dotFree’s “free” domain names explained

As I reported a couple of days ago, a Czech company called The dotFree Group wants to apply to ICANN for a .free top-level domain, and will offer domain names for free.
Now for the small print – not all .free domain names will be free, and there will be strict limitations on how many free domains any given individual is able to register.
Here is an email interview I conducted with dotFree chief executive Dominique Piatti, which I think covers the basics of the business model and contains a few surprises.
I’ve corrected a few typos, but other than that it’s unedited.

DI: Applying for a new TLD will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and running it over the longer term will cost more. How does dotFree plan to cover the cost of running a free TLD?
Piatti: We are working with Venture Capital companies together from Eastern Europe and have an estimated turnover of EUR 1.25 million for 2011. In addition to this we are generating substantial revenue with our current projects www.cz.cc (which is a free second-level domain name registry) and with the Domain Registrar Script which is currently in version 1.3.5 (www.registrar-script.cz.cc).
DI: .free could be a desirable TLD for domain investors. Will there be any limitations on how many .free domains an individual is allowed to register? What would prevent a single person registering hundreds of thousands of .free domains?
Piatti: Yes, currently we plan that each individual is allow to have 1 .free domain at no costs within their account. If a user plans to have more domain names he can upgrade to VIP status (eg. $5/year and you can hold up to 20 domains in your account) similar like we have it successfully tested with www.cz.cc over the past 12 months. We have an advanced fraud detection tool developed which identifies double accounts owned by the same person.
DI: Do you anticipate a .free aftermarket? Would somebody be able to register, for example, “poker.free” for free and then sell it to somebody else for hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Piatti: Yes, we launch .free the same way as any other TLD in the market with the difference that every individual can have a .free domain at no costs. We will launch similar to the most recent TLD’s like .co and .me with premium domains, auctions etc. Also, aftermarket sales are possible therefore.
DI: Would “premium” domains also be free, or would you charge for them like you do with premium .cz.cc names?
Piatti: All our premium domains will cost around $5/year and will not be free. There are around 200,000 premium domains planned.
DI: Do you anticipate selling .free domains via registrars like Go Daddy and eNom, or would you expect to sell direct to the end user?
Piatti: Both. In our business plan we have the ICANN accredited registrars as distribution channels listed but we will also distribute those .free domain names directly over our own website.
DI: Would there be a “landrush” period? Would you auction premium names or would it be first-come-first-served?
Piatti: The launch will be very similar to .co and .me with everything it takes to make .free a highly successful gTLD.

16 Comments Tagged: .free, dominique piatti, dotfree group, ICANN, new TLDs

Porno union will try to shaft .xxx

The fight between ICM Registry and the Free Speech Coalition over the proposed .xxx top-level domain is not over yet.
The porn trade group has a plan to block ICM’s passage through the ICANN process, and has already stepped up efforts to rally the adult entertainment industry to its cause.
Last weekend at the AVN Show in Florida, FSC chair Diane Duke reportedly said:

ICM is saying this is a done deal… but it is not a done deal. We [the FSC] have a strategy to block the application. I have spoken with people from ICANN, and they agreed that this is not a done deal.

Asked whether lawsuits would be required, Duke reportedly answered: “There are other avenues to block this.”
These comments and others suggest that the FSC intends to use ICANN processes to, at the very least, delay .xxx’s delegation.
A public comment period will be launched soon on the proposed ICM-ICANN registry contract. This will likely be oversubscribed by FSC supporters.
If the contract ends up being bounced to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee for consideration, there’s another opportunity for FSC lobbying.
Then, crucially, if ICANN votes to approve .xxx, the FSC could attempt to temporarily block the actual delegation to the DNS root by filing a Reconsideration Request.
Under my reading of the Reconsideration procedure, the actual delegation of the TLD could be delayed by anything between 30 and 120 days. Possibly longer.
The FSC would need to show at the very least that it would be harmed by .xxx’s introduction. If successful, the best case scenario for the FSC would see the resolution approving .xxx bounced back to the ICANN board for a second vote.
Beyond that, there’s always an Independent Review Panel. For that, the FSC would need to show that the .xxx approval breached ICANN’s bylaws or articles of incorporation, which seems to me to be a more challenging proposition. Also very expensive.
Another interesting quote from the AVN article – reportedly Allan Gelbard, lawyer to John “Buttman” Stagliano, said that the adult industry may be unduly worrying because:

anti-trust and trademark legal challenges would be brought immediately following the final approval by the ICANN board

Make of that what you will.
There’s also a new anti-.xxx blog, written by Theresa “Dark Lady” Reed, containing a new “satirical” video spoofing ICM.
To be honest, the funniest thing about it for me was the decision to cast a handsome, shiny-toothed American anchorman type as British ICM president Stuart Lawley.

10 Comments Tagged: buttman, dark lady, diane duke, free speech coalition, ICANN, icm registry, independent review panel, irp, john stagliano, reconsideration, theresa reed, xxx

Want thousands of free .jobs domains? Now’s your chance

Employ Media wants to hear from companies interested in registering .jobs domain names in bulk, at the start of its recently approved landrush process.
The company has set up a web site to handle expressions of interest of “high level business concepts on how these domain names could be developed either individually or in bulk”.
Before now, .jobs domains have been limited to the name of the company registering them. IBM, for example, uses ibm.jobs to bounce to its HR pages.
Employ Media applied to ICANN to liberalize the namespace, allowing the registration of the names of professions and places, and was successful over the objections of many existing jobs boards.
From the press release:

“We believe accepting EOI’s will facilitate dialog with potential RFP applicants. We’re particularly interested in hearing ideas comprising a bulk number of domains,” states Tom Embrescia, Chairman of Employ Media. “Up to now, we’ve only allowed company names such as www.Applebees.jobs and www.UnionPacific.jobs. Now we are looking for ideas for how companies can easily and uniformly distribute their jobs and related information to user-intuitive sites such as www.Chicago.jobs, www.sales.jobs, and www.restaurant.jobs.”

Right now, the company is only looking for 150-word outlines of business ideas. The RFP period will begin shortly after the EOI period closes on August 24 (less than two weeks from now).
Employ Media already has plans in place with the DirectEmployers Association to launch universe.jobs, a free jobs portal using thousands of premium .jobs domains as entry points.
It remains to be seen how concrete these plans are, although the two outfits have already run a “beta test” of the scheme, so I’m guessing they’re quite firm.
If you fancy your chances, the RFP site is RFP.jobs.
There are at least two filthy domain hacks I intend to apply for. All I need to do is think of a way I can pretend they benefit the global HR community, which is an unfortunate prerequisite.

2 Comments Tagged: .jobs, directemployers association, employ media, ICANN, landrush, universe.jobs

Will Go Daddy be the next domain name IPO?

It was four years ago this week, August 8, 2006, when Bob Parsons unexpectedly canceled Go Daddy’s planned IPO at the eleventh hour.
But with its closest competitor, eNom parent Demand Media, ready to go public, eyes inevitably turn to Scottsdale to see if the market leader is ready to follow suit.
I’ve no doubt Go Daddy will be watching Demand’s IPO carefully, but there are some reasons to believe a me-too offering is not a short-term certainty.
Bob Parsons owns Go Daddy
First, and most importantly, Bob Parsons owns Go Daddy. At the time of the 2006 S-1, he was the company’s sole investor, and I believe that’s still the case.
Unlike Demand Media, which raised about $355 million in financing in its early days, Go Daddy doesn’t have a gang of institutional investors clamoring for a return on their investments.
The flip-side of this argument is that it does have is a loyal senior management team holding share options they’re not yet able to cash in on the public markets.
The fact that Parsons is still in charge may cause some investor nerves, given the trust hit he will have taken on Wall Street four years ago, but I don’t think that’s a massive consideration.
The IPO market is still poor
The first attempt at an IPO was canceled mainly due to poor market conditions, according to Parsons’ blog post at the time.
It had only been a few months since Vonage’s catastrophic offering, which saw early-mover investors lose millions, and there was little appetite for tech IPOs.
A lot has changed in the last four years, but the current tech IPO market is still struggling, with many companies recently under-pricing their offerings or losing value since.
According to VentureDeal stats reported at GigaOm, of the 21 tech IPOs in the first half of this year, only five were trading above their IPO price at the end of July. Most had seen double-digit declines.
While some analysts think the upcoming Skype and Demand Media IPOs could breathe life into the market, it’s far from a certainty.
Go Daddy is a cash cow
Go Daddy’s financial statements will look a lot healthier today that back in 2006.
Parsons said he yanked the IPO in part because there was too much focus on Go Daddy’s performance under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
Under GAAP, Go Daddy was a loss-making company, due to the way that revenue from domain names has to be recognized over the course of the registration while the associated costs are incurred up-front.
This meant that Go Daddy was a cash machine – with something like $95 million of deferred revenue on its balance sheet at the time of the 2006 filing – but technically unprofitable.
Whether this has changed or not, I don’t know; Go Daddy is still growing. But it’s a lot larger now than it was in 2006, and its cashflow and balance sheets will certainly look impressive even if its income statement does not.
I’m guessing a lot will depend on how Demand performs over the coming months as to whether Go Daddy follows its lead.
But Parsons said four years ago that the firm would revisit the public markets again, and I’m sure we won’t have too long to wait until it does.

4 Comments Tagged: bob parsons, demand media, enom, go daddy, ipo

eNom called world’s most “abusive” registrar

A small security firm has singled out eNom as the domain name registrar and web host with the most criminal activity on its network.
HostExploit released a report today claiming the concentration of “badware” on the network belonging to eNom and its soon-to-be-public parent Demand Media is “exceptionally high”.
The claim is based on the proportion of dodgy sites on eNom’s network relative to its size, rather than the actual quantity.
The report says the Demand-owned autonomous system AS21740 has the fifth-highest amount of badware and the sixth-highest number of botnet command and control servers.
It goes on to say that the four or five AS’s with larger amounts of malware are themselves between 10 and 7,500 larger than eNom, as measured by address space.
The report, which I’m guessing HostExploit released to coincide with the hype around Demand Media’s upcoming IPO, draws heavily on existing research, such as this recent KnuJon registrar report (pdf).
It also uses stats from Google-backed StopBadware.org to demonstrate that eNom hosts a disproportionately large number of malware-serving URLs.
According to StopBadware, Go Daddy actually hosts more bad URLs than eNom – 10,797 versus 7,429 – but Go Daddy’s market share is of course over three times larger.
According to WebHosting.info, eNom currently has 9.5 million domains under management, compared to Go Daddy’s 35.2 million.
In Demand Media’s IPO registration statement, filed last Friday, the company acknowledges that it sometimes gets bad publicity but says it’s caught between a rock and a hard place.

We do not monitor or review the appropriateness of the domain names we register for our customers or the content of our network of customer websites, and we have no control over the activities in which our customers engage.
While we have policies in place to terminate domain names if presented with a court order or governmental injunction, we have in the past been publicly criticized for not being more proactive in this area by consumer watchdogs and we may encounter similar criticism in the future. This criticism could harm our reputation.
Conversely, were we to terminate a domain name registration in the absence of legal compulsion, we could be criticized for prematurely and improperly terminating a domain name registered by a customer.

3 Comments Tagged: demand media, enom, go daddy, hostexploit, ipo, knujon, stopbadware

Some Skype domain names still owned by ex-employees

Oops! A number of Skype’s domain names are still registered in the names of people who no longer work for the company.
The embarrassing oversight was revealed in the company’s S-1 registration statement (huge HTML file), filed yesterday as the company prepares to launch its IPO.
Here’s the relevant section, with my emphasis.

Third parties have registered domain names that contain the Skype trademark without our consent, and a small proportion of the Skype domain names are registered in the names of our former employees rather than in our name. While we are seeking to have these domain names transferred to us, we may not be successful and to the extent that Skype domain names are not under our control in certain countries, it could hinder our marketing efforts, cause confusion to our users and may harm our reputation in those countries if those domain names are used in ways unrelated to our business or in ways with which we would not agree.

The company appears to be having a hard time protecting its brand in the offline world, too.
According to the S-1, News Corp arm BskyB, which runs Sky TV in the UK, has been objecting to Skype’s trademark applications, and it recently manage to block one such application in the EU.
It’s also having problems getting trademark protection in Asia, where others have registered very similar marks.

2 Comments Tagged: bskyb, skype, trademarks

DotFree wants to give away .free domains

A Czech company has become the latest to say it will apply for a new top-level domain, but it’s got a unique twist – domain registration will be free.
The dotFree Group, based near Prague, says it will apply for .free and offer the domains free of charge.

.FREE is going to be a generic Top Level Domain, which is going to be available for free, as the name itself says. Individuals, companies, organizations, groups, etc. are going to be able to register their .FREE website under a desirable name.

Can: open. Worms: everywhere.

• How many registrars will actually want to carry this TLD?
• How will dotFree fund its ICANN application fee and ongoing running costs?
• Will there be a landrush? How will that work?
• Will there be an after-market? With a no-risk investment, .free would be a domainer’s paradise.
• How will the registry prevent rampant abuse by spammers?
• Are these guys serious?

I’ve got a call in, so maybe we’ll find out more soon.
The dotFree Group already offers free domain names at the third level under cz.cc, and sells a pricey script so anyone can become a “registrar”.
The company sounds like it already has the infrastructure to support a small TLD.There are apparently 50,000 .cz.cc domains registered today, which already makes it bigger than some gTLDs.
(Hat tip: @dotRadio)

16 Comments Tagged: .free, dotfree group, ICANN, new TLDs

Iron Mountain beds another registry

Iron Mountain puts itself about a bit, doesn’t it?
The company has signed a co-referral deal with wannabe new top-level domain registry operator UrbanBrain. The deal appears identical to one it inked with Central Registry Solutions in May.
Under these deals, Iron Mountain will refer potential TLD applicants to UrbanBrain (or CRS) and the registries will refer their clients to Iron Mountain for data escrow services.
The press releases don’t make it clear under what circumstances clients will be referred to UrbanBrain versus CRS, but given UrbanBrain is Japanese it could be along geographical lines.
Again, I ask: who benefits most?
My guess is still Iron Mountain, which has already got a pretty tight grip on the ICANN-mandated data escrow market. I can’t see it sending as much traffic to the registries as it receives.

1 Comment Tagged: central registry solutions, iron mountain, new TLDs, urbanbran

Domainers get love, but no refunds for .co cybersquatters

.CO Internet has ramped up its anti-cybersquatter messaging, promising no refunds for trademark-infringing .co registrants, no matter how much they paid for their domains.
An “Open Letter to .co Domain Registrants”, published by the company yesterday, also contains a shout-out to domainers, which I think may be a first from a domain registry.
The letter points out, as I have previously, that .co is subject to the UDRP on the same terms as other TLDs including .com.

The outcome of a UDRP proceeding is binding, and no refunds will be given under any circumstances — regardless of how much money you may have paid to secure the domain; whether the domain was acquired directly via a domain registrar or through a domain auction venue; and whether you were unaware that you had infringed on someone else’s rights.

There’s similar text on the front page of COauctions.com, where the registry is currently auctioning off contested landrush applications.
Is this just a matter of legal ass-covering? Or are there some gray-area domains in the landrush auction?
Despite all the promotional work the registry performed in the run-up to general availability, there are still plenty of people who seemed to believe .co represented new, lawless territory.
The letter ends with the statement that “.CO Internet is committed to protecting the rights of brand owners, domain investors, and end users.”
Domainers getting some love in the same breath as brand owners is not something you hear every day, particularly from registries.

7 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, auction, cybersquatting, landrush, udrp

.CO landrush auctions kick off today

.CO Internet has today started auctioning off domain names that had multiple applicants during the .co landrush earlier this summer.
According to the company, over 2,500 names will be auctioned over the next four weeks. The top three most-contested names were Slots.co, Insure.co and Denver.co.

Other notable .CO domain names up for auction include Mexi.co, America.co, Betting.co, Vitamins.co, UsedCars.co, Happy.co, Ebook.co and Jackpot.co.

Registrants who applied for one of the contested domains need to sign up at www.COauctions.co.
There have been almost 410,000 .co registrations since the Colombian country-code domain was opened up to international registrants last month.
So far, the biggest seller has been o.co, sold to Overstock for $350,000.
Given that slots.com sold for $5.5 million, it seems likely that slots.co could fetch something in five figures or beyond.

6 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, auctions, landrush