Ten more new gTLD contests settled in auction

Applicant Auction helped resolved 10 new gTLD contention sets last week, and the first results started trickling through today.
Of the six results we have so far, Uniregistry and Famous Four Media won two auctions, while Minds + Machines and Donuts both won one each.
According to our database, the following five contention sets have been closed:

• .pizza — Donuts won after withdrawals from Asiamix Digital, Uniregistry and Minds + Machines.
• .fashion — M+M won after withdrawals from Donuts, Uniregistry and Famous Four Media.
• .diet — Uniregistry won after withdrawls from Donuts and Famous Four.
• .cricket — Famous Four won after withdrawals from M+M and Donuts.
• .help — Uniregistry won after withdrawals from Donuts and Dot Tech.
• .racing — Famous Four won after withdrawals from Donuts and Uniregistry.

We’ve also seen a withdrawal from Momentous in the .rip competition, suggesting that that gTLD was also settled at auction last week. It’s not yet clear from the database who won.

Rockefeller slams .sucks as “predatory shakedown”

US Senator Jay Rockefeller today came out swinging against the proposed .sucks new gTLD, saying it looks like little more than a “predatory shakedown” by applicants.
In a letter to ICANN (pdf), Rockefeller has particular concern about Vox Populi, the .sucks applicant owned by Canadian group Momentous.
As we’ve previously reported, Vox Populi plans to charge trademark owners $25,000 a year for defensive registrations and has already started taking pre-registrations even though .sucks is still in contention.
Rockefeller told ICANN:

I view it as little more than a predatory shakedown scheme… A gTLD like “sucks” has little or no socially redeeming value and it reinforces many people’s fears that the purpose of the gTLD expansion is to enrich the domain name industry rather than benefit the broader community of internet users.

Unusually, I find myself in agreement with Rockefeller, who chairs the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee — Vox Populi’s plan does bring the domain industry into disrepute.
But it’s not the only applicant for .sucks. Top Level Spectrum and Donuts have also applied for the string.
While neither has revealed their proposed pricing, in Donuts’ case a blocking registration via its Domain Protected Marks List service will cost substantially less on a per-domain basis.
Rockefeller asks that ICANN keep his thoughts in mind when reviewing the application, and I’m sure ICANN will pay lip service to his concerns in response, but I don’t think the letter will have much impact.
A bigger question might be: does Rockefeller’s letter foreshadow more Congressional hearings into the new gTLD program?
The last one, which Rockefeller chaired (for about five minutes, before he buggered off to do more important stuff) was in December 2011, and they have tended to happen every couple of years.
Such a hearing would come at an inopportune moment for ICANN, which is trying to distance itself from the perception of US oversight in light of the Edward Snowden spying revelations.
It’s been setting up offices all over the world and championing the forthcoming NetMundial internet governance meeting, which is happening in Brazil next month.

Extortion.sucks — Vox Pop CEO defends “under-priced” $25,000 sunrise fee

Vox Populi Registry, the .sucks new gTLD applicant backed by Momentous Corp, is to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in its Sunrise period, should it win the TLD.
Not only that, but it’s become the first new gTLD applicant that I’m aware of to start taking pre-registration fees from trademark owners while it’s still in a contention set with other applicants.
At first glance, it looks like plain old trademark-owner extortion, taken to an extreme we’ve never seen before.
But after 45 minutes talking to Vox Pop CEO John Berard this evening, I’m convinced that it’s worse than that.
The company is setting itself up as the IP lobby’s poster child for everything that is wrong with the new gTLD program.
If Vox Pop wins the .sucks contention set — it’s competing against Donuts and Top Level Spectrum — it plans to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in Sunrise and $25,000 a year thereafter.
Registrations during general availability, whether they match a trademark or not, will cost $300 a year.
During the pre-registration period, the Sunrise fee is $2,500 and the “Priority Reservation” fee is $250.
The Sunrise fee is, I believe, higher than any sunrise fee in any TLD ever to launch.
But Berard said that he believes Vox Pop’s .sucks proposition is, if anything, “under-priced”.
“Most companies spend far more than $25,000 a month on a public relations agency, most companies spend more than $25,000 a month on a Google ad campaign,” he said.
“Companies spend millions of dollars a year on customer service. We view .sucks as an element of customer service on the part of companies,” he said.
Berard, a 40-year veteran of the public relations business, said that he believes .sucks represents an opportunity for brands to engage with their customers, gaining valuable insight that could help them improve product development or customer service.
“The last thing I view .sucks as is a domain name. That’s the last value proposition for .sucks,” he said. “The primary value proposition is as a key and innovative part of customer service, retention and loyalty.”
It’s about giving companies “the ability to bring internet criticism and commentary out of the shadows and into the light” and “an opportunity to actually have a legitimate ability to correct misconceptions and engage, in much the way they’re doing now with Facebook”, he said.
It’s all about helping companies create a dialogue, in other words.
But Berard said that Vox Pop does not intend to launch any value-added services on .sucks domains.
While a domain name may be the “last value proposition” of .sucks, it is also the only thing that Vox Pop is actually planning to sell.
Asked to justify the $25,000 Sunrise fee, at first Berard pointed to policies that he said will ensure a transparent space for conversation.
“A company might not have to register its brand in .sucks, because if someone else does the policies and practices that we hope to deploy give that company a transparent opportunity to participate,” Berard said. “There’s no chasing unknown people down dark alleys for unfounded criticism. It will all be done in the light of day.”
“We have built-in policies that prevent sites from being parked pages,” he said. “The site must be put to that use — of customer service — whether you are the company that owns [the brand] or a customer that wants to complain about it.”
There was some confusion during our conversation about what the policies are going to be.
At first it sounded like companies would be obliged to run criticism/conversation sites targeting their own brands or risk losing their domains, but Berard later called to clarify that while pages cannot be parked under the policy, they can be left inactive.
It will be possible, in other words, for a company to register its brand.sucks and leave the associated site dark.
The registry would also have an “authenticated Whois database”, he said, though it would allow registrants to use privacy services.
There would also be prohibitions on cyber-bullying and porn in .sucks, if Vox Pop wins it. It has committed to these policies in its Public Interest Commitments (pdf)
But the company does not appear to be doing anything that ICM Registry did not already do when it launched .xxx a couple of years ago, when it comes to making brand owners’ lives easier.
In fact, it’s planning to do a lot less, while being literally a hundred times more expensive.
By contrast, if Donuts wins .sucks, brand owners will be able to defensively block their marks using the Domain Protected Marks List for $3,000 over five years, which would cover all of Donuts 200-300 new gTLDs.
There doesn’t appear to be any good reason Vox Pop is charging prices well above the market rate, in my view, other than the fact that the company reckons it can get away with it.
In what may well be a deliberate move to put pressure on trademark owners, Vox Pop is also the first registry I’ve encountered to say it will do a 30-day, as opposed to a 60-day, Sunrise period.
Under ICANN rules, registries have to give at least 30 days warning before a 30-day Sunrise starts, but once it’s underway they are allowed to allocate domains on a first-come-first-served basis.
All of the 30-odd registries currently in Sunrise have opted for the traditional 60-day option instead, where no domains are allocated until the end of the period.
There’s also the question of accepting Sunrise pre-registrations before Vox Pop even knows whether it will get to run .sucks.
There are two other applicants and Berard said that he reckons the contention set is likely to go to an ICANN last-resort auction.
Judging by ICANN’s preliminary timetable, the .sucks auction wouldn’t happen until roughly September next year, by my reckoning.
Anyone who pre-registers today will have to wait a year before they can use (or not) their domain, if they even get to register it at all.
Any money that is taken during the pre-reg period will be refunded if Vox Pop fails to launch.
In the meantime, it will be sitting in Momentous’ bank account where the company, presumably, will be able to use it to try to win the .sucks auction.
Trademark owners, in my view, should vote with their wallets and stay the hell away from Vox Pop’s pre-registration service.
I’m not usually in the business of endorsing one new gTLD applicant over another, but I think Vox Pop’s Sunrise pricing is going to make the whole new gTLD program — and probably also ICANN and the domain name industry itself — look bad.
It’s a horrible reminder of a time when domain name companies were often little better than spammers, operating at the margins and beyond of acceptable conduct, and it makes me sad.
The new gTLD program is about increasing choice and competition in the TLD space, it’s not supposed to be about applicants bilking trademark owners for whatever they think they can get away with.

First new gTLD contracts signed

Donuts, an ARI Registry Services subsdiary and CORE this morning became the first new gTLD applicants to sign registry contracts with ICANN.
The ceremonial signing took place live on stage at the opening ceremony of ICANN 47, the week-long public meeting in Durban, South Africa.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis signed on behalf of شبكة. applicant International Domain Registry. The string is Arabic for “.web” and transliterates as “.shabaka”. It is 3 in the program’s evaluation queue.
In an ARI press release, Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving confirmed that Go Daddy will carry .shabaka.
Donuts CEO Paul Stahura signed for .游戏, the Chinese-language “.games”, which had prioritization number 40.
It was not immediately clear which contracts Iliya Bazlyankov, chair of CORE’s executive committee, signed. CORE has applied for three internationalized domain name gTLDs with high priority numbers.
(UPDATE: Bazlyankov has been in touch to say: “We signed the .сайт (site) and .онлайн (online) contracts which had numbers 6 and 9 in the priority”.)
Representatives of Go Daddy, MarkMonitor, Momentous, Mailclub and African registrar Kheweul.com also joined ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade on stage to sign the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
The event marks the beginning of the contract signing phase of the new gTLD program, an important milestone.
For applicants without outstanding objections, contention or Governmental Advisory Committee advice, signing a contract means only pre-delegation testing and the final transition to delegation remains.

New Domain Name Association names interim board

The formative Domain Name Association has started calling itself the Domain Name Association and is moving closer to a proper launch under the guidance of an interim board of directors.
This is the trade group that started getting together in January, kick-started by Google, and launched a one-page web site at WhatDomain.org in March.
Right now, ARI Registry Services CEO Adrian Kinderis is acting as chair of the interim board.
The rest of the board comprises: Jon Nevett (Donuts), Elizabeth Sweezey (FairWinds), Rob Hall (Momentous), Jeff Eckhaus (Demand Media), Statton Hammock (Demand Media), and Job Lawrence (Google).
According to a presentation Kinderis gave at a meeting of ICANN execs and industry leaders in New York yesterday, the DNA will be a non-profit, independent organization funded by membership fees.
Membership will be open to registries, registrars, resellers, back-end providers and individual consultants.
The mission is to: “Promote the interests of its members by advocating the use, adoption, and expansion of domain names as the primary tool for users to navigate the Internet.”
The finer details of scope, marketing, governance and funding are still being worked out, but if you’re in the industry you can probably expect an invitation to join before too long.
It’s actually not the only industry trade group forming at the moment.
Judging by presentations given in Beijing two weeks ago, the Brand Registry Group is thinking about coming together as a trade association as well as a constituency within ICANN’s policy-making structure.

Registrars sought as Pool.com shuts down drop-catching business

ICANN is looking for new homes for approximately 67,000 domain names, after a decision by Momentous to dump 85 of its domain name registrar accreditations.
The accreditations were used primarily for drop-catching, according to an email sent to registrars last Friday, and each has between 200 and 3,000 gTLD domains under management.
While most affected domains are recently caught drops, there may be some regular registrants scattered throughout the customer base, according to ICANN.
Momentous, owner of Pool.com, announced that it was getting rid of its drop-catching registrars in an email to customers late last year, as several domainer blogs reported at the time.
Pool plans to “refocus its business away from an emphasis on the secondary market”, the email said.
The company wanted to consolidate all of the domains in its NameScout registrar with the transfer fees waived, but ICANN declined its request, according to the email.
Some customers are not happy with how Pool has handled the situation.
The domainer “Acro” is currently pursuing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau in Momentous’ native Canada, according to a recent blog post.
The 85 accreditations are due to expire January 10. Registrars wishing to take over the portfolios had a deadline of this afternoon to express an interest with ICANN.

Momentous’ .sucks bid “about creating dialogue”

The CEO of Momentous’ .sucks new gTLD applicant reckons smart brands will embrace the cheeky concept.
I chatted to John Berard, CEO of Momentous subsidiary Vox Populi Registry, this afternoon for a piece in The Register, and he reckons .sucks isn’t the money-grubbing scam many people will say it is.
“If some people think this is just a way to get registration money out of corporations, then those people are either unaware or are being short-sighted about their marketing effectiveness,” he said.
Berard believes smart companies nowadays are embracing social media interactions as a way to improve their marketing, and that .sucks will be a way to facilitate that.
That said, the policies governing .sucks are still not clear.
Momentous is also applying for .design, .rip and .style.

Brands are Pool.com’s surprise digital archery clients

Companies applying to ICANN for “dot-brand” top-level domains are among those signing up for Pool.com’s new digital archery service, according to Rob Hall, CEO of parent Momentous.
The company launched its Digital Archery Engine last month, not too long after ICANN confirmed its controversial method of batching new gTLD applications for processing.
Now, Pool is receiving interest from not only mass-market generic string applicants, but also dot-brands.
“It’s a wider swath of TLDs that I thought originally,” said Hall. “At first I thought for sure the generics and the domains that might be in competition.”
“It’s amazing to me that a lot of people out there are saying the brands don’t care, the brands are doing this just defensively, the brands couldn’t care less about going first… but a lot of them do,” he said.
“A lot of them are saying ‘I want to be in that first batch’, which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected,” he added.
He said he had no idea what the motivations are for these brands.
“Our job is to get them in the first batch, not to ask them why they want to be there,” he said.
Hall said it wasn’t clear how many clients Pool would eventually sign up to the service, but said he expects it to be definitely much more than 50.
ICANN’s digital archery system – which will batch applicants according to which can most accurately send a message over the internet to a target time – was poorly received by most people.
Unsurprisingly, Hall is not one of those people.
Pool is one of several companies that have been competing to register expiring domain names for the better part of a decade, so its systems have been fine-tuned for sending messages over the internet quickly.
While the big registries such as .com use the EPP protocol, some of the registries Pool interacts with use HTTP, which seems to be ICANN’s preferred option for digital archery.
Hall said Pool aims for latency of less than 6 milliseconds. Its servers are positioned topologically close to registries – typically one or two hops – and the software measures monitors network conditions.
“The key is being able to detect what is the latency and to predict it, then factor that into the engine to say ‘When do I fire?’,” he said.
He does not anticipate the CAPTCHAs or other Turing tests presenting a problem – Pool would simply bring a human into the equation.
The Digital Archery Engine is not cheap. If Pool gets you into the first batch, you’re $25,000 out of pocket. If you’re in the top half of batches (batch three of five counts as top half) it’s $10,000.
The company was singled out recently by ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency as an “insider” exploiting the digital archery system as a “revenue extraction opportunity”.
A letter highly critical of the system from IPC chair Steve Metallitz said:

This arcane and seemingly arbitrary batching method will also reinforce the widespread impression that all ICANN procedures are dominated by “insiders” with contractual relationships to ICANN, who will surely know best how to manipulate this initiative to their own benefit, or that of their paying customers. It is difficult to reconcile such an outcome with ICANN’s obligation to act in the public interest.

Hall said was happy for the free advertising. “I’d like to thank them,” he said.
But he said Pool isn’t “manipulating” anything.
“They’ve called this ‘digital archery’,” he said. “It’s a game to see who’s best at it. That’s what they’ve designed. We’re not gaming anything. And we’re not offering this to insiders, we’re offering this to everyone.”

Zip.ca lets zip.tv expire then files UDRP to get it back

The Canadian movie rental site Zip.ca, a sister company of Pool.com, has filed a cybersquatting complaint with WIPO over the domain name zip.tv.
A UDRP filed over a dictionary word would often scream reverse domain name hijacking, but it appears that in this case Zip.ca owned the matching .tv but accidentally let it expire.
According to historical Whois records, Zip.ca owned zip.tv until July 6 this year, when the registration expired and it went into its registrar’s “Reactivation Pending” status.
It was then acquired by a Chinese registrant, Mai Lifang, in October. The domain is currently parked.
It’s embarrassing for Zip.ca, given that its parent, Momentous, is primarily a domain name company, owning DomainsAtCost.com, Pool.com, Internic.ca, Rebel.com and NameScout.
Zip.tv was not just a defensive registration, either. It was previously promoted as a community-focused YouTube-style companion site for Zip.ca back in 2007.
The company also owns a trademark on the domain.

Now you can outsource your whole gTLD

It’s already common practice for domain name registries to outsource their technical operations to a back-end provider such as VeriSign or Afilias, but a new company hopes that new gTLD registries will want to go one step further.
Sedari, which appears to have soft-launched at the .nxt conference today, wants successful new gTLD applicants to outsource their back-office functions too.
The company, headed by former ICANN policy advisor Liz Williams, “helps string owners outsource the risk and responsibility of running a registry in compliance with ICANN’s contracts”, according to its site.
I understand this means functions such as billing, support, compliance, and liaising with the back-end registry and the front-end registrars.
I guess it’s going to be possible for a successful gTLD applicant to sign a registry contract with ICANN and then do very little to actually manage its day-to-day operation.
A registry that outsources its technical infrastructure to the likes of Neustar and its back office to Sedari will presumably be free to focus on nothing but marketing.
Sedari is staffed by a number of familiar faces.
Its CFO is Kevin Wilson, who had the same role at ICANN until January, and former ICANN director Dennis Jennings is on the board.
Its CTO is Wayne MacLaurin, who was previously CTO of Momentous. Jothan Frakes, formerly with Minds + Machines, is senior VP of channel management.