating their 10th anniversaries too. Radix has been putting a lot of effort into promoting its own birthday, so a couple months ago I had a long chat with CEO Sandeep Ramchandani about the last decade and what the future holds.
We discussed Radix’s business model, rivalries, performance, blockchain-based alt-root gTLDs, the company’s plans for the next application round, and the TLDs he wishes the company had bought.
Measuring success
Radix is based in Dubai but has most of its 75-person headcount located in Mumbai, India. It also has satellites, mainly focused on registrar relations and marketing, in the US, South America (where it markets .uno) and Asia.
Across 10 gTLDs, it has amassed over 5.6 million registrations, according to its web site. If you exclude pre-2012 TLD .info, that’s more than Identity Digital, which has more than 20 times as many TLDs in its stable.
“Donuts went for the long tail, category-specific names,” Ramchandani said. “Our idea was to launch TLDs that had mass-market potential.”
More than half of the regs to date have been concentrated in two TLDs — .online and .site, each of which measure their volumes in seven figures. The TLD .store is approaching a million names also.
More than half of the company’s sales are coming from the US, with 20% to 30% from Europe. It’s pretty much the same mix across premium sales and basic regs, he said.
Radix has been focusing most of its marketing effort on .store, .tech and .online, but Ramchandani says he thinks .site, currently at around 1.2 million domains and the company’s second-biggest seller, has a lot of untapped potential.
“We have about six million domains right now, but I don’t think that’s the best metric, as you can easily spike volumes by selling cheap,” Ramchandani said.
“The real metric is domains that are renewing every year,” he said. “Our first year registration price is still fairly low, but we optimize it to maximize our renewals.”
There’s also the matter of live web sites, of course. Radix estimates there are over 725,000 live sites on its domains, according to its web site.
On premium renewals
If you’re a domain investor, imagine you have a portfolio of tens of thousands of domains that you price at between $100 and $10,000, and you get to sell them not once, but every single year.
That’s Radix’s “high-high” business model, where domains in premium tiers are priced for users and renew at premium prices.
Ramchandani says that between 10% and 15% of Radix’s revenue comes from premiums, but it’s growing faster than regular-price regs. So far, it’s sold about 5% to 6% of its premium inventory. Many thousands of domains remain.
But the problem with premiums is of course whether or not they will renew at all, particularly if they’ve been sold to a domain investor who failed to secure the quick flip.
Ramchandani said premium renewals have been running at about 55% for the first renew, 75% for the second and above 90% for the third. The second and third-time figures are very respectable indeed for any TLD.
Premiums are typically held by end-user registrants rather than investors, he said. Probably lower the one in 10 premiums are owned by domainers, he guessed.
“We don’t have a lot of domainer interest, because the holding cost is too high,” he said. “A lot of the best web sites we see on our TLDs are on premiums.”
On industry consolidation
One of Ramchandani’s regrets over that last decade is that Radix didn’t manage to pick up some of the gTLDs that changed hands as the industry began to consolidate.
“We could have gone a bit harder to acquire some of the larger TLDs that did sell over the last few years,” he said. He would have to loved to have gobbled up .club or .design, he said, but these were bought by deeper-pocketed GoDaddy.
He said Radix sees itself as a buyer rather than a seller “for sure”, but the problem is: “We are interested in buying, but there aren’t so many out there that are really good TLDs.”
The company is not interested in the business model of buying up a dormant dot-brand and repurposing it to mean something other than its original meaning, which other registries have tried.
Ironically, that was where Radix started out, selling Palau’s .pw ccTLD as a domain for the “professional web”, which was a hard sell.
On the next round and alt-root TLDs
The long-touted next application round has been in policy development hell at ICANN for a decade, and Ramchandani agrees that “it’s a couple years away at this point and could very well be longer than that”.
“We will participate,” he confirms, adding “we’ll have to look at which TLDs we think are worth going for.”
“I think the best ones are already on the market, but there may be a few — based on recent trends — that make really good TLDs that qualify to have the scale and global impact that we look for,” he says.
“But honestly if we end up with none I think we still think have a very, very exciting business opportunity ahead of us for the next 10 years at least with the TLDs we already have, so it’s not something we’re betting the business on,” he says.
But how big will the next round be? There were 1,930 applications in the 2012 round, and plenty of anecdotal evidence today about pent-up demand, particularly from brands. That said, many say the first round wasn’t as successful as some had anticipated, which could lower turnout.
“A lot depends on the barrier to entry,” Ramchandani says. “Last time there was an investment of $185,000 for an application so there was a decent barrier to entry, but there are talks about potentially reducing that spectacularly. If that happens, I think the floodgates will open.”
(I should note that our conversation took place before ICANN announced that applications fees will likely be closer to $250,000 in the next round.)
“Last time this process ran there was less confidence that there was a sustainable business around new gTLDS, but given how some of the domainers in that round have performed — there are a bunch of TLDs that have done substantially better than everyone’s expectations — there might a lot more coming in to fight for those in contention with us in the next round,” he said.
He’s expecting to see “really high numbers” in dollar terms when strings come up for auction, but “a dozen, max, that will be really highly contested”.
One factor that could push down applications are blockchain-based alt-roots, where the likes of Unstoppable Domains throwing its legal weight around to prevent versions its TLDs appearing in other roots.
That said, Ramchandani would not rule out applying for TLDs that exist in alt-roots.
sex.xyz sells at $11,000 loss as premium renewal kicks in
The domain sex.com was for many years the most-expensive ever sold, but the outlook might not be so bright for sex.xyz, which may be a bit of a poisoned chalice.
sex.xyz sold at Sedo for $2,150, according to a record that popped up in my feed today. Namebio lists the same price, with a sale date of December 15.
The domain appears to have been sold just one week before it came up for renewal, which would have cost the original registrant an eye-watering $13,000.
According to XYZ, the registry, it had sold in December 2021 for $13,000, and is one of the names listed as having an annual premium renewal the same as the original sale price.
sex.com sold for $13 million in 2006 and held the record for the highest publicized domain sale every, until the crypto guys started throwing their money around a few years back.
The current record is $30 million for voice.com, sold in 2019. The name nfts.com sold for $15 million last year.
Update: this post was updated to correct that it was sex.com that sold for $13 million, not xyz.com.
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