Seven domain hacks already registered in Google’s .ing

Some companies are using their trademarks to grab potentially valuable domain hacks in the upcoming .ing gTLD, possibly avoiding having to cough up seven figures for them later on.

There’s about a week left on Google Registry’s .ing sunrise period, but some hacks have already started showing up in the .ing zone file. Not counting those that look like they belong to Google, I count seven so far:

• adapt.ing
• design.ing
• draw.ing
• dumpl.ing
• edit.ing
• giv.ing
• sign.ing

None of them resolve to web sites from where I’m sitting and Whois is pretty much useless nowadays other than to confirm that the registration dates that fell within the .ing sunrise, which began September 20.

edit.ing and sign.ing both have Adobe-owned name servers, which may give an indication of who registered those names.

To get a domain name during sunrise, you don’t necessarily need to have a famous brand, you only need to have a trademark recognized by the ICANN-approved Trademark Clearinghouse.

The trademark string can “cross the dot”, which may be what’s happened in the case of dumpl.ing and giv.ing.

Getting these potentially valuable generic domain hacks is particularly important in the case of .ing, where Google has set ludicrously high fees for its Early Access Period, which follows sunrise on October 31.

As first reported by Domain Name Wire, EAP prices start at $1.1 million retail.

Namecheap has given away 500,000 free .me domains

A project started in 2014 has seen Namecheap give away 500,000 .me domains to university students in the Anglophone world.

The offer, started in 2014 at nc.me, is for the first year’s registration and is for students to create “online portfolios, resumes, blogs and other personal websites”.

Registrants authenticate themselves by having email addresses associated with universities, such as .edu in the US. Institutions in the UK and Australia are also supported.

Not all of the names registered over the last nine years are still registered, according to a spokesperson, but 500,000 would be a sizable chunk of .me’s total domains under management.

The registry, Domen, does not regularly publish its reg numbers but it hadn’t yet crossed the one million mark as of 2018, according to its web site.

The Namecheap spokesperson said that the registry provide the first-year regs for free under the partnership.

Red Cross gets takedown powers over .org domains

Public Interest Registry has inked a first-of-its kind domain takedown partnership with the American Red Cross.

The deal gives the Red Cross a “trusted notifier” status, meaning it will have a special channel to report fraudulent fundraising sites with domains, which PIR can then suspend at the registry level.

It’s designed mainly to quickly tackle fraud sites that spring up to exploit people’s good will in the aftermath of natural disasters to which the Red Cross would typically respond to.

It’s particularly relevant not only due to the size of PIR’s flagship .org, but also due to its recent takeovers of gTLDs including .charity and .giving.

PIR said the partnership is only for such cases, and would not permit the Red Cross to take down criticism or satire. It also said there’s an appeals process for registrants whose names are suspended.

Trusted notifier schemes are not uncommon among the larger registries, but they typically focus on Big Copyright and organizations that fight child sexual abuse material online.

Domain universe grew 1% in Q1

There was a 1% increase in domain names under management worldwide in the first quarter, compared to Q4 2022 and Q1 2022, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The period ended with 354 million names across all TLDs, according to the report, an increase of 3.5 million, the report says.

ccTLDs did most of the heavy lifting, up by 2.6 million names or 2% sequentially to 135.7 million at the end of the first quarter. The growth figures correct for an error in the Q4 report.

Verisign has its own .com recovering, having dipped last year, now up by 1.1 million names sequentially to 161.6 million. Sister TLD .net was flat on 13.2 million.

New gTLDs dipped by 200,000 names to 27.3 million, a 0.6% decrease quarter-over-quarter, but were up by 900,000 or 3.6% compared to a year earlier, the DNIB states.

Closed generics and IDNs debates are big drag on new gTLDs

As ICANN 77 officially kicks off in Washington DC today, the issues of closed generics and IDNs have already emerged as big drag factors on the launch of the next new gTLD application round.

During a day-long “day zero” session yesterday, the community heard that the absolute fastest the GNSO will be able to make policy on closed generics is 96 weeks — over 22 months — using its “expedited” Policy Development Process.

Meanwhile, making policy on internationalized domain names — mainly, how to handle string similarity conflicts in non-Latin scripts — is not expected to be done until March 2026 at the earliest. And that’s through an “expedited” PDP that has already been running for over two years.

The predicted closed generics timetable (on page 16 of this PDF presentation) is actually relatively aggressive compared to the two previous EPDPs (on post-GDPR Whois policy) that the GNSO has previously completed.

It only calls for 36 weeks — about eight months — for the actual working group deliberations, for example, compared to the 48 weeks the equally controversial Whois EPDP took a few years ago.

But the expected duration prompted some criticism yesterday from those wondering why, for example, a “call for volunteers” needs to take as long as three months to carry out.

The timetable was written up prior to the publication over the weekend of a draft framework for closed generics (pdf), which lays out a few dozen principles that should be taken into account in subsequent EPDP work.

With what looks like a certain amount of wheel-reinvention, the document describes a points-based system for determining whether an applicant is worthy of a closed generic. It seems to be based quite a lot on the process used to assess “Community” applications in the 2012 round.

The framework was created in private over the last six months by a cross-community group of 14 people from the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee. Chatham House rules applied, so we don’t know exactly whose opinions made it into the final draft. But it exists now, and at first glance it looks like a decent starting point for a closed generics policy.

The major issue is that the work, at its core, is about predicting and preemptively shutting down all the ways devious corporate marketing people might try to blag themselves a closed generic for competitive or defensive purposes, rather than for the public interest, and I’m not sure that’s possible.

Discussion on closed generics will continue this week at ICANN 77, including a session that starts around about the same time I’m hitting publish on this article.

Everyone hates Verisign’s new .net deal

The public has commented: Verisign’s .net registry contract should not be renewed in its currently proposed form.

ICANN’s public comment period for the renewal closed yesterday and attracted 57 submissions, most of which either complained about Verisign being allowed to raise its prices or expressed fears about domains being seized by governments.

The proposed contract retains the current pricing structure, in which Verisign is allowed to raise the price of a .net domain by 10% a year. They currently cost $9.92, meaning they could reach $17.57 by the time the contract ends.

The Internet Commerce Association, some of its supporters, Namecheap, the Registrars Stakeholder Group, the Cross-Community Working Party on ICANN and Human Rights (CCWP-HR), and TurnCommerce all oppose the price increases.

The RrSG said the price provisions “are without sufficient justification or an analysis of its potentially substantial impact on the DNS”.

These commenters and others who did not directly oppose the increases, including the At-Large Advisory Committee and consultant Michael Palage, called for ICANN to conduct an economic analysis of the domain name market.

The Business Constituency was the only commenter to openly support the increases, though its comment noted that it is opposed in principle to ICANN capping prices at all.

The Intellectual Property Constituency did not express a view on pricing, but called for greater transparency into the side-deal that sees ICANN get an extra $4 million a year for unspecified security-related work. ICANN has never revealed publicly how this money is spent.

In terms of the number of submissions, the biggest concern people seem to have is that the proposed contract contains language obliging Verisign to take down domains to comply with “applicable law, government rules or regulations, or pursuant to any legal order or subpoena of any government, administrative or governmental authority, or court of competent jurisdiction”.

This language is already in the .com contract, but before ICANN clarified this on April 26 several concerned registrants had made comments opposing its inclusion.

Notably, the founder of the controversial troll forum kiwifarms.net, which has been kicked out of registrars after being linked to suicides, submitted his own “ICANN should be destroyed” comment.

Several commenters also noted that the definition of “security and stability” in the .net contract differs to the Base Registry Agreement that almost all other registries have signed in such a way that it is feared that Verisign would not have to abide by future ICANN Consensus Policies under certain circumstances.

As several commenters note, the usual protocol following an ICANN public comment period is for ICANN to issue a summary report, pay lip service to having “considered” the input, and then make absolutely no changes at all.

This time, some commenters held out some hope that ICANN’s new, surprisingly sprightly and accommodating leadership may have a different approach.

The comments can be read here.

ICANN just put a date on the next new gTLD round

ICANN has just penciled in a date for the next round of new gTLD applications for the first time, but it’s already upsetting some people who think it’s not aggressive enough.

Org has released its draft Implementation Plan for the next round, which would see it launch in May 2026, three years from now.

The date seems to have been set from the top. The plan refers to “the Board’s desire to launch the next round by May 2026”.

The plan sets out the timeline by which community members will work with staff to turn the community’s policy recommendations into the rules and procedures for accepting and processing gTLD applications.

This cross-community Implementation Review Team will write the next Applicant Guidebook — the new gTLD’s program’s Holy Quran.

The plan covers the 98 policy recommendations already approved by the ICANN board of directors, it will be updated when or if the board approves the 38 recommendations currently considered “pending”.

The work would be split into eight “modules”, corresponding to the sections of the AGB, and the IRT would tackle each in turn, meeting mostly via Zoom for a couple hours once a week.

The modules would be split into about 40 topics, each covering a group of related recommendations, and each topic would be discussed for two meetings, with Org-drafted text undergoing first and second “readings” by the IRT.

The first module would take seven months to complete, timed from this month, and each subsequent module would take three to four months after the completion of the preceding module, according to the draft plan.

Above and beyond that timetable, the IRT has certain external dependencies, such as the work being done with governments on the “closed generics” issue, the plan notes.

After the AGB is published, ICANN would need to carry out other work, such as subjecting the AGB to public comment, then marketing the program for four months, before an application window would open.

The timeline has been received negatively by pretty much everyone on the IRT expressing a view on mailing list or Zoom chatter so far, with some asking why the modules have to be tackled sequentially rather than in parallel work tracks.

Some have also pointed out that an IRT lasting over two years risks participant attrition, a frequent problem with ICANN’s interminable policy-making work.

The IRT comprises dozens of volunteers from all sections of the community, though the most-engaged tend to be the lawyers and consultants who stand to make money advising large enterprises on their dot-brand applications.

Epik customer exodus started when Monster quit

Domain registrants started leaving Epik in droves when CEO Rob Monster quit last year and serious allegations of financial mismanagement emerged, an analysis of the numbers shows.

Epik’s total gTLD domains under management began to free-fall in September 2022, dropping by more than 70,000 by the end of the year, almost all as a result of customers transferring their domains to other registrars.

Data from registry transaction reports I compiled shows Epik peaking at around 808,000 domains across all gTLDs at the end of August, having gone up every month that year.

But DUM started tumbling when Monster quit and customers started reporting problems extracting funds from their accounts in mid-September. Epik dropped to 792,000 domains that month, with 780,000 in October, 767,000 in November and 733,000 at the end of the year.

Transfers from Epik to other registrars also went up in September, almost doubling from the 9,500 domains reported in August to 16,000, a level of customer bleed it maintained until December, when it rocketed up to almost 23,000.

Most of the losses were of course in .com, but .net, .org and .xyz also saw big downsides.

The drop in revenue won’t help the company extract itself from its current dire straits. It’s publicly admitted it’s having difficulty paying its customers, some of whom complain they’re owed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Epik is facing a customer lawsuit, the prospect of a probe by its local state attorney general over its unlicensed escrow service, and recently had to shut down its unlicensed “insurance” service after a settlement with the Washington state insurance regulator.

Whoever runs its Twitter account has been pointing the finger of blame at Monster, saying the company, which it refers to as “Epik 2.0” is trying to move “out of a monster’s shadow”.

In recent days it’s tweeted reassurances that customers will eventually be made whole, legal threats against Monster (believed to still be non-executive chair) and, yesterday, expressions of a desire to “connect” with Monster and explore “alternative paths”.

.org back-end contract up for grabs

Public Interest Registry has started vetting potential registry service provider replacements for Identity Digital, ahead of a formal request for proposals later this year.

The company said this week that in order to run .org’s back-end, which would have to support almost 11 million domains, an RSP would have to hit a list of high-end criteria.

Candidates will have to have seven years experience running an RSP across multiple TLDs, with at least three registry clients, over 500,000 domains, and at least 25 ICANN-accredited registrars on its books, among other items.

That narrows the field down to probably fewer than a dozen companies. The likes of GoDaddy, CentralNic, Verisign, ZDNS, Tucows and Nominet would all presumably qualify, along with Identity Digital itself.

If a transition to a new RSP were to happen, it would be the largest TLD back-end migration in history by a considerable margin. The largest to date was the 3.1 million names that moved from Neustar (now GoDaddy) to Afilias (now Identity Digital) in 2018.

The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was when .org was substantially smaller, at 2.7 million names.

According to PIR’s most-recent tax return, Afilias was paid $15.6 million in 2021 for registry services.

PIR said in 2021 that it expects to issue the RFP in the second half of 2023.

The end of “do-nothing” ICANN?

ICANN’s new gTLD program hit a remarkable milestone earlier this month. Measured from the 2012 application window, on March 6 it officially overtook NASA’s Apollo Program, which put a dozen humans on the moon, in terms of duration.

But some in the community coming out of ICANN 76 last week appear to be cautiously optimistic that the days of the “do-nothing” ICANN, entirely too wrapped up in pointless bureaucracy and navel-gazing, may be coming to a close under its new leadership.

As I reported in January 2022, at that point ICANN hadn’t implemented a policy in over five years and didn’t seem to be close to actually getting stuff done.

That sentiment was reflected at a Cancun open-mic session last week, when 20-year community member Jordyn Buchanan, who works for Google and said he’d taken a five-year break from the ICANN process, spoke up.

“It’s not so great when I look at the substantive progress that has been made — or rather that hasn’t been made — in the past few years, or really over the past decade or so,” he told the board.

He gave several examples, not least the new gTLD program, where ICANN has been procrastinating for years.

“Consistently across the board, I think we see examples of where we’re just not living up to the vision of ICANN as being an entity that could be more responsive and more rapid looking at technological changes,” he said.

The only area where progress has been made is Whois, and that’s only because ICANN’s hand was forced by European Union legislation, he said.

Board member Chris Chapman, at his first full ICANN meeting in the role, responded positively to the feedback, stating: “There’s a real realization internally within the board that there have got to be more efficient, effective, and timely deliverables.”

Directors including interim CEO Sally Costerton and chair Tripti Sinha, made similar noises throughout the week, repeatedly invoking the idea of an “inflection point” for the institution, which faces increasing pressures from governments and other external forces.

The noises were encouraging to some.

The GNSO Council decided as the Cancun meeting closed to send a letter to Sinha and Costerton, both relatively recent appointments, observing “there seems to be a noticeable change, maybe even a cultural change, towards ‘getting things done’.”

The Council will express its support for “this spirit of pragmatism and delivery” and encourage ICANN to continue along the same lines.

Council’s spirits appear to have been raised by the ICANN’s board’s touring stakeholder bilaterals last week with questions about how ICANN can be more “agile”, particularly through the use of “small teams” to answer narrow policy problems.

Such a practice has been used in areas such as DNS abuse, and its arguably in use today answering the closed generics question.

Community members also used these sessions to express dissatisfaction with the lumbering Operational Design Assessments that have delayed Whois reform and the new gTLD program, suggesting that ODA work in future could run in parallel with the Policy Development Processes they seek to assess.

So, it seems pretty clear that ICANN’s new leadership used ICANN 76 send the signals they needed to send to get the community on board with their program.

Whether this honeymoon-period energy will lead to real change or gradually wither away under 25 years of accumulated labyrinthine bureaucracy, institutional lethargy, and personal beefs remains to be seen.

But this isn’t rocket science.