Demand Media spins off Rightside

Demand Media has completed the spin-off of its domain name business, Rightside.
Shares in the new company, which will be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, went to existing Demand Media shareholders.
Trading under the ticker symbol NAME, Rightside stock started off at $16.77 yesterday morning and is currently trading at around $15.07.
Rightside comprises number two registrar eNom, retail registrar Name.com, new gTLD portfolio registry United TLD (which is branded Rightside), and its share of auction house NameJet.
It is headed by CEO Taryn Naidu and chairman David Panos.
The company also today named its initial board of directors.

Comment Tagged: demand media, enom, name.com, namejet, rightside

Dublin picked for ICANN 54

ICANN had selected Dublin to play host to its 54th public meeting, which will be held in October next year.
According to a blog post from Michele Neylon, CEO of Irish registrar Blacknight, the venue will be the imaginatively named The Convention Centre, Dublin.
The primary sponsor will be INEX, the local internet exchange, he reports.
It will be interesting to see if the Irish government bothers to show up. It’s not a member of the GAC and Neylon has frequently criticized it for taking no interest in ICANN affairs.
The meeting will be held from 18 to 22 October, 2015.
Despite Ireland having only one accredited registrar, Dublin houses the nominal headquarters for a big chunk of the registry side of the industry, largely for tax purposes.
Afilias has been there for over a decade and recently Rightside, the Demand Media spin-off, also relocated its HQ there. A number of smaller new gTLD applicants founded in other countries are also “based” in Dublin.
ICANN still hasn’t named the city for ICANN 53, 2015’s mid-year meeting. I assume it will be in either Asia or Latin America. ICANN 51 is in Los Angeles this October, 52 is in Marrakech next February.
Personally, I’m looking forward to visiting Dublin. Despite what a startling number of you (even people who’ve known me for years!) seem to think, I’m not Irish and I’ve never been to Ireland.

5 Comments Tagged: blacknight, dublin, ICANN, icann 54

Two more years! Chehade stays at ICANN with $100,000 pay raise

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has had his contract renewed for an extra two years with a new pay package worth up to $100,000 more than he was previously getting.
The ICANN board of directors last week approved an extension of his contract, which had not been due to expire until July next year, to June 30, 2017.
Effectively immediately, he’ll receive a new salary of $630,000 a year, with a performance-related bonus of up to $270,000 per year. That’s up 12.5% from his original salary of $560,000 and $240,000 bonus.
ICANN described the compensation as “comparable to similar positions”.
Despite the hefty bump, Chehade is still on a smaller package than his immediate predecessor, Rod Beckstrom, who was on a base salary of $750,000 with $195,000 in bonuses.
By renewing his contract a year early, ICANN avoids the kind of leadership speculation that dogged Beckstrom’s final year in the corner office.
“As we noted in the Board resolution, taking this action will help ensure the stability in leadership that is important for ICANN. It also shows the support and confidence that the Board has in Fadi,” ICANN chair Steve Crocker said in a statement.

1 Comment Tagged: ceo, ICANN

Terror victims try to seize five ccTLDs

ICANN is fighting a US court action that could see the ccTLDs of Iran, Syria and Korea being seized by victims of terrorism.
While ICANN has not been sued as such, it’s been named in three “writs of attachment”, which seek to force the organization to hand over control of .ir, .sy, .kp, سور, and ايران.
This audacious attempt to take over three nations’ domains is being attempted by lawyers representing victims of state-sponsored terrorism, reportedly led by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.
Darshan-Leitner has secured billions of dollars worth of judgments against these states in US courts over the last decade.
But because the states won’t pay up, she’s been getting US courts to seize state-owned US-based assets, such as valuable real estate, instead.
Now her attention has turned to domain names.
The writs against ICANN, issued by a District of Columbia court a month ago, would force ICANN to hand over any assets belonging to Iran, Syria and Korea.
But ICANN says it cannot and should not be made to do so, filing hundreds of pages of court documents yesterday explaining why ccTLDs are not property that can be “attached”.
“Attachment” is a legal term used in the process of transferring assets from debtors to creditors.
In its defense, ICANN argues that allowing the seizure would do nothing less than jeopardize the globally interoperable internet:

First, a ccTLD simply is not “property” subject to attachment. Second, although operating for the benefit of the people of Iran, Syria and North Korea, respectively, the relevant ccTLDs are not “owned” by the defendants or anyone else, for that matter. Third, the .IR, .SY and .KP ccTLDs are not “located” in the District of Columbia or even the United States, and therefore are beyond the reach of Plaintiffs’ Writs of Attachment. Fourth, even if these ccTLDs could be characterized as “property in the United States of the defendants,” this Court would lack jurisdiction over these proceedings, according to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Fifth, ICANN does not unilaterally have the capability or authority to transfer the .IR, .SY or .KP ccTLDs to Plaintiffs. Finally, a forced transfer of the .IR, .SY and .KP ccTLDs would destroy whatever value may exist in these ccTLDs, would wipe out the hundreds of thousands of second-level domain names registered therein by various individuals, businesses and charitable organizations, and could jeopardize the single, global, interoperable structure the Internet.

“While we sympathize with what plaintiffs may have endured, ICANN’s role in the domain name system has nothing to do with any property of the countries involved,” ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey said in a statement.
In its motions to quash the writs, ICANN describes how it has no contractual relationship and few dealings with the three ccTLD managers in question and how it has received no money from them.
It goes on to describe its relationship to the DNS root zone and the US Department of Commerce
The motion then compares domain names to street addresses and not “property”:

a ccTLD can be thought of as a zip code. That zip code may encompass many different addresses, and those addresses in turn may correspond to certain places on the Internet that people can access, such as websites. But the street address itself is not property, nor is the zip code in which the street address exists…To the extent a ccTLD is capable of a legal definition, it is a collection of technical and administrative services, rather than property

There’s a bunch of US case law that states second-level domain names are not property, which ICANN draws on heavily in its motion.
I’m not going to dwell on the legal issues at stake here too much, but the case is politically, to use an inappropriate word, explosive.
If ICANN were to receive a court order, instructing it to transfer ownership of .ir to Darshan-Leitner’s group, and had no option but to comply, we’re looking at a major international political incident.
Under ICANN’s current IANA arrangement, ICANN-recommended changes to ccTLD management are handled by Verisign, but only with the consent of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
The US Department of Commerce, of which NTIA is a part, would have to give its approval to the transfer of Iran’s ccTLD from an Iranian institution to an Israeli entity.
That, at a time when US-Iranian relations are softening, in light of the new ISIS crisis in Iraq.
It’s a recipe for putting the IANA contract at the center of what can mildly be described as a “political incident” unlike anything the internet has seen to date.
While the US government has a role in ccTLD redelegations today, due to its membership of the DNS root zone triumvirate, it has announced its intent to step away from IANA stewardship.
The NTIA will be replaced, possibly as early as September 2015, by a mechanism that the ICANN community has started to develop.
If we can assume that the US government’s current role may prove to be a buffer between the US courts and potentially devastating forced ccTLD redelegations, it’s not at all clear that the NTIA-replacement mechanism would hold the same kind of political clout.
Would an IANA without US stewardship be more susceptible to crazy US court rulings?
If the US court asserts its authority over the DNS root zone, by ordering the transfer of a ccTLD to a private entity, all ccTLD registries would have a right to be very nervous indeed.
The case also highlights the fact that ICANN is subject to US court jurisdiction — something likely to remain after the IANA stewardship transition — which also makes some nations very nervous.
Rumors have been floating around for a while that ICANN would like to move its headquarters and primary legal structure to Switzerland — it already has an office and a legal presence there — and this case will certainly provide ammunition for those who would like to see such a move happen.

9 Comments Tagged: .ir, .kp, .sy, cctlds, darshan-leitner, ICANN, terrorism

Google beats Microsoft to .docs

Google and Microsoft seem to have settled their contention set for the .docs new gTLD, with Google emerging the victor.
Microsoft withdrew its application for .docs this week.
It’s not clear how the deal was made, but Google is known to have participated in private auctions for other strings.
Google Docs is of course Google’s office document service.
Microsoft also has a Docs service, a collaboration with Facebook at Docs.com, but it seems to have been in beta since April 2010 and, by the looks of the site, isn’t what you’d call a success.

1 Comment Tagged: .docs, google, Microsoft, new gTLDs

ICM buys .sex for up to $3 million

ICM Registry, the .xxx domain name registry, may have paid as much as $3 million for the .sex gTLD.
Internet Marketing Solutions Limited, the only other applicant for .sex, withdrew its application this week.
Word is that ICM forked out somewhere between $2 million and $3 million for exclusive rights to the string.
I hear it was a private deal, not an auction organized by a third party.
I wonder whether the price was affected by the revelation by ICANN earlier this month that it considers porn-related gTLD strings “sensitive” for no particular reason.
It’s quite low, considering that sex.com sold for $13 million and sex.xxx sold for $3 million just a couple of months ago.
ICM now is the only applicant for .sex, .porn and .adult. It plans to grandfather existing .xxx registrants into the new namespaces, assuming ICANN doesn’t throw a spanner in the works.

1 Comment Tagged: .sex, ICANN, icm registry, internet marketing solutions

Crazy housing market reflected in .london landrush

The world’s insatiable appetite for property in London is being reflected in applications for domain names during .london’s landrush, according to the registry.
Just a few days before the landrush ends, over 30 applications have been filed for properties.london, Dot London said, and apartments.london and houses.london “are among the most sought after” domains.
The registry said:

Trades that serve the property industry are also proving popular, with addresses such as removals.london and scaffolding.london receiving numerous applications, while there are three times as many applications for estateagent.london as for lettingagent.london.

The property market in London is utter madness right now. The average price of a house here is £567,392 ($963,275), up over 12% on a year ago, according to Zoopla.
I could buy a three-bedroom semi-detached house in the town of my birth for the price of a parking space in London.
Apartments literally smaller than a snooker table were selling for £90,000 ($152,000) two years ago.
It’s madness, I tell you, madness.
While much of the house price boom can be blamed on overseas investors, many of whom leave their properties vacant, Dot London is at least giving the city’s residents special treatment in .london.
The landrush is being carried out simultaneously with the sunrise period. Both commenced April 29 and end July 31.
Trademark owners get priority, followed by applicants with London addresses. In the event domains are contested by multiple applicants with the same priority, there’ll be a private auction.
Dot London says that the most-popular landrush domain is nightlife.london, completely unrelated to property. It has more than 40 applications.

8 Comments Tagged: .london, dot london, landrush

Amazon and Google deal on .talk, .play, .drive and others

Google and Amazon have started making deals to settle their new gTLD contention sets.
Google won three contention sets against Amazon this week, judging by the latest withdrawals, while Amazon won two.
Amazon won .talk and .you after Google, the only other applicant, withdrew.
Neither company appears to have a “You” brand, unless you count YouTube, but the .talk settlement strongly suggests that Google Talk, the company’s instant messaging client, is on the way out.
When Google applied for .talk in 2012 it intended to give Talk users custom domains to act as a contact point, but in 2013 Google started to indicate that it will be replaced as a brand by Google Hangouts.
The withdrawal seems to suggest that the existence of a gTLD application, a relatively small investment, is not an overwhelming factor when companies consider product rebranding.
I wonder what effect a live, active TLD will have on similar decisions in future.
But Google won the two-horse races for .dev and .drive and after Amazon withdrew its applications.
Google has a product called Google Drive, while Amazon runs Amazon Cloud Drive. Both companies have developer programs, though Google’s is arguably the more substantial of the two.
Google has also won .play — Google Play is its app store — after Amazon, Radix and Star Registry’s withdrawals. Amazon does not have a Play brand.
Google has also withdrawn its application for .book, leaving six remaining applicants, including Amazon, in the contention set.
I don’t currently know whether these contention sets were settled privately or via a third-party auction.

1 Comment Tagged: .dev, .drive, .play, .talk, .you, amazon, auctions, contention, google, ICANN, new gTLDs

NYC picks Panama registrar for reserved names

The City of New York is working with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to reserve government-related domains in the new .nyc gTLD, despite imposing residency requirements on registrants.
CCI REG director Gerardo Aristizabal tells us it has already handled over 100 registrations during the “City Government-Affiliated Reserve List” phase of .nyc’s protracted launch schedule.
While it’s not technically an exclusive deal, the registrar does appear to be the registrar of choice for the City.
Aristizabal says that he’s in the process of setting up a New York-based registrar to handle .nyc-related business in future.
But today CCI REG is incorporated in Panama and is perhaps best-known to DI readers for being one of .CO Internet’s launch registrars. .CO is now of course owned by Neustar, .nyc’s back-end.
The registrar operated my.co, which focused on the Colombian market. for .co. For .nyc, it’s operating at hellodotnyc.com.
It amuses me that the City of New York, which is also the contracted registry for the gTLD, would choose to use an overseas registrar, given .nyc’s restricted policies.
To buy a .nyc name during general availability, currently slated for October, you’ll need a New York mailing address.

1 Comment Tagged: .nyc, cci reg, city of new york, neustar

ICANN looking for chief registrant advocate (but there’s a catch)

ICANN is looking for a Registrant Services Director — somebody to advocate for the rights of registrants within the organization.
It’s a paid staff position, reporting directly to Global Domains Division president and ICANN number two Akram Atallah, not a part of the volunteer community.
The catch is that the newly created position is going to be based in Istanbul, Turkey, at one of ICANN’s three hub offices, which is probably going to limit the pool of available candidates.
“The right person for the role will build a team to develop and maintain a range of services and activities to support the needs of Domain Name Registrants,” the job ad states.
“It involves participation in a number of cross-organizational projects in areas such as registrant rights, contract interpretations and compliance, operations, legal policy definitions and implementation with a strong focus on multi-stakeholder collaboration,” it goes on.
I believe it will be the first time ICANN has had an executive dedicated to looking after the interests of registrants on its staff.
Limiting the pool of candidates further, ICANN is looking for somebody with eight to 12 years’ experience in a relevant role within the domain name industry.
An MBA or an advanced degree in engineering would be a plus, the ad states.

8 Comments Tagged: ICANN