CentralNic reports strong 2022

CentralNic grew faster than analysts’ expectations last year, the company said today.

The company expects to report EBITDA of “at least” $177 million, up 33%, on revenue up 77% at about $728 million, for 2022.

Factoring out acquisitions and currency fluctuations, organic growth is expected to be around 60%.

The growth has been driven by its domain monetization business, which CentralNic has been building through acquisitions over the last few years.

The company will report its results proper on February 27.

Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials

Google partners with UN on aids.day, womens.day and more

Google Registry has landed itself possibly the highest-profile anchor tenant of the new gTLD program to date — the United Nations.

Various UN organizations have picked up about 20 premium .day domains and launched redirects to promote the corresponding UN-recognized issue-awareness days that occur throughout the year.

For example UNAIDS has registered aids.day to raise awareness of the disease on December 1, World AIDS Day, UN WOMEN has registered womens.day for International Women’s Day on March 8, and UNICEF has registered childrens.day for November 20, World Children’s Day.

(If you’re wondering: International Men’s Day is not a UN-recognized event. The domain mens.day, which doesn’t resolve for me, was registered last month, apparently to somebody in Germany where, ironically, it is not observed.)

The UN domains all seem to redirect to pages on existing UN sites on other TLDs, rather than having bespoke web sites.

Google launched .day in late 2021 and has sold about 14,000 domains so far. It maintains a calendar of the various days and corresponding .day names at new.day, which also serves as a lead generator.

Comment Tagged: .day, google, un

Guy wants to be ICANN CEO and turn off 1.5 million Iranian domains

With the role of ICANN CEO opening up for applicants following the resignation of Göran Marby in December, the CEO of VPN.com appears to have thrown his hat in the ring.

In an unusual and ambiguous press release, “VPN.com CEO Reviews ICANN CEO Opening”, Michael Gargiulo strongly suggests he’s thinking about applying for the gig, currently filled on an interim basis by Sally Costerton.

“Stepping away from VPN.com to lead a global organization like ICANN that aligns with our mission of freedom and a secure Internet for all is something I have considered before, but the timing was not right,” he writes.

“ICANN does not need an empty suit filling this position; it needs someone with vision, ability to address lingering problems that ICANN has faced for extended periods of time, and the guts to stand up to countries like Russia,” he writes.

VPN.com is an strange hybrid of VPN review site and domain brokerage, formed after Gargiulo bought the domain for $1 million in 2017.

The press release is odd in that Gargiulo not only gets a couple of basic facts about ICANN wrong, but also draws attention to an occasion in 2019 when he called for Marby and President Trump to delete Iran’s .ir ccTLD from the DNS root in protest at the country’s human rights violations

The release refers to ICANN’s chair as Maarten Botterman, which hasn’t been true since September, and its headcount of “140 employees”, which is about 260 short of the actual number.

But it’s the opinion that Iran’s human rights violations, surely more acutely felt today than in 2019, should lead to the suspension of .ir’s 1.5 million domain names is surely a disqualifying position for a would-be ICANN CEO.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, ICANN faced calls to punish Putin by turning off .ru, which it resisted to broad community support.

Gargiulo did not respond to a request for clarification.

Comment Tagged: .ir, ICANN, iran, vpn.com

ICANN kicks the can on .org price cap defeat

ICANN has deferred action on its recent Independent Review Process defeat over price caps on .org and .info, instead referring the decision to one of its committees.

The IRP panel ruled in late December that ICANN broke its own bylaws when it approved the removal of price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts in 2019. It recommended that ICANN look into ways to restore the caps.

The ICANN board of directors at the weekend voted to ask its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) to “review, consider, and evaluate” the IRP decision and recommend next steps.

The IRP was fought by the registrar Namecheap.

Comment Tagged: .info, .org, ICANN, price caps

No masks required at ICANN Cancun

ICANN is considerably loosening up its Covid-19 restrictions for its next meeting, due to take place in Cancun, Mexico, in March.

The Org said last night that face masks will no longer be compulsory inside the venue, though they will still be provided for free and are “strongly recommended”. Testing kits will also be handed out.

It also won’t need to see your vaccination papers any more. You’ll merely need to check a box confirming that you’re fully up-to-date on your shots at time of registration.

Also gone are proof-of-vaccination wrist-bands, though the color-coded lanyard system, which allows people to indicate their comfort level with social proximity, will remain in place.

The meeting will take place from March 10 at the Cancun Center, but you have to register online before March 8. You can’t just rock up on the day and register on the door like you could pre-pandemic.

Comment Tagged: cancun, covid-19, ICANN, icann 76, pandemic

sex.com for sale, but it’s not a domain deal

The owners of sex.com, which for many years was the highest-price domain sale ever recorded, have put the site on sale.

The unidentified sellers say they will accept minimum bids of $20 million, with at least $10 million up front, in an auction that began yesterday and will run until January 31.

The domain alone sold for $13 million in 2013, but this offer is for the full site, so don’t expect it to make it to any domain sales league tables.

The sellers say the site is an “innovative blend of popular social platforms”. That appears to mean it’s a blend of features borrowed from TikTok and OnlyFans.

In the name of journalistic integrity I checked it out.

The main page is basically a feed of short teaser videos of porn models posing or performing sex acts, accompanied by invitations to subscribe to their feeds for modest monthly subscription fees.

The site’s sellers say they receive 20% of the subscription fees, with the models taking the rest.

They say they get over a million daily unique visitors. Most appear to be to the legacy “pin” business, which allows users to create collections of porn content, the site’s primary business prior to July 2021.

Interested bidders can sign up at sex.com/auction.

Update: when tweeting a link to this post, I discovered Twitter won’t allow links to sex.com (which Twitter had auto-linked from the headline) because it thinks the site is “potentially harmful”.

Comment Tagged: auction, sex.com

ICANN to be told to stop pussyfooting on new gTLDs

The GNSO Council is expected to tell ICANN’s board of directors that it needs to stop lollygagging and set the wheels in motion for the next round of new gTLDs.

The Council plans to send a letter to the board ahead of its retreat this weekend, urging it to approve the GNSO’s new gTLD policy recommendations — the so-called SubPro Final Report — which turn two years old today.

There may also be some harsh critique of ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment for the program, which put an unexpectedly enormous price tag and years-long runway on the next round.

An early draft of the letter urges the board to approve the SubPro report “as soon as practicable” and “quickly” form an Implementation Review Team, which is the next stage of turning policy recommendations into systems and processes.

The ODA had provided two options for the next round. One would take five years and cost $125 million before a single application fee is collected. The second would cost about half as much and take 18 months.

The key differences were that Option 1 would see a lot of automation, with ICANN scratch-building systems for handling applications, objections, contention resolution and such, whereas Option 2 would cut some corners and rely more on manual processing.

But the GNSO, at least judging by the early draft of its letter, seems to regard this as a false dichotomy, instead proposing a third way, leaning on configurable third-party software and existing ICANN systems.

Option 1 is “overly aggressive… overly complex, time and resource intensive, and much more expensive than is necessary”, the draft letter says.

There wasn’t enough information in the ODA for the Council to figure out exactly how the two options differ, it says.

The letter is expected to tell the board that it doesn’t need to pick between the two options. Rather, it should just approve the SubPro’s recommendations and leave it to the ICANN staff and community members on the IRT to work out the details.

While the letter doesn’t come out and say it outright, the subtext I infer is that the ODA, which took a year and cost $9 million, was a waste of time and money. If the Council can’t figure out what it means, how is the board (its intended audience) supposed to?

The Council also expresses bafflement that the proposed Registry Services Providers Pre-Evaluation program, which was meant to streamline the program by accrediting RSPs in advance of the application window opening, is predicted by the ODA to be incredibly expensive and time-consuming, the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

The letter was composed by a “small team” subset of the Council and is likely to be edited over the next few days as other members weigh in. The Council is expected to discuss it at its monthly meeting tomorrow and send it to the board before it discusses the ODA on Sunday.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, subpro

New ICANN boss makes encouraging noises on new gTLDs

ICANN’s new interim CEO Sally Costerton addressed the community in her new role for what I believe was the first time last Thursday, in a call with the GNSO Council.

The hour-long call was meant to discuss the outcomes of the Council’s Strategic Planning Session a month ago, but it also served as a Q&A between councilors and Costerton.

The last 15 minutes are of particular interest, especially if you’re one of the people concerned about ICANN’s devolution into a “do-nothing” organization over the last several years.

At that mark, Thomas Rickert of the trade group eco addressed the issue in a lengthy comment in which he pointed out that ICANN has been moving so slowly of late that even lumbering governmental institutions such as the European Union have come to realize that it’s faster to legislate on issues such as Whois than to wait for ICANN to sort it out.

He also pointed to the community’s pain of waiting a year for the recent Operational Design Assessment for the next round of new gTLDs, and its shock that the ODA pointed to an even more-expensive round that could take five years or more to come to fruition.

“I’ve heard many in the community say that the operational design reports come up with a level of complexity and diligence that stands in the way of being efficient,” he said. “So maybe the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

ICANN should be brave, dig its heels in, and get stuff done, he remarked.

Costerton seemed to enjoy the critique, suggesting that the recording of Rickert’s comments should be circulated to other ICANN staff.

She described herself as a “pragmatist rather than an ideologue”.

“I so want to say you’re absolutely right, Thomas, I completely agree with you 100%, we should just get it done,” she said. “Good is good enough. Perfect is the enemy of the good — I like that expression, I think it very often is.”

But.

Costerton said she has to balance getting stuff done with threats from governments and the risk of being “overwhelmed by aggressive litigation”. She said that ICANN needs “a framework around us that protects us”.

Getting that balance right is the tricky bit, she indicated.

Costerton, who took her new role at the end of last year following Göran Marby’s unexpected resignation, did not tip her hand on whether she plans to apply to have the “interim” removed from her job title. It is known that she has applied at least once before.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, subpro

Verisign loses prestige .gov contract to Cloudflare

Cloudflare is to take over registry services for the US government’s .gov domain, ending Verisign’s 12-year run.

It seems .gov manager CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, opened the contract up for bidding last August and awarded it to Cloudflare in mid-December.

The deal is worth $7.2 million, Cloudflare said in a press release on Friday, which is more than twice as much as Verisign charged when it took over the .gov back-end in 2011.

But it seems the deal includes Cloudflare providing authoritative DNS for .gov domains, something Verisign does not currently provide the TLD, in addition to managing the zone file, registry, Whois, etc.

It’s not clear who’s running the exclusive .gov registrar, but CISA appears to be building a new one.

.gov domains are only available to US federal, state, tribal and local government organizations, and there was a $400-a-year fee until April 2021, when CISA made them free to register.

There are about 8,600 .gov domains today. Not a lot, but the deal comes with bragging rights.

CISA took over .gov from the General Services Administration in March 2021 and dropped the fees a month later.

It’s not clear whether Verisign had bid for a renewed contract or simply walked away, as it did when it conceded .tv to GoDaddy last year. I’ve asked the company for comment.

The loss of .gov is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to .com, which continues to make Verisign one of world’s most-profitable companies.

While it’s an ICANN-accredited registrar, I believe this is Cloudflare’s first foray into registry services. Might we see the company as an emergent threat to the established players in the next new gTLD round? It’s certainly looking that way.

1 Comment Tagged: .gov, cisa, cloudflare, verisign

Wanted: a gTLD to ban

ICANN may have failed so far to deliver a way for the world to create any more gTLDs, but it’s about to pick a string that it will resolve to never, ever delegate.

It’s going to designate an official “private use” string, designed for organizations to use behind their own firewalls, and promise that the chosen string will never make it to the DNS root.

IP lawyers and new gTLD consultants might want to keep an eye on this one.

The move comes at the prompting of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which called for ICANN to pick a private-use TLD in a September 2020 document (pdf).

ICANN hasn’t picked a string yet, but it has published its criteria for public comment:

1. It is a valid DNS label.
2. It is not already delegated in the root zone.
3. It is not confusingly similar to another TLD in existence.
4. It is relatively short, memorable, and meaningful.

The obvious thing to do would be to pick one of the 42 strings ICANN banned in the 2012 new gTLD round, which includes .example, .test and .invalid, or one of the three strings it subsequently decided were too risky to go in the root due to their extensive use on private networks — .corp, .mail and .home.

The SSAC notes in its document that ICANN’s two root server constellations receive about 854 million requests a day for .home — the most-used invalid TLD — presumably due to leaks from corporate networks and home routers.

But .homes (plural) is currently in use — XYZ.com manages the registry — so would .home fail the “confusingly similar” test? Given that it’s already established ICANN policy that plurals should be banned in the next round, .home could be ruled out.

ICANN’s consultation doesn’t make mention of whether gTLDs applied for in subsequent rounds would be tested for confusing similarity against this currently theoretical private-use string, but it seems likely.

Anyone considering applying for a gTLD in future will want to make sure the string ICANN picks isn’t too close to their brands or gTLD string ideas. Its eventual choice of string will also be open for public comment.

There don’t seem to be a massive amount of real-world benefits to designating a single private-use TLD string.

Nobody would be obliged to use it in their kit or on their networks, even if they know it exists, and ICANN’s track record of reaching out to the broader tech sector isn’t exactly stellar (see: universal acceptance). And even if everyone currently using a different TLD in their products were to switch to ICANN’s choice, it would presumably take many years for currently deployed gear to cycle out of usage.

Comment Tagged: collisions, ICANN, new gTLDs, private use, string confusion