Final .eco applicant completes evaluation

Planet Dot Eco has finally passed its ICANN evaluation, meaning the four-way contention set for one of the oldest public new gTLD ideas, .eco, can move forward a little.
In its Initial Evaluation last August, the company scored a miserable 1 point on its financial evaluation, failing to hit the target of 8 points, and scored a 0 on one of its technical criteria.
But with the Extended Evaluation results published today (pdf), Planet Dot Eco managed to scrape passing scores on both parts of the evaluation.
This means that the .eco contention set, which also includes Donuts, Minds + Machines and Big Room, is no longer being held up by evaluations.
However, Big Room’s is a Community application and the company has indicated that it will go for a Community Priority Evaluation.
Unless Big Room wins the CPE (which strikes me as unlikely), that will also delay any possibility of contention resolution.

5 Comments Tagged: .eco, big room, donuts, extended evaluation, planet dot eco, tldh

Google’s first new gTLD racks up 2,300 domains

Google’s Charleston Road Registry reached 2,300 .みんな domain names on the new gTLD’s first day of general availability, immediately making it the biggest IDN gTLD by volume so far.
The string is Japanese for “everyone”. As you might expect, it’s an unrestricted space.
About 230 names — 10% of the TLD — are non-IDNs. I believe the number also includes some sunrise registrations.
It actually went into GA on Tuesday, but data was not available yesterday.
While it’s not in the same ballpark as the likes of .guru, it nevertheless overtook the only other IDN gTLD to launch so far, dotShabaka’s شبكة. (Arabic for “web”), which has 1,643 names.
Google sold the names via 17 accredited registrars, only one of which appears to be Japanese. The list excludes most of the biggest registrars.
.みんな is unusual in that Google intends to run its Trademark Claims service forever, rather than turning it off after the 90 days required by its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

9 Comments Tagged: .みんな, charleston road registry, ga, google, ICANN, idn gtlds, idns, new gTLDs

New gTLDs pass 200,000 registrations

The number of domain names in new gTLDs passed 200,000 last night, according to zone files.
The exact number, according to the DI PRO database, is 201,184.
It’s based on incremental organic growth over the last week since the last batch of new gTLDs went into general availability, rather than any big launch events or surges.
Here are the top 10 zones, all of which belong to Donuts.
[table id=28/]
What the 200,000 count does not reflect is the first day of general availability for Google’s first-to-launch gTLD, .みんな (Japanese for “everyone”), which I’m expecting to start showing numbers tomorrow.
In related news, the DI PRO new gTLD zone file league table service (here) was upgraded today to make it a bit more useful during periods of patchy data availability.
The service will now show all delegated new gTLDs that have started publishing zone files, along with the most-recent domain counts, on days when the file was for whatever reason not available.

Comment Tagged: di pro, new gTLDs

.club “will overtake .guru” in week one

Now that we’ve seen how many domain names are actually being sold in new gTLDs, you might reasonably expect some registries to rein in their more ambitious sales targets.
Not so with .CLUB Domains, which plans to go to general availability with .club on May 7.
CEO Colin Campbell told DI today that he’s sticking by his target of selling five million .club names in the first five years.
What’s more, he has big hopes for the gTLD’s first week on the market.
“I firmly believe that .CLUB will exceed all other new generic top level domains in the first week of launch in registrations and overtake .GURU as the leader,” Campbell said in an email.
Donuts’ .guru has over 41,000 domains today and is adding 250-500 more per day. It could be around the 60,000 mark by the time .club hits registrar storefronts.
Campbell notes that all the new gTLDs to launch so far have been uncontested — .CLUB beat out two other applicants for .club in the first private auction last June.
He also reckons .club’s .com-level pricing will help sales — most of the new gTLDs launched to date are priced at over $20 a year.
I don’t doubt that .club will be a decent seller — it has lots of use cases — but five million names in five years still seems wildly ambitious to me.

10 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, new gTLDs

Van Gelder rebrands to Milathan

Domain name consultant Stephane Van Gelder has changed the name of his company from Stephane Van Gelder Consulting to Milathan.
The name, Van Gelder tells us, is a “derivative of words in Hindi that mean ‘union’ or ‘meeting’ in the sense of bringing people together”.
Milathan’s tagline will be “Internet Intelligence – Strategic Advice”.
Van Gelder is co-founder of the French registrar Indom but left in 2012 after the sale of the company to Group NBT in 2010.

4 Comments Tagged: milathan, stephane van gelder consulting

US revives .kids.us in new Neustrar contract

Neustar has been awarded a new three-to-five-year contract to manage the .us ccTLD, under a deal with the US Department of Commerce announced today.
It’s a renewal of a role that Neustar has held since .us was relaunched in 2001, but the new contract come with a few notable new provisions.
First, it seems that the company is now obliged to bring some “multi-stakeholder” oversight into the management of the TLD. Neustar said in a press release:

In 2014, Neustar plans to launch a new multi-stakeholder council including members representing localities, registrars, small businesses and non-profit organizations as well as entities involved with STEM education and cybersecurity. The .US TLD Stakeholder Council will provide a vibrant, diverse, and independent forum for future development of the .US TLD, working directly with .US TLD stakeholders and helping Neustar to identify public needs and develop policies, programs, and partnerships to address those needs while continuing to enhance America’s address.

Second, it looks like .kids.us might not be dead after all.
The third-level service was introduced as a result of the poorly considered Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002, which forced Neustar to operate a child-friendly zone in .us.
The Department of Commerce killed off .kids.us in 2012, but the new .us contract (pdf) says:

Notwithstanding the June 2012 determination to suspend operation of kids.us domain under the current contract, DOC seeks proposals to rejuvenate the kids.us space to increase utilization, utility and awareness of the kids.us domain.

The contract has several more references to Neustar’s obligation to promote the SLD. At the time it was killed off, there were just a handful of registered names in the space.
The contract also says that .us currently has just shy of 1.8 million names under management.

Comment Tagged: .kids.us, .us, department of commerce, neustar, ntia

ICANN hires Walmart alum as CIO

ICANN has hired itself a new C-level executive.
Ashwin Rangan started today as chief innovation and information officer, meaning he’s going to be in charge of ICANN’s oft-criticized IT systems.
He most recently held the CIO role at Edwards Lifesciences, but he’s also held similar positions at MarketShare, Walmart, and Rockwell Semiconductors.
He’s based in ICANN’s Los Angeles headquarters, which the organization is now referring to as a “hub” office.
In keeping with ICANN’s international flavor (and hiring policy), he speaks three Indian languages in addition to English.
Interestingly, his LinkedIn URL is /theinsightfulcio‎, showing he understands the value of a decent web address, even if it is after the slash. I didn’t even know LinkedIn did vanity URLs.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN

Afilias wins .green auction

Afilias won the auction for the .green new gTLD, it emerged today.
Rightside withdrew its application for the string in the last few days, according to the ICANN web site, leaving Afilias the only remaining applicant in the four-way contention set.
Top Level Domain Holdings said last week that it had lost a private auction with Afilias and Rightside. The fourth applicant, Dot Green, withdrew last year citing the likely cost of an auction.
It’s not known how much Afilias paid in the auction, but it’s likely to have been in the millions.

11 Comments Tagged: .green, afilias, dot green, ICANN, new gTLDs, private auctions, rightside, tldh

SnapNames acquired by Web.com

Web.com has acquired domain name dropcatcher SnapNames for an undisclosed sum, according to press releases from it and former owner KeyDrive, confirming reports from Friday.
Web.com said the deal will be “immaterial” to its 2014 financial results.
The Nasdaq-listed company already owns leading registrars Network Solutions and Register.com. It’s also a new gTLD applicant, one of many companies having applied for .web.
KeyDrive acquired SnapNames, along with the registrar Moniker, from Oversee.net in 2012.
Just last week KeyDrive announced that Moniker, which with SnapNames had been managed by Craig Snyder, was getting a new CEO in the form of Key-Systems exec Bonnie Wittenberg.

3 Comments Tagged: keydrive, snapnames, web.com

TMCH sends out 17,500 Trademark Claims notices in a month

Wow.
Just four weeks after the first new gTLDs went into general availability, the Trademark Clearinghouse has already sent out over 17,500 Trademark Claims notices to trademark owners.
A Claims notice is a warning that is generated whenever somebody registers a domain name that exactly matches a trademark listed in the TMCH’s database.
The 17,500 number refers to post-registration notices sent to trademark owners, not pre-registration warnings delivered to would-be registrants.
Considering that there are somewhere in the region of 180,000 domain names in new gTLDs today, 17,500 represents a surprisingly high percentage of the market (high single figures).
Of course, not all of these will be due to cybersquatting attempts.
There are plenty of marks in the TMCH that are acronyms or dictionary words, either because they match a genuine brand or because somebody obtained trademarks on generic terms in order to game sunrise periods.
I’d count those as false positives, personally, but it’s impossible to know without access to TMCH data how many of the 17,500 alerts delivered to date can be accounted for in that way.
There are 26,802 marks in the TMCH, according to the company.

3 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, gaming, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise, tmch, trademark claims, trademark clearinghouse