Domain universe shrinks again: .com and .cn down, .au up

The number of registered domain names in the world shrank again in the third quarter, with mixed results across various TLDs, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

There were 349.9 million names across all TLDs at the end of September, down 1.6 million sequentially but up 11.5 million compared to Q3 2021, the DNIB states.

The industry has downsized in every quarter this year, judging by Verisign’s numbers.

The company’s own .com, suffering from post-Covid blues, macroeconomic factors and (possibly) pricing issues, dragged the overall number down in Q3 by 200,000 domains, ending with 160.9 million.

But China’s .cn was hit harder, ending the period down from 20.6 million to 18 million. As I pondered in September, this may be due to how Verisign sources data.

Australia’s .au benefited from the launch of second-level availability, which boosted its number by 400,000 domains, ending with 4 million and overtaking .fr and .eu to become the seventh-largest ccTLD.

The ccTLD world overall shrunk sequentially by 1.7 million names but grew by 5.7 million on the year to end the quarter with 132.4 million.

New gTLDs ended with 27.3 million names, up 300,000 sequentially and 3.8 million year over year.

3 Comments Tagged: .au, .cn, .com, dnib, verisign

New gTLD applications to cost about $250,000

Getting hold of a new gTLD could cost applicants well north of a quarter million dollars in base application fees alone in the next round, according to ICANN.

Presenting the results of its year-long Operational Design Phase to the GNSO Council via Zoom last night, staffers said application fees are likely to be either around $240,600 or $270,000 next time, higher than the $185,000 it charged in 2012.

Those would be the base fees, not including any additional evaluations or contention-related fees.

The Org next week is set to present its board and the community with a stark choice — one big expensive round along the lines of 2012, with a potential five-year wait for the next application window to open, or a cheaper, staggered four-stage round with maybe only 18 months of development time.

The Operational Design Assessment — a 400-page tome the Org has spent the last 14 months developing — is set to be published early next week, outlining two options for how ICANN should proceed on the next round.

One option is to build a highly automated system that fully implements all of the GNSO’s policy recommendations but costs up to $125 million up-front to build and roll out over five years. Application fees would be about $270,000.

The other would cut some bells and whistles and require more human intervention, but would be cheaper at up to $67 million up-front and could be rolled out within 18 months. Application fees would be about $240,600.

ICANN CFO Xavier Calvez, responding to exclamations of surprise via Zoom chat, said that a decade of inflation alone would lead to a 28% price increase to $237,000 if the next round were opened today, but in two or three years the price could be even higher if current economic trends continue.

While many expected the fact that technical evaluations will be conducted on a registry service provider basis rather than a per-application basis would wipe tens of thousands from the application fee, ICANN pointed out that building and executing this RSP pre-evaluation process will also cost it money.

ICANN wants to operate the program on a “cost-recovery basis”, so it neither makes a profit nor has to dig into its operational budget. It expects “more than three dozen vendors will be required” to help run the round.

It seems that the portion of the fee set aside to deal with “risks” — basically, anticipated litigation — is expected to be around a fifth of the total, compared to about a third in the 2012 round.

ICANN is asking its board and the community to decide between what it calls “Option 1 — One Big Round” and “Option 2 — Four Annual Cycles”.

Option 1 would essentially be a replay of 2012, where there’s a single unlimited application window, maybe a couple thousand applications, and then ICANN processes them all in a highly automated fashion using custom-built software.

Option 2 would allow unlimited applications once a year for four years, but it would cap the number processed per year at 450 and there’d be a greater degree of manual processing, which ICANN, apparently unfamiliar with its own history of software development, thinks poses additional risk.

My hot take is that the Org is presenting a false choice here, much like it did in January with its ODA on Whois reform, where one option was so unpalatably time-consuming and expensive that it had most of the community retching into their soy-based lattes.

There’s also an implicit criticism in both ODAs that the community-driven policy-making process has a tendency to make big asks without adequately considering the resources required to actually get them done.

I might be wrong, but I can’t at this early stage see much support emerging for the “One Big Round” option, except perhaps from the most ardent opponents of the new gTLD program.

ICANN expects to deliver the ODA — 100 pages with 300 pages of appendices — to its board on Monday, with wider publication not long after that. It will hold two webinars for the community to discuss the document on Wednesday.

6 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, odp, subpro

Macy’s scraps .macys gTLD

US retailer Macy’s has dumped its dot-brand gTLD .macys.

The company told ICANN recently that it no longer wishes to hold a registry contract, noting that it never used the gTLD.

ICANN last week agreed that as a dot-brand with no third-party users, the domain will not be redelegated to another registry.

It’s the seventh gTLD to scrap its contract this year, lower than ICANN’s budget estimates.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, macys, new gTLDs, termination

Elon Musk chaos credited with surge in .social regs

Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter has been credited with leading to a surge in .social domain registrations last month, according to registry Identity Digital.

.social leaped into the top 10 of the company’s most-registered TLDs at number five internationally and number two in North America, second only to legacy .info, the company reported this week.

ID said that month-over-month .social regs increased 435% in the first two weeks of November.

It’s a pretty small TLD, so the boost only equated to an increase of about 5,000 domains in November, according to zone files, which put the current count at about 35,000.

Musk closed his acquisition in late October, and he started Trussing it into the ground the following week, laying off thousands of employees and cack-handedly attempting to monetize the “blue check mark”.

ID reckons this is behind the increase in .social sales, with CEO Akram Atallah saying in a press release: “Volatility in social platforms that people rely on leads users to take action to own their digital identity and content, which often starts with finding a domain name.”

He pointed to Twitter alternative Mastadon, which is a decentralized, open-source platform and uses a .social domain, as a driver for the growth. Some of the new .social regs point to Mastadon installs, ID said.

ID also sold premium names arts.social, lol.social and justice.social during the month, but no .social domains appear on its top 20 sales in its most-recent monthly report.

Comment Tagged: .social, elon musk, identity digital, mastadon, new gTLDs, twitter

InternetNZ says sorry for “institutional racism”

New Zealand ccTLD registry InternetNZ has apologized for its “institutional racism” following a probe instigated by its reaction to a YouTube video last year that incited violence against Māori citizens.

“We acknowledge that InternetNZ has institutional racism built into our culture and structures. These systems, and the way people have acted within them, have caused harm to Te Ao Māori,” the company said in a statement last week.

“We unreservedly apologise for the harm to Te Ao Māori [the Māori world],” it added. “We know that from here, it is our actions that will right these wrongs.”

The apology follows the publication of a report into current and historical structural racism at the company by Māori language advocate Hana O’Regan, commissioned by the InternetNZ Council last year.

The review was ordered after two council members, both Māori women, resigned in protest at InternetNZ’s inaction when a masked individual reportedly uploaded a video to YouTube encouraging the massacre of Māori people.

It seems many believed InternetNZ should have publicly condemned the video, which stayed online for more than a day, as well as used its political clout to encourage YouTube to delete it.

The company apologized a few days later, saying it had not wanted to inadvertently draw attention to the video, perhaps inflaming matters, but said that was with hindsight the wrong call.

O’Regan’s report is more wide-ranging than the 2021 incident, however, delving back into InternetNZ’s roots in the mid-1990s and finding long-term resistance to the asks of the Māori people.

Māori had to struggle to get the second-level domain maori.nz created, while geek.nz sailed through approval, the report says. There was also resistance to enabling internationalized domain names, which would allow the macro diacritic used in the Māori language, it says.

The report also criticized InternetNZ’s decision-making structure as failing to embrace Māori cultural practices, and its membership for failing to be sufficiently diverse.

The company says it has in the last year or so appointed a C-level Māori cultural advisor and created a committee to advise on Māori matters. It is also working on a “comprehensive action plan” it intends to publish early next year.

The 35-page report can be found here (pdf). It’s written for a domestic audience, so if you’re not Kiwi, you’ll probably need Google Translate to follow it. And if you’re an American conservative, it’ll probably pop all your aneurysms at once.

Comment Tagged: .nz, internetnz, racism

Melbourne IT to relaunch, return to roots, after $3.4 million acquisition

Australian registrar Webcentral.au is to revive its Melbourne IT brand with a renewed focus on the corporate domains market, following the AUD 5 million ($3.4 million) acquisition of a smaller rival.

The company said today it’s buying registrar New Domain Services and bringing its CEO, Jonathan Horne, on board as the new boss of Melbourne IT, which divested its corporate domains arm to CSCGlobal in 2013.

Webcentral now says it plans to “relaunch the Melbourne IT brand and business and pursue growth opportunities in the corporate domains services sector”, returning the company to its roots.

New Domain has revenue of AUD 2 million and EBITDA of AUD 1.2 million, with 25,000 customers, the company said.

Melbourne IT was among the first handful of registrars to be accredited by ICANN when it broke up Network Solutions’ monopoly in the late 1990s.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, melbourne it, new domain services, webcentral

Registrars CAN charge for Whois, ICANN grudgingly admits

ICANN is powerless to prevent registrars from charging for access to non-public Whois data, the Org has reluctantly admitted.

In a recent advisory, ICANN said it is “concerned” that registrars including Tucows have been charging fees to process requests for data that would otherwise be redacted in the free public Whois.

But it said there’s nothing in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, specifically the Temporary Specification governing Whois in the post-GDPR world, that bans such services:

While the RAA explicitly requires access to public registration data directory services to be provided free of charge, the Temporary Specification does not specifically address the issue of whether or not a registrar may charge a fee for considering requests for access to redacted registration data.

So basic Whois results, with all the juicy info redacted, has to be free, but registrars can bill organizations who ask for the veil to be lifted. ICANN wrote:

ICANN org is concerned that registrars’ imposition of fees for consideration of requests for access to nonpublic gTLD registration data may pose an access barrier. Access to registration data serves the public interest and contributes to the security and stability of the Internet

The advisory calls out Tucows’ Tiered Access Compliance and Operations system, TACO, as the primary example of a registrar charging for data, but notes that others are too.

Not long after the advisory was published, Tucows posted an article in which it explained that the fees are necessary to cover the cost of the “thousands” of automated requests it has received in the last four years.

Charging fees for compliance with other forms of legal process is not uncommon in the industry, and the vast majority of requests for registration data (approximately 90%) continue to come from commercial litigation interests and relate to suspected intellectual property infringement.

Facebook, now Meta, was at first, and may still well be, a frequent bulk filer.

Tucows said that it “frequently” waives its fees upon request for “single-use requestors and private parties”.

2 Comments Tagged: compliance, gdpr, ICANN, opensrs, privacy, taco, tucows, whois

New new gTLD registry in town as Rostam buys UNR

UNR, the former Uniregistry, has emerged under new ownership, new leadership, and with another new name, apparently finalizing Frank Schilling’s piecemeal exit from the domain name industry.

The nine gTLD contracts remaining with UNR following its fire-sale auction 18 months ago are now owned by Internet Naming Company, which like UNR is based in Grand Cayman.

The new company, which appears to be a continuation of UNR yet promising a “clean slate”, is owned and run by Shayan Rostam, who was UNR’s chief growth officer and previously worked for XYZ.com and Intercap.

INC’s portfolio comprises .click, .country, .help, .forum, .hiv, .love, .property, .sexy, and the unlaunched .trust, which together have over 350,000 registered domains.

Registry-recommended retail pricing varies wildly between TLDs, from the .com-competitive, such as .click at $9.99, to the wallet-busting, such as .sexy at $2,999 and .forum at $1,199.

INC is also offering consulting, auction and management services for other TLDs, including dot-brands.

The emergence of INC means we now know where all 23 of the gTLDs UNR auctioned off last year ended up. XYZ.com wound up with 10, with GoDaddy, Top Level Design, Nova Registry and Dot Hip Hop all grabbing one or two each.

UNR sold its registrar business to GoDaddy and its registry back-end business to Tucows (which is supporting INC’s portfolio) last year, giving INC the ability to talk about going “back to basics”, unencumbered by any conflicts of interest.

The new company is using inaming.co for its web site. The individual TLDs’ sites still use UNR landing pages.

Comment Tagged: auction, godaddy, internet naming company, new gTLDs, tucows, uniregistry, unr

Stop me if you’ve heard this…

The collective noun for wildebeest is “an implausibility”.

In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re ever confronted by a large group of these majestic bovine quadrupeds, that’s how you should describe what you see.

An implausibility of wildebeest.

I tell you this not because it’s relevant to anything else that appears in this article, but because a series of unfortunate and unavoidable circumstances have kept me offline for the last few weeks, and you may find this round-up piece tells you lots of things you already know.

If that’s the case for you, I can only apologize, with the caveat that you probably didn’t know about the wildebeest thing, so at least this post has provided some value.

Let’s start with ICANN, shall we?

My ICANN announcements feed contains 20 unread articles this morning, and as far as I can tell from a cursory glance over the headlines, the Org has done almost nothing of consequence recently.

It’s mostly outreach-this, engagement-that, review-the-other. If official announcements were any guide, ICANN would look like an entity far more concerned with promoting and promulgating its own increasingly debatable legitimacy, rather than doing the stuff it was originally set up to do.

Like new gTLDs, for example…

While ICANN continues to fart around with its working groups and consultations and Dantean layers of bureaucracy, the blockchain/crypto/web3 crowd are continuing to bolster their efforts to eat the Org’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Most notably, blockchain-based alt-root naming services including Unstoppable have launched the Web3 Domain Alliance, which, even if it misses its goals, promises to make the next new gTLD round an even bigger litigation clusterfunge than the last.

The alliance intends to among other things “advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.”

In other words, if some well-financed crypto bro creates .example on some obscure blockchain root and gets a little bit of traction, ICANN shouldn’t be allowed to create .example on the authoritative consensus root.

This has the potential to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a parking ticket hearing and I take some comfort from the fact that I’ll most likely be long dead before the lawsuits from the next new gTLD round have all played out.

The Web3 Domain Alliance is promising imminent pledges of support from “web2” companies, and it will be interesting to see if any company in the conventional domain name industry is ready to break ranks with ICANN and sign up.

In actual gTLDs…

Another thing that will likely post-date my death is the launch of the last gTLD from the 2012 application round. Many still lie dormant, but they do still continue to trickle out of the gates.

While I’ve been offline, we’ve witnessed the general availability launch of Google’s .boo and .rsvp — the former criminally missing the increasingly lengthy and bewildering Halloween season and the latter probably a little late for the Christmas party season — while non-profit .kids went GA a couple of days ago.

In the world of ccTLDs…

GoDaddy is formally relaunching .tv, the rights to operate it won in a bidding process earlier this year after incumbent registry Verisign declined to compete.

It’s talking about a “a complete rebrand and marketing makeover”, with a new, very colorful, destination site at TurnOn.tv.

Many years ago, a senior Verisign exec described .tv to me as “better than .com”, and in a world where any shouty teenage pillock can essentially launch their own TV show for the price of an iPhone and broadband connection, that’s probably never been truer.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster isn’t going to let the little matter of an ongoing Russian invasion interfere with its 30th birthday celebrations and the 12th annual UADOM conference.

It’s being held remotely for obvious reasons. It starts tomorrow, runs for two days, and more details can be found here and here.

In other conference news, NamesCon has also announced dates for its 2023 NamesCon Global conference. According to Domain Name Journal, it will return to Austin, Texas, from May 31 to June 3 next year.

DomainPulse, the conference serving the Germanophone region of Europe (albeit in English), has set its 2023 event for February 6 and 7 in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Scoop of the month…

By far the most interesting article I’ve read from the last month came from NameBio’s Michael Sumner, a reverse-exposé of the successful .xyz domain investor who goes by the name “Swetha”.

This area of the industry is not something I spend a lot of time tracking, but I’ll admit whenever I’ve read about this mononymed India-based domainer’s extensive, expensive .xyz sales, I’ve had a degree of skepticism.

It turns out that skepticism was shared by some fellow industry dinosaurs, so Sumner did the legwork, amazingly and ballsily obtaining Swetha’s Afternic login credentials (with her consent) and hand-verifying years of sales data.

He concluded that the sales she’s been reporting on Twitter are legit, and that she’s a pretty damn good domainer, but understandably could not fully disprove the hypothesis that some of her buyers are .xyz registry shills.

Elliot Silver later got a comment from the registry in which it denied any kind of collusion and implied skepticism was the result of sexism and/or racism, rather than the sketchiness sometimes displayed by anonymous Twitter accounts and the registry itself.

Earnings, M&A, IPOs…

• The otherwise-consolidating industry is getting its first IPO in some time, with United-Internet pitching a public markets spin-off of its IONOS group, which includes brands such as Sedo and InternetX, to potential investors. DNW pulled out some of the more interesting facts from its presentation.
• Industry consolidator CentralNic reported a strong Q3, though its growth is no longer dependent on its domain name business.
• Tucows reported modest growth (pdf) for Q3, hindered by flat-to-down results in its domain name business.
• GoDaddy, which no longer breaks out numbers for its domains business, reported a billion-dollar quarter.
• Smaller, faster-growing registrar NameSilo reported turning a loss into a profit in the quarter.
• In M&A, Namespace, owner of EuroDNS, announced it has acquired fellow German registrar Moving Internet.

And finally…

The DNS turned 35. So that’s nice.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 600 unread emails to deal with…

3 Comments Tagged: .tv, .xyz, godaddy, hostmaster, ICANN, namescon, namesilo, newgTLDs, round-up, tucows, unstoppable, verisign, web3 domain alliance

Verisign growth slows with post-Covid blues

Verisign sold fewer .com and .net domains than it did a year ago in the third quarter and has once again slashed its outlook for the year.

It had 174.2 million names across the two TLDs at the end of September, an increase of 1.2% over the year but down by around 100,000 names (rounded) on the quarter.

There were 9.9 million new domains sold. That compares to 10.1 million in the second quarter and 10.7 million in Q3 last year.

It now expects its total domains under management to increase by between 0.25% and 1% for the full year. That compares to the between 0.5% and 1.5% it predicted at the end of Q2, the 1.75% and 3.5% predicted in April, and the between 2.5% and 4.5% it predicted in February.

That equates to 2022 revenue of $1.418 billion to $1.426 billion, CFO George Kilguss told analysts. Verisign’s always jaw-dropping operating margin is expected to be between 65.75% and 66.25%.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts the slower growth can the attributed to the general macroeconomic malaise, Verisign coming off the lockdown bump experienced in 2020 and 2021, and the perennial issue of Chinese lumpiness.

Renewal rates for Q3 are expected to be 73.8%, the same as Q2 but down from 75% a year-ago.

But the company continues to make money hand over fist. Revenue was up 6.8% compared to Q3 last year at $357 million and net income was up to $169 million compared to $157 million a year ago.

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