Donuts’ trademark block list goes live, pricing revealed

Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List, which gives trademark owners the ability to defensively block their marks across the company’s whole portfolio of gTLDs, has gone live.
The service goes above and beyond what new gTLD registries are obliged to offer by ICANN.
As a “block” service, in which names will not resolve, it’s reminiscent of the Sunrise B service offered by ICM Registry at .xxx’s launch, which was praised and cursed in equal measure.
But with DPML, trademark owners also have the ability to block “trademark+keyword” names, for example, so Pepsi could block “drinkpepsi” or “pepsisucks”.
It’s not a wildcard, however. Companies would have to pay for each trademark+keyword string they wanted blocking.
DPML covers all of the gTLDs that Donuts plans to launch, which could be as many as 300. It currently has 28 registry agreements with ICANN and 272 applications remaining in various stages of evaluation.
Trademark owners will only be able to sign up to DPML if their marks are registered with the Trademark Clearinghouse under the “use” standard required to participate in Sunrise periods.
Donuts is also excluding an unspecified number of strings it regards as “premium”, so the owners of marks matching those strings will be out of luck, it seems.
Blocks will be available for a minimum of five years an maximum of 10 years. After expiration, they can be renewed with minimum terms of one year.
The company has not disclose its wholesale pricing, but registrars we’ve found listing the service on their web sites so far (101domain and EnCirca) price it between $2,895 and $2,995 for a five-year registration.
It looks pricey, but it’s likely to be extraordinarily good value compared to the alternative of Sunrise periods.
If Donuts winds up with 200 gTLDs in its portfolio, a $3,000 price tag ($600 per year) works out to a defensive registration cost of $3 per domain per gTLD per year.
If it winds up with all 300, the price would be $2.
That’s in line (if we’re assuming non-budget pricing comparisons and registrars’ DPML markup), with Donuts co-founder Richard Tindal’s statement earlier this year: that DPML would be 5% to 10% the cost of a regular registration.
Tindal also spoke then about a way for rival trademark owners to “unblock” matching names, so Apple the record company could unblock a DPML on apple.music obtained by Apple the computer company, for example.
Donuts is encouraging trademark owners to participate before its first gTLDs goes live, which it expects to happen later this year.

8 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, defensive registrations, domain protected marks list, donuts, dpml, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise, tmch, trademarks

CentralNic reports profitable first half

CentralNic today issued its first financial statements since floating on London’s Alternative Investment Market earlier this month.
The company is profitable, reporting profit before tax for the first half of 2013 that almost doubled to $636,000 on revenue that was up 16% at £1,735 million ($2.7 million).
Revenue was down substantially and profit more or less flat sequentially, however. In the second half of 2012, the company took profits of £593,000 on revenue of £2.9 million ($4.6 million).
Seasonality? One-time fees from its new gTLD applicant clients? CentralNic didn’t say.
The H12013 results do not include any revenue from its deal with Go Daddy, which started selling .la domains in July, but it did include revenue from partnerships with two Chinese registrars.
Chairman John Swingewood said in a statement to the market:

The Company is undergoing sustained growth resulting from increased demand for our domain names, establishing new retail channels and securing new inventory. What is more impressive is that these results are yet to include revenues from sales of our pipeline of new Top-Level Domains, which include .college, .bar, .wiki and .xyz, for which the first launch activities are due to start at the end of the year.

The company, which is signed up to provide back-end registry services for 14 uncontested and 39 contested new gTLDs, raised £5 million in its IPO on September 3.

Comment Tagged: .la, centralnic, new gTLDs

Vignes joins Artemis

Former OpenRegistry CEO Jean-Christophe Vignes has joined new gTLD applicant Artemis as director of domain operations, according to Artemis.
Artemis, which is one of the hopeful applicants for .secure, said “he will be in charge of building our Registry and Registrar capabilities for .secure”.
Vignes, a lawyer by trade, helped found registry service provider OpenRegistry a few years ago but left in July 2012 to go into private practice in Paris. He formerly worked for EuroDNS.
Artemis still needs to beat Amazon at auction or through some other means if it wants to win .secure, which Amazon wants to operate as a closed generic.

Comment Tagged: .secure, amazon, artemis, openregistry

OpenRegistry gets €2m financing

New gTLD registry services provider OpenRegistry has secured €2 million ($2.7 million) in financing, the company announced yesterday.
The amount will be “spread over the coming year” and comes from, among other existing investors, Australian registrar Instra.
The Benelux-based company will also see investment from the Luxembourgish government under a ‘Young Innovative Enterprises’ scheme.
OpenRegistry is to provide back-end services for up to 19 new gTLDs and currently manages the registry for .sx, the recently launch ccTLD for Sint Maarten.

1 Comment Tagged: .sx, instra, openregistry

Nine more new gTLD contracts signed

ICANN signed nine more new gTLD Registry Agreements yesterday.
The contracts cover .kiwi, .futbol, .kitchen, .directory, .diamonds, .tips, .today, .enterprises, and .photography.
All but .kiwi, which will be run by Dot Kiwi Ltd, were Donuts’ applications.
ICANN now has Registry Agreements with registries to manage 45 new gTLDs.

Comment Tagged: donuts, dot kiwi, ICANN, new gTLDs

dotShabaka Diary — Day 14, Writing an RRA

The fourteenth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Tuesday 24 September 2013
We are trying to determine the best process to finalise a Registry Registrar Agreement (RRA) that is satisfactory to both dotShabaka Registry and our registrars.
According to our agreement with ICANN, we must use a uniform non-discriminatory RRA with all registrars. This makes it challenging in the new gTLD landscape; we have to get it right the first time or we face being bogged down in a clunky amendment procedure.
This is not an easy concept to implement, but dotShabaka Registry and other early launchers must address this soon. It seems there are at least four ways dotShabaka Registry could do this:
1. Wait for ICANN to develop a boilerplate RRA that incorporates the various new gTLD requirements.
2. Negotiate an agreement with the biggest registrar/s and expect that all other registrars will be happy with the result.
3. Put an Agreement out for public comment and request that the Registrars come together with a consensus view.
4. Wait for the Registrar community to generate an agreement for Registries to use.
We don’t expect ICANN’s Automated Registrar Onboarding System (AROS) to be ready for the launch of our TLD.
We would love to hear your thoughts here. Can you think of another pathway to finalise a RRA for the first new gTLDs launched?

Read previous and future diary entries here.

9 Comments Tagged: dotshabaka diary

One IE pass, one fail this week

ICANN is down to 18 new gTLD applications in Initial Evaluation now, after one pass and one failure this week.
The pass is the dot-brand .lplfinancial, applied for by LPL Financial, a US-based broker. The company already owns the arguably better domain lpl.com.
The failure, which is eligible for Extended Evaluation, is Top Level Domain Holdings’ geographic bid for .roma, a city TLD for Rome, Italy.
The application failed on geographic grounds, meaning TLDH seems to have failed to provide sufficient evidence of government support or non-objection.
It’s TLDH’s final IE result and the only one of its 70 applications to fail to achieve a passing score.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, initial evaluation, new gTLDs

New gTLD plans November 30 sunrise

I-Registry, which signed an ICANN Registry Agreement for the new gTLD .onl this week, plans to launch its Sunrise period on November 30, according to the company.
It’s the first date for a new gTLD Sunrise period I’ve come across to date, though it is of course an informal target rather than a firm commitment.
ICANN has signed contracts covering a few dozen gTLDs but as yet none have been delegated. As anyone who has been following dotShabaka’s diary on DI will know, there’s still a lot of uncertainty
.onl, which is short for “online”, is expected to be an open gTLD with no registration restrictions.
I-Registry plans to donate a portion of its profits to charity.

5 Comments Tagged: .onl, i-registry, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise

Phishing domains double in 2013

The number of domain names registered for phishing attacks doubled in the first half of the year, according to the latest data from the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
The APWG identified 53,685 phishing domains, of which 12,173 are believed to have been registered by phishers. The remainder belonged to compromised web servers.
This 12,173 number — up from 5,835 in the year-ago period — is the important one for the domain name industry, as it is there that registries and registrars have the ability to make a difference.
“The increase is due to a sudden uptick in domain registrations by Chinese phishers,” the APWG said in its Domain Name Use and Trends 1H2013 report (pdf). Chinese targets accounted for 8,240 (68%) of the registered domains.
This works out to about 66 maliciously registered domains per day on average, or less than half a percent of the total number of domains registered across all TLDs daily.
According to the APWG, the number of phishing domains that actually contain a brand or a variation of a brand is smaller still, at 1,244. That’s flat on the second half of 2012.
It works out to about seven new trademark-infringing phishing domain names per day that a brand owner somewhere in the world (though probably China) has to deal with.
APWG reiterated what it has said in previous reports:

most maliciously registered domain names offered nothing to confuse a potential victim. Placing brand names or variations thereof in the domain name itself is not a favored tactic, since brand owners are proactively scanning Internet zone files for their brand names. As we have observed in the past, the domain name itself usually does not matter to phishers, and a domain name of any meaning, or no meaning at all, in any TLD, will usually do. Instead, phishers often place brand names in subdomains or subdirectories.

2 Comments Tagged: anti-phishing working group, apwg, phishing

dotShabaka Diary — Day 13, Questions, Questions

The thirteenth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Friday 20 September 2013
The new gTLD webinar on 19 September was very well attended with over 200 people on the call. Due to time constraints ICANN did not answer questions previously submitted by email so we thought it would be useful to share them with you here:

• 1. What issues do ICANN need to resolve before the delegation processes will commence for those TLDs that have completed PDT?
  a) What are the processes and schedules for resolution of these issues?
  b) Will this information be made available to Applicants to assist with launch planning?
• 2. The number of Trademark records in the Arabic script in the TMCH is very low – the last information that Deloitte/IBM/ICANN published in early July was that there were 13 trademarks records in the Arabic script in the TMCH. No update on IDN trademark records in the TMCH has been provided since.
  a. Why is this information not publically available to assist registry operators with launch planning?
  b. What is the plan to improve TMCH IDN numbers and what are the forecasts?
• 3. Only 26 Registrars have signed the 2013 RAA. To expedite the on-boarding process and enable a global network of Registrars for the TLD launch, can ICANN remove the requirement that a registrar have executed the 2013 RAA in order to obtain a registration token for the TMDB? This will allow Registrar testing to proceed whilst the 2013 RAA is being executed/negotiated.
• 4. Can you please provide a specific date for distribution of the PR kit for new gTLD registries who are planning launch activities as mentioned by Christine Willett in her recent video interview?
• 5. When will ICANN update its website with the list of registrars that have completed TMCH Integration Testing as promised in section 1.5 of the 6 August RPM Requirements Document?
• 6. When will the Registry Reporting Interface required as per Specification 3 be in production rather than OT&E?
• 7. ICANN staff mentioned that there may be a call to discuss finalising the URS Technical Requirements Document
  a. When will this call occur?
  b. When will the URS Technical Requirements Document be finalised?
  c. Must the URS Technical Requirements Document be finalised prior to the delegation or sunrise of the first new gTLDs?
• 8. Is the CZDA operational and ready for the first new gTLDs which will be delegated in the next month?
• 9. Can IBM create a permanent OT&E for the TMCH that allows complete end to end testing and includes all the functionality found in the production environment?

We look forward to ICANN will publishing responses to these questions in the Q&A typically distributed a few days after completion.

Read previous and future diary entries here.

2 Comments Tagged: dotshabaka diary