TLDH reveals new gTLD launch strategy

Top Level Domain Holdings will announce its go-to-market strategy — including .tv-style premium names pricing and its launch as a registrar — at an event at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires this evening.
The company, which is involved in 60 new gTLD applications as applicant and 75 as a back-end provider, is also revealing a novel pre-registration clearinghouse that will be open to almost all applicants.
First off, it’s launching Minds + Machines Registrar, an affiliated registrar through which it will sell domain names in its own and third-party TLDs.
Instead of a regular name suggestion tool, it’s got a browsable directory of available names, something that I don’t recall seeing at a registrar before.
Searching “murphy.casa”, I was offered lots of other available domains in the “English Surnames” category, for example.
Until TLDH actually has some live gTLDs, the site will be used to take paid-for pre-registrations, or “Priority Reservations” using a new service that TLDH is calling the Online Priority Enhanced Names database, which painfully forces the acronym “OPEN”.
Pre-registrations in .casa, .horse and .cooking will cost €29.95 ($40), the same as the expected regular annual reg fee. It’s first-come first-served — no auctions — and the fee covers the first year of registration.
If the name they pay for is claimed by a trademark holder during the mandatory Sunrise period, or is on the gTLD’s collisions block-list, registrants get a full refund, TLDH CEO Antony Van Couvering said.
He added that any applicant for a new gTLD that is uncontested and has an open registration policy will be able to plug their gTLDs into the OPEN system.
PeopleBrowsr is already on the system with its uncontested .ceo and .best gTLDs, priced at $99.95.
No other registrars are signed up yet but Van Couvering reckons it might be attractive to registrars that have already taken large amounts of no-fee expressions of interest.
TLDH plans to charge registries and registrars a €1 processing fee (each, so TLDH gets €2) for each pre-registration that is sold through the system.
For “premium” names, the company has decided to adopt the old .tv model of charging high annual fees instead of a high initial fee followed by the standard renewal rate.
Van Couvering said a domain that might have been priced at $100,000 to buy outright might instead be sold for $10,000 a year.
“Because we want to encourage usage, we don’t want to charge a huge upfront fee,” he said. “We’d really like to make premium names available to people who will actually use them.”
Looking at the aforementioned English Surnames category on the new M+M site, I see that jackson.casa will cost somebody €5,179.95 a year, whereas nicholson.casa will cost the basic €29.95.
Two other new gTLDs, .menu and .build, have already revealed variable pricing strategies, albeit slightly different.

Comment Tagged: .casa, .cooking, .horse, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs, open, preregistration, tldh, top level domain holdings

.wow has more collisions than any other new gTLD

Amazon, Google or Demand Media are going to have to block over 200,000 strings in .wow, which all three have applied for, due to the risk of name collisions.
That’s tens of thousands of names greater than any other applied-for gTLD string.
Here’s the top 20 gTLDs, ranked by the number of collisions:
[table id=21 /]
The average new gTLD string has 7,346 potential collisions, according to our preliminary analysis of the lists ICANN published for 1,318 strings this morning.
As blogged earlier, 9.8 million unique domain names are to be blocked in total.
Seventeen gTLDs seem to have been provided with empty lists, so will not have to block any domains in order to proceed to delegation with ICANN.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, name collisions, new gTLDs

ICANN blocks almost 10 million new gTLD domains

ICANN has asked new gTLD registry operators to block a total of 9.8 million domain names, due to the perceived risk of damage from name collisions.
To put it another way, Verisign has managed to take close to 10 million domain names off the market.
ICANN today delivered second-level domain block-lists for 1,327 new gTLDs. Combined, the number of unique blocked domains is just over 9.8 million, according to DI’s preliminary analysis.
Some of the lists relate to gTLDs that will not be approved because they’re in mutually exclusive contention sets with other strings (for example, .unicorn and .unicom).
Twenty-five unfortunate gTLD applicants did not receive lists, because ICANN said they do not qualify for the block-list-based “Alternate Path to Delegation”.
We’re currently crunching the numbers and will have more information later today, with a bit of luck.

6 Comments Tagged: collisions, ICANN, new gTLDs

Pritz to head DNA trade group

Former ICANN chief strategy officer Kurt Pritz has just been named interim executive director of the Domain Name Association, the trade group formed this year to promote the domain industry.
Pritz will “apply his track record in teambuilding and bringing together diverse skillsets to the knowledgeable and talented members of the Domain Name Industry” the group said.
He will participate in a DNA session later this week here in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where ICANN is currently holding its 48th public meeting.
If you’re in BA, the two-hour session will be held from 3pm on Wednesday at the Alvear ART Hotel, Suipacha 1036.
The DNA opened its doors for membership last month, and currently counts the likes of Google, Donuts, Demand Media and Go Daddy among its top-paying members.

2 Comments Tagged: dna, domain name association

ICANN 48 travelers face chaos after plane crash

Nobody was hurt. Don’t worry.
But dozens of ICANN 48 attendees experienced huge delays, frustration and anger after a plane skidded off the runway at Buenos Aires, temporarily closing the whole of the Ministro Pistarini International Airport and sending travelers off on diversions totaling thousands of miles.
The early-morning “incident involving a plane”, which is what my own flight crew only ever referred to it as, did not cause any injuries and was apparently cleaned up quite quickly.
But there seems to have been barely anyone flying into Ezeiza on the eve of ICANN 48 yesterday that was not in some way affected.
Consider these stories, collected from the conference floor and Twitter, strictly anecdotal.

• Several flights carrying ICANNers, due to land at around the same time, found themselves diverted to large cities in neighboring Latin American countries. Many found themselves sitting in hot metal tubes on airport tarmacs in Montevideo, Uruguay, Santiago, Chile and Rio De Janeiro, Brazil before finally turning back to BA.
• One flight, carrying several delegates from Washington DC, was diverted to Santiago — a 2,000-mile round trip — not once but TWICE, leaving passengers ultimately delayed by well over a day. After the first diversion, and sitting on the Santiago runway for two or three hours, the plane returned to BA only to be told by air traffic control to stay in an hours-long holding pattern while the airport cleared up the backlog. Realizing he lacked the fuel (and apparently the foresight) to do so, the pilot decided to return to Santiago instead, where passengers eventually had to spend the night. They finally started rolling into BA this afternoon.
• Another, diverted to Montevideo, apparently had to divert for a second time when, moments away from landing, the pilot realized the “runway wasn’t long enough” and had to pull up.
• My own British Airways flight from London Heathrow, carrying at least a dozen ICANNers, was diverted to Rio de Janeiro, a three-hour flight away. After four hours on the Rio runway and another two sitting in the departure lounge without instruction or information we were finally told that we’d have to wait another eight hours before we could leave, on a newly scheduled flight getting into BA in the wee hours, some 17 hours late. Some stayed at the airport and waited it out. Business class passengers (you know who you are) were safely smuggled away to a hotel to avoid the scuffles that almost broke out over the pallets of flavorless refugee-camp MREs the remaining economy class passengers were offered to keep them quiet. Some of us jumped into taxis and hit Copacabana beach instead.

So it all worked out okay in the end.
Bwahahahaha!

3 Comments Tagged: buenos aires, icann 48

Demystifying DITL Data [Guest Post]

With all the talk recently about DNS Namespace Collisions, the heretofore relatively obscure Day In The Life (“DITL”) datasets maintained by the DNS-OARC have been getting a lot of attention.
While these datasets are well known to researchers, I’d like to take the opportunity to provide some background and talk a little about how these datasets are being used to research the DNS Namespace Collision issue.
The Domain Name System Operations Analysis and Research Center (“DNS-OARC”) began working with the root server operators to collect data in 2006. The effort was coined “Day In The Life of the Internet (DITL).”
Root server participation in the DITL collection is voluntary and the number of contributing operators has steadily increased; in 2010, all of the 13 root server letters participated. DITL data collection occurs on an annual basis and covers approximately 50 contiguous hours.
DNS-OARC’s DITL datasets are attractive for researching the DNS Namespace Collision issue because:

• DITL contains data from multiple root operators;
• The robust annual sampling methodology (with samples dating back to 2006) allows trending; and
• It’s available to all DNS-OARC Members.

More information on the DITL collection is available on DNS-OARC’s site at https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/data/ditl.
Terabytes and terabytes of data
The data consists of the raw network “packets” destined for each root server. Contained within the network packets are the DNS queries. The raw data consists of many terabytes of compressed network capture files and processing the raw data is very time-consuming and resource-intensive.
[table id=20 /]
While several researchers have looked at DITL datasets over the years, the current collisions-oriented research started with Roy Hooper of Demand Media. Roy created a process to iterate through this data and convert it into intermediate forms that are much more usable for researching the proposed new TLDs.
We started with his process and continued working with it; our code is available on GitHub for others to review.
Finding needles in DITL haystacks
The first problem faced by researchers interested in new TLDs is isolating the relatively few queries of interest among many terabytes of traffic that are not of interest.
Each root operator contributes several hundred – or several thousand – files full of captured packets in time-sequential order. These packets contain every DNS query reaching the root that requests information about DNS names falling within delegated and undelegated TLDs.
The first step is to search these packets for DNS queries involving the TLDs of interest. The result is one file per TLD containing all queries from all roots involving that TLD. If the input packet is considered a “horizontal” slice of root DNS traffic, then this intermediary work product is a “vertical” slice per TLD.
These intermediary files are much more manageable, ranging from just a few records to 3 GB. To support additional investigation and debugging, the intermediary files that JAS produces are fully “traceable” such that a record in the intermediary file can be traced back to the source raw network packet.
The DITL data contain quite a bit of noise, primarily DNS traffic that was not actually destined for the root. Our process filters the data by destination IP address so that the only remaining data is that which was originally destined for the root name servers.
JAS has made these intermediary per-TLD files available to DNS-OARC members for further analysis.
Then what?
The intermediary files are comparatively small and easy to parse, opening the door to more elaborate research. For example, JAS has written various “second passes” that classify queries, separate queries that use valid syntax at the second level from those that don’t, detect “randomness,” fit regular expressions to the queries, and more.
We have also checked to confirm that second level queries that look like Punycode IDNs (start with ‘xn--‘) are valid Punycode. It is interesting to note the tremendous volume of erroneous, technically invalid, and/or nonsensical DNS queries that make it to the root.
Also of interest is that the datasets are dominated by query strings that appear random and/or machine-generated.
Google’s Chrome browser generates three random 10-character queries upon startup in an effort to detect network properties. Those “Chrome 10” queries together with a relatively small number of other common patterns comprise a significant proportion of the entire dataset.
Research is being done in order to better understand the source of these machine-generated queries.
More technical details and information on running the process is available on the DNS-OARC web site.
—
This is a guest post written by Kevin White, VP Technology, JAS Global Advisors LLC. JAS is currently authoring a “Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework” for the new gTLD program under contract with ICANN.

1 Comment Tagged: collisions, ICANN, jas advisors, new gTLDs, security

Only two new gTLD bids in Initial Evaluation

Initial Evaluation on the first round of new gTLD applications is almost done, with only two bids now remaining in that stage of the program.
ICANN last night published the delayed IE results for PricewaterhouseCooper’s .pwc and the Better Business Bureau’s .bbb, both of which were passes.
The only two applications remaining in IE are Kosher Marketing Assets’ .kosher and Google’s .search.
The latter is believed to be hung up on technical changes it has made to its bid, to remove the plan to make .search a “dotless” gTLD, which ICANN has banned on stability grounds.
Eight applications are currently in Extended Evaluation, having failed to achieve passing scores during IE.

1 Comment Tagged: extended evaluation, ICANN, initial evaluation, new gTLDs

Why Hansen quit .nyc for .co.com

Ken Hansen has surprised many by resigning from Neustar, where he was general manager of the slam-dunk .nyc new gTLD initiative, to become CEO of .co.com, a new pseudo-TLD registry.
The announcement raises a couple of big questions.
First, why is .co.com being launched as a registry?
The name belongs to domain investor Paul Goldstone. He put it up for sale in March 2012, with broker DomainAdvisors speculating aloud that it would fetch a price in the millions.
We wondered at the time whether CentralNic, whose bread and butter back then (before its interests in new gTLDs became clear) was two-letter country-codes in .com, would swoop to buy it.
We also wondered whether .CO Internet would make an offer, in order to eliminate competition and reduce existing and potential confusion with its own ccTLD, .co.
If either company made an offer, it does not seem to have been accepted.
Goldstone is instead going to try to build a registry around the name, with Hansen as CEO and himself as president. DomainAdvisors founder Gregg McNair is chairman of the new venture.
Second, why on earth would Hansen, who has been leading business development for Neustar’s own .nyc — the forthcoming new gTLD for the city of New York — join an unproven .com subdomain provider?
He tells us that his confidence in .nyc’s prospects has not waned, but that he is one of the owners of the new company.
He said in an email:

Sometimes following the crowd is not the best thing to do in business. New gTLDs have always been about choice from my perspective. I still believe in new gTLDs in general, but there is still a VERY significant market for short recognizable domains ending in .com. We will meet that demand. Not to mention, we can move quickly without waiting on ICANN.

Gaining visibility for a subdomain product can be tricky at the best of times, but with hundred of new generic TLDs coming to market… Hansen, Goldstone and McNair really do have a challenge on their hands.
The new company intends to run sunrise, landrush and “premium” names phases for its launch, which is expected to kick off in the first quarter next year. No word yet on whether it will follow the CentralNic model and also voluntarily incorporate ICANN policies on UDRP, Whois and so forth.

5 Comments Tagged: .nyc, co.com, neustar, new gTLDs, pseudo-tlds, subdomains

Kleinwächter joins ICANN board

Internet governance expert Wolfgang Kleinwächter has joined ICANN’s board of directors with immediate effect.
Kleinwächter is the emergency replacement for Judith Vazquez, who quit with no explanation last month. He’ll carry out Vazquez’s duties until her term was due to end, a year from now.
He’s a rare insider appointment from the Nominating Committee, which regularly looks outside of ICANN for its board expertise.
He has been involved with ICANN since almost the beginning, and currently sits on the GNSO Council (a term due to expire this week) as a representative of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency.
He’s a German national and currently employed by the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches on the subjection of internet policy and regulation.
He also has experience in UN-related policy projects such as the World Summit on the Information Society and the Internet Governance Forum.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN

.sexy and 10 more gTLDs now in the root

The third batch of new gTLDs have gone live.
Uniregistry’s .sexy and .tattoo are currently in the DNS root zone, the first two of its portfolio to become active.
The TLDs .bike, .construction, .contractors, .estate, .gallery, .graphics, .land, .plumbing, and .technology from Donuts have also gone live today.
Donuts already had 10 new gTLDs in the root from the first two batches.
There are now 24 live new gTLDs.
The first second-level domains to become available will be nic.tld in each, per the ICANN contract they’ve all signed.
You’ll notice that they’re all ASCII strings, despite the fact that IDNs get priority treatment in the new gTLD program.

3 Comments Tagged: delegation, donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs, uniregistry