New gTLD applicants up to 207

With the registration deadline less than four weeks away, ICANN has revealed that it has received 207 sign-ups for generic top-level domain applications.
That’s an increase of 63 over the last week and up 163 on February 13.
As with previous announcements of this kind, certain caveats apply.
ICANN is talking about registered users of its TLD Application System. Each TAS account can be used to file up to 50 applications.
In practice I expect very few accounts will be used to file that many.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, tas

Olympic gTLD showdown coming in Costa Rica

While the ICANN public meeting in Dakar last October was notable for a heated clash between governments and the domain name industry, the Costa Rica meeting next week may be characterized by these two recent enemies uniting against a common enemy.
ICANN staff.
Members of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, the Governmental Advisory Committee and the At-Large Advisory Committee all appear to be equally livid about a last-minute new gTLD program surprise sprung by ICANN late last week.
The hitch relates to the ongoing saga about special brand protection for the International Olympic Committee, Red Cross and Red Crescent movements in the new gTLD program.
The need to develop rights protection mechanisms for essentially just three organizations has always been a slightly ridiculous and unnecessary premise, but recently it has assumed symbolic proportions, cutting to the heart of the multistakeholder model itself.
Now, following a perplexing eleventh-hour ICANN mandate, Costa Rica is likely to see some fierce debate about the ICANN decision to kick off the new gTLD program last June.
We expect the GNSO and the GAC to show a relatively united front against ICANN staff on the IOC/RC issue. The At-Large Advisory Committee is also set to throw a bomb or two.
There’s even an outside chance that upcoming talks could wind up adding delay to the next phase of the new gTLD program itself…
The full text of this pre-ICANN 43 policy analysis is available to DomainIncite PRO subscribers here.

1 Comment Tagged: costa rica, cybersquatting, gac, ICANN, international olympic committee, new gTLDs, olympics, red crescent, red cross, trademarks

O.co loses 61% of its traffic to O.com

Overstock.com’s decision to rebrand itself O.co had a disastrous effect on the internet retailer’s traffic, according to its CEO.
Patrick Byrne told financial analysts yesterday that “O.co was my bad call” and that “about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com”
It’s not clear what the source of the data is, or why the measurement given was out of 13, but it works out to 61%.
Byrne noted that people may have typed o.co instead after figuring out that o.com doesn’t work – it’s currently reserved, alongside most other single-letter .com domains, by Verisign.
His comments came as Overstock reported 2011 revenue down 3% to $1.05 billion and fourth-quarter revenue down 10% to $314 million.
Byrne said on a conference call with analysts:

There were some bad decisions for which I take responsibility in marketing O.co. O.co was odd in that it worked on one level. It did get out there into people’s heads, but what we discovered, and we turned it up slowly and we actually had nice adoption from the beginning of last year, gradually people shifting to O.co and then, but we got into the Christmas season and it worked terribly for people who were not familiar with us. There was a tremendous amount of traffic diverting to O.com and I think we’ve figured out that it was about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com. Now some of them may have come, trying anyway.

The company bought o.co from registry .CO Internet for $350,000 in July 2010, during the .co relaunch. It later said it would rebrand the company on its new domain.
It even bought the naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum, which is now known as the O.co Coliseum.
Until quite recently, Overstock was an important .CO Internet reference customer. Now, I’m guessing, not so much.
Overstock has “slowed” its rebranding, reverting to referring to o.co as a “shortcut” rather than its primary address, which remains overstock.com.
The company bought o.info last year and this week launched the site as an information portal for its products. It also operates o.biz as a business-to-business site.

25 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, o.co, o.com, verisign

Directi emerges as new gTLD applicant

The India-based domain name registrar Directi plans to apply for a bunch of new generic top-level domains, using ARI Registry Services as its back-end registry provider.
Directi has set up a new entity, Radix, to handle its applications and registry business.
The number and nature of the gTLDs in Radix’s plans have not been revealed, but the company uses words like “entrepreneurial” and “ambitious” to describe the move.
Reading between the lines, I’m going to lump Radix in with the like of Minds+Machines, Donuts, and Demand Media as one of the few companies to reveal big multiple-gTLD investment plans.
These “domainer” applicants (as opposed to focused, single-string applicants) are the guys to watch post-May 1, when the list of applications is published by ICANN.
In addition to Radix, Directi owns ResellerClub, LogicBoxes, BigRock and WebHosting.info.
According to Whois, radix.com belongs to a Brazilian investment company. It does not currently resolve.
Assuming there’s no affiliation with Directi, I think this officially means that Andrew Allemann is no longer allowed to mock companies that launch services before they own the matching .com domain.

1 Comment Tagged: ari registry services, directi, ICANN, new gTLDs

China cracks down on new gTLD applicants

Chinese companies planning to apply to ICANN for a new generic top-level domain will have to get a permit from the government, it has been announced.
Applicants will have to reveal their services, their contingency plans, and their trademark protection and anti-abuse procedures, among other details, to China before applying.
The news, which could be troubling to some Chinese gTLD applicants, came in an official Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announcement yesterday.
A local source confirmed that the Ministry plans to issue permits to new gTLD applicants.
It seems to apply to any gTLD, but a second set of regulations to govern the obtaining of government non-objection letters in the case of geographic strings has also been introduced.
These rules seem to apply only to local companies. As far as I know China is not yet claiming exclusive ownership of the Chinese language and script as it has in the past.
I also hear on the grapevine that China thinks ICANN is subject to a business tax on its $185,000 application fees, and that applicants are being asked to pre-pay this tax on ICANN’s behalf.
The nation has form when it comes to heavy-handed domain name industry regulation.
Rules forcing registrants to submit ID when they register .cn domain names have caused the number of ccTLD registrations to plummet over the last couple of years.
The .cn space peaked at about 14 million domains under management in 2009 and stands at just 3.3 million today.

Comment Tagged: .cn, china, ICANN, new gTLDs

ICANN staffer linked to hacked intelligence firm

Former ICANN director Veni Markovski, who currently heads Eastern European relations at the organization, has been fingered by Wikileaks as a Stratfor source.
Stratfor is the “global intelligence” outfit, once described by Barron’s as “The Shadow CIA”, which had its email server pwned by the hacker group Anonymous last year.
Wikileaks was given over five million Stratfor emails by Anonymous, which it started to publish earlier this week.
According to several of these emails, Markovski reached out to Strafor, and was then cultivated as a “source”, after the company’s analysis was quoted in coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia war.
I think the emails say a lot more about Stratfor and its methods than they do about Markovski.
Shortly after making contact, Stratfor senior Eurasia analyst Lauren Goodrich asked a colleague to check out this “Shady Bulgarian”.
“Was wondering if he has OC [organized crime] or FSB [the Russian Federal Security Service] connections,” Goodrich wrote.
This background check seemed to extend to checking for media references and then reading the resume Markovski publishes openly on his web site.
The subsequent response from Stratfor analyst Fred Burton described Markovski as “hooked into the Bulgairan OC, but nothing too shady bout that since he is Bulgarian”.
Quite what “hooked into” was supposed to mean in this context is open to interpretation.
In September 2008 emails, Goodrich described him as a “Bulgarian billionaire telecommunications oligarch” and “kinda a strange guy, but very powerful in business circles.”
Markovski joined ICANN as manager of regional relations for Eastern Europe, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2007.
A familiar face at ICANN, he also served on its board of directors between 2003 and 2006. He’s chair of the Internet Society of Bulgaria, and founded the Bulgarian ISP bol.bg.
The Wikileaks emails reveal that Goodrich and Markovski communicated about political and security developments in the region from 2008 until at least June of last year.
One of the questions Markovski was asked, ironically, was “What can a small company like Stratfor do to protect itself from cyber-attacks?”
But the relationship, frankly, doesn’t appear to be much different to that of a journalist and his source. I’ve seen no evidence in the leaks of nefarious activity or of money changing hands.
Despite all the “Shadow CIA” marketing nonsense, there’s a substantial school of thought that says Stratfor is not nearly as cloak-and-dagger as it likes to make out.
Headlines such as “Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously“, published in The Atlantic this week, strike me as probably closer to the truth.
If you want to judge for yourself, you can read the emails here.
UPDATE: Markovski provided the following statement: “I have not been involved with Stratfor. I am not in the position to address other people’s private emails, which are being quoted in your article.”

Comment Tagged: ICANN, stratfor, veni markovski, wikileaks

M+M in bizarre Bengaluru gTLD bid

Minds + Machines is to apply to ICANN for .bangaluru, a top-level domain for the Indian city of Bengaluru.
Parent Top Level Domain Holdings announced today that M+M will enter into a joint venture with local partner India TL Domain for the application.
Confusingly, the proposed gTLD appears to be a misspelling – or at least a very uncommon spelling – of the name of the city in question.
The city is still often known by its old colonial name, Bangalore. But in 2006 it officially renamed itself Bengaluru, its original Kannada name.
But a TLDH spokesperson has confirmed that the company is applying for .bangaluru, with an A, which does not appear to be an official name for the city in any language.
The application has the support of the Bengaluru’s mayor’s office, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, which is a prerequisite for city gTLD applications.
On its web site, BBMP calls the city “Bengaluru”, but in its letter of support for the M+M/ITLD bid it refers to “Bangaluru” and “dot Bangaluru”.
Is the city going to get a gTLD with a confusing Latin spelling? It certainly appears that way.
Bengaluru is India’s third most-populous city, with six million citizens. It’s known as India’s tech hub.
M+M and ITLD have also previously been linked to a joint-venture bid for .mumbai, though a question mark was raised over its governmental support last August.

Comment Tagged: .bangaluru, .bengaluru, india tl domain, Minds + Machines, tldh, top level domain holdings

DomainIncite turns two

I almost forgot. Actually, I did forget.
Yesterday was DomainIncite’s second birthday.
It was an eventful year for the site, reflecting an eventful year for the industry. We broke a metric ton of domain name news and our page view and unique reader counts more than doubled.
And of course we launched DomainIncite PRO, our subscription-supported analysis service. For PRO, we’ve brought on board two new contributing analysts already, with a third hopefully coming soon.
As this is the one day of the year I let the Chinese wall in my head crumble, I’d like to give my annual shout-out to all of DI’s advertisers, past and present. Your support is very much appreciated.
As readers with young children in their families will know, two is the age at which kids start becoming aggressive, pain-in-the-ass monsters that will stop at nothing when it comes to seeing what they can get away with.
Just sayin’.
Anyway, it’s all good. Happy birthday me.

12 Comments Tagged: domainincite

Sedari working on .africa gTLD bid

Sedari has been contracted to support the controversial African Union-backed .africa top-level domain application.
The new gTLD specialist will supply UniForum with its usual suite of financial, technical and policy support services, Sedari said today.
South Africa-based UniForum was given approval for its .africa bid by the AU last week, raising questions over a longstanding rival application by DotConnectAfrica.
UniForum is already responsible for South Africa’s .za country-code top-level domain.

Comment Tagged: africa, african union, dotconnectafrica, sedari, uniforum

Four companies given OK for .osaka

While GMO Registry announced yesterday that it had been given government approval to apply for the geo-gTLD .osaka, apparently it was not alone.
Four companies were given the same approval by the Osaka Prefecture, according to local gTLD consultancy UrbanBrain.
As well as GMO, letters of non-objection have been given to UrbanBrain parent company Interlink, BusinessRalliart, and Future Spirits, UrbanBrain’s Jacob Williams said.
Interlink is a Japanese ISP and domain registrar, Future Spirits is a hosting company, and BusinessRalliart is a technology company already linked to bids for .okinawa and .ryukyu.
Whether all four actually apply is another matter entirely — cash could be saved if the companies combine their efforts now or if some of the less cash-rich applicants withdraw.

Comment Tagged: .osaka, businessralliart, future spirits, gmo registry, interlink, urbanbrain