Q3 industry growth driven by .tk, .com and .icu

The domain name industry grew by 5.1 million names in the third quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign.
September ended with 359.8 million names across the board, the DNIB (pdf) shows.
Half of the growth came from Tokelau’s .tk, which is handed out for free by Freenom and is where domains never delete. It grew by 2.6 million names to 25.1 million in the quarter.
Next biggest grower was Verisign’s own .com, which grew by 1.5 million names to end September with an even 144 million. Its red-headed sibling, .net, lost 200,000 names over the same period and ended the quarter on 13.4 million.
Excluding .com and .tk leaves just one million names worth of net growth across the remainder of the industry, which comprises another 1,515 TLDs.
Taiwan’s .tw, which has been going through a bit of a spurt over the last year or so, added 300,000 domains, but .uk, which was a driver in Q2, was flat at 13.3 million.
New gTLDs grew by one million during the quarter, ending at 24 million, according to the DNIB.
That appears to have been driven almost entirely by ShortDot’s cheapo .icu, which has been flying off the shelves in China all year. Zone file records show it added over a million domains in Q3. It currently has 4.2 million names in its zone.
When these domains start to drop, it will likely be on a scale to materially affect the overall industry numbers in future DNIBs.

Three more dot-brands fizzle out. Total now 69, dudes

Three more dot-brand registries have opted to kill off their own gTLDs, bringing the total to date to 69.
The three self-terminating gTLDs, which all informed ICANN of their intentions in October and November, are: .工行 (.xn--estv75g), .nadex and .vistaprint.
The .vistaprint termination is perhaps of note, given that online printing company Vistaprint was one of the bidders in the 2016 auction of .web, due to its application for .webs being ruled confusingly similar.
It wound up paying just a dollar for that gTLD, due to the complexity of the .web contention set, but even that appears to have been a defensive move.
Since then, Vistaprint has also terminated its .vista contract, and my records show that it has been “in contracting” with ICANN for .webs since August 2016. Clearly, it’s in no rush to ever actually use the thing.
Also noteworthy, .工行 becomes only the second internationalized domain name gTLD to self-terminate, after Walmart called it quits on its pre-delegation contract for .一号店.
.工行 was owned by the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which by many measures is the largest bank in the world. It had revenue of over $105 billion last year, so whatever factors drove its decision to dump its dot-brand, cost was not one of them.
Finally, Nadex, an online stock-trading platform, evidently couldn’t find a use for .nadex, so it’s jumped ship too.
Hundreds of dot-brands remain, collectively managing thousands of domains and web sites.

America has Amazon’s back in gTLD fight at ICANN 66

The United States looks set to stand in the way of government attempts to further delay Amazon’s application for .amazon.
The US Governmental Advisory Committee representative, Vernita Harris, said today that the US “does not support further GAC advice on the .amazon issue” and that ICANN is well within its rights to move forward with Amazon’s controversial gTLD applications.
She spoke after a lengthy intervention from Brazilian rep Ambassador Achilles Zaluar Neto, who said South American nations view the contested string as their “birthright” and said ICANN is allowing Amazon “to run roughshod over the concerns and the cultural heritage of eight nations and tens of millions of people”.
It was the opening exchange in would could prove to be a fractious war of words at ICANN 66 in Montreal, which formally opens tomorrow.
The .amazon applications have been controversial because the eight countries in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization believe their unwritten cultural rights to the word outweigh Amazon’s trademark rights.
Forced to the negotiating table by ICANN last year, the two sides each posed their own sets of ideas about how the gTLD could be managed in such a way as to protect culturally sensitive terms at the second-level, and taking ACTO’s views into account.
But an ICANN-imposed deadline for talks to conclude in April was missed, largely as a result of the ongoing Venezuela crisis, which caused friction between the ACTO governments.
But today, Brazil said that ACTO is ready and willing to get back to the negotiating table asked that ICANN reopen these talks with an impartial mediator at the helm.
As things stand, Amazon is poised to get .amazon approved with a bunch of Public Interest Commitments in its registry contract that were written by Amazon without ACTO’s input.
Neto said that he believed a “win-win” deal could be found, which “would provide a positive impetus for internet governance instead of discrediting it”. He threatened to raise the issue at the Internet Governance Forum next month.
ICANN’s failure to reopen talks “would set a bad precedent and reflect badly on the current state of internet governance, including its ability to establish a balance between private interests and public policy concerns”, he said
But the US rallied to Amazon’s defense. Harris said:

The United States does not support further GAC advice on the .amazon issue. Any further questions from the GAC to the Board on this matter we believe is unwarranted… We are unaware of any international consensus that recognizes inherent governmental rights and geographic names. Discussions regarding protections of geographic names is the responsibility of other forums and therefore should be discussed and those relevant and appropriate forums. Contrary to statements made by others, it is the position of the United States that the Board’s various decisions authorizing ICANN to move forward with processing the.application are consistent with all relevant GAC advice. The United States therefore does not support further intervention that effectively works to prevent or delay the delegation of .amazon and we believe we are not supportive and we do not believe that it’s required.

This is a bit of a reversal from the US position in 2013.
Back then, the GAC wanted to issue consensus advice that ICANN should reject .amazon, but the US, protecting one of its largest companies, stood in the way of full consensus until, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, the US decided instead to abstain, apparently to appease an increasingly angry Brazil.
It was that decision that opened the door to the six more years of legal wrangling and delay that .amazon has been subject to.
With the US statement today, it seems that the GAC will be unlikely to be able to issue strong, full-consensus advice that will delay .amazon further, when it drafts its Montreal communique later in the week.
The only other GAC member speaking today to support the US position was Israel, whose rep said “since it is an ongoing issue for seven years, we don’t believe that there is a need for further delay”.
Several government reps — from China, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium and the European Commission — spoke in favor of Brazil’s view that ICANN should allow ACTO and Amazon back to the negotiating table.
The GAC is almost certain to say something about .amazon in its communique, due to drop Wednesday, but the ICANN board of directors does not currently have an Amazon-related item on its Montreal agenda.
UPDATE: The originally published version of this story incorrectly identified the US GAC representative as Ashley Heineman, who is listed on the GAC’s web site as the US representative. In fact, the speaker was Vernita Harris, acting associate administrator at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Had I been watching the meeting, rather that just listening to it, this would have been readily apparent to me. My apologies to Ms Heineman and Ms Harris for the error.

Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China

ICANN has announced the creation of another root server instance in China, which definitely, DEFINITELY won’t let the Chinese government mess with the interwebs.
ICANN said this week that it’s opened an instance of the L-root that it manages in Shanghai.
It’s the third L-root in China but only the first outside of Beijing.
In a press release announcing the installation, which was carried out with technical support from CNNIC and Shanghai Telecom, ICANN decided to preemptively head off any concerns that putting an important piece of internet infrastructure in China comes with added security risk:

Contrary to common misconception, root servers do not control the Internet. The operation of an instance also does not provide any mechanism to alter content of the DNS. Any modification of root zone content will be mitigated by a part of the DNS protocol known as the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and if an instance fail to respond to a query, resolvers will ask the same question to another instance or root server.

It’s merely the latest of 168 L-root installations and 1,015 copies of the 13 logical root servers, which all use IP Anycast to more quickly serve DNS answers to their local users.
Given how big and populous China is, there are surprisingly few root server instances in the country, according to root-servers.org.
In addition to ICANN’s three boxes, Verisign’s J-root and Internet Systems Consortium’s F-root have three in Beijing and two in Hangzhou between them. The K, I and F roots each have one instance in Beijing.
That’s eight nodes in China proper, which has 800 million internet users. Cross the border into semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which has a population of under eight million people, and there are nine root instances.
The city of Bucharest, Romania (pop. 1.8 million) has the same number of root instances as China.

China’s MySpace trainwreck sells its gTLD

A once-hot Chinese social networking company that now sells used cars instead has offloaded its gTLD.
The registry contract for .ren, the Pinyin for the Chinese “人”, meaning “people”, has been transferred from Beijing Qianxiang Wangjing Technology Development Co to ZDNS International.
The original registry is better known by the name Renren.
At the time the new gTLD was applied for in 2012, Renren was at the peak of its powers, discussed in the same breath as Facebook.
A social networking site with close to 60 million active monthly users in China, it had recently raised $800 million by floating on the New York Stock Exchange.
But it has fallen on hard times since, and the site was sold for just $20 million in cash and $40 million of stock last November.
A number of articles around the same time chart its downfall, calling it a “trainwreck”, a “digital ghost town” and, even more embarrassingly, “China’s answer to MySpace”
You get the idea.
Renren the company is still a going concern due to its now-core business of selling used cars in China, but the NYSE threatened to delist its stock a couple of weeks ago because its share price had been below $1 for more than 30 days.
Now, it seems it’s getting rid of its gTLD too.
.ren has been bought (presumably) by ZDNS International, the Hong Kong-based arm of DNS service provider ZDNS.
It’s not a dot-brand. The space is open to all-comers and is currently priced competitively with .com.
The gTLD’s fortunes tracked the site’s declining popularity. It’s been on the slide, volume-wise, for years.
It peaked at around 320,000 zone file domains in November 2016, comparable to other TLDs popular in China, but today stands at around 17,000.
It’s the second registry contract ZDNS has taken over recently. A month ago, I reported it has taken over .fans from CentralNic.
ZDNS was already providing back-end services for .ren.

Three-letter .com owned by hospital “hijacked”

A California hospital has seen its three-letter .com domain reportedly hijacked and transferred to a registrar in China.
Sonoma Valley Hospital, a 75-bed facility north of San Francisco, was using svh.com as its primary domain until earlier this month, when it abruptly stopped working.
The Sonoma Index-Tribune reports that the domain was “maliciously acquired”, according to a hospital spokesperson.
It does not seem to be a case of a lapsed registration.
Historical Whois records archived by DomainTools show that svh.com, which had been registered with Network Solutions, had over a year left on its registration when it was transferred to BizCN in early August.
BizCN is based in China and has around 711,000 gTLD domains under management, having shrunk by about 300,000 names over the 12 months to April.
The Sonoma newspaper speculates that the domain may have been hijacked via a phishing attack. It’s not clear whether the hospital or NetSol, part of the Web.com group, was the target.
Three-letter .com names are highly prized, usually selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Domain investors should obviously steer clear of svh.com, which will is probably already up for sale.
Not only is there a possibility of attracting unwelcome legal attention, but there’s also the moral implications of paying somebody who would steal from a hospital.
The hospital in question has now changed its name to sonomavalleyhospital.org. This transition, which includes migrating the email addresses of all of its staff, seems to have taken several days.
Anyone sending personal medical information to the old svh.com email addresses may find that information in the wrong hands.

Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner

It appears that the struggling new gTLD .fans has changed ownership for the second time in a year.
According to ICANN’s web site, the .fans Registry Agreement was assigned to a company called ZDNS International on June 28.
Since August 2018, the contract had been in the hands of a CentralNic subsidiary called Fans TLD, having been originally operated by Asiamix Digital.
ZDNS International appears to be a newish Hong Kong subsidiary of major China-based DNS service provider ZDNS.
ZDNS provides DNS services for more than 20 TLDs, mostly Chinese-language, but as far as I can tell it is not the contracted party for any.
It’s also known for providing registry gateway services for non-Chinese registries that want to set up shop in the country.
CentralNic took over .fans last year after Asiamix failed to get the TLD’s sales to take off.
.fans had about 1,700 domains under management at the time, and it’s been pretty much flat ever since. I don’t think CentralNic has been promoting it.
Over the same period, singular competitor .fan, which Donuts acquired from Asiamix last year, has gone from 0 to almost 3,000 registrations.
If CentralNic, a public company, made a profit on the flip it does not appear to have been material enough to require disclosure to shareholders.

MMX to pay $5.1 million to get out of terrible .london deal

Minds + Machines will pay its partner on .london roughly $5.1 million in order to put the catastrophic deal to bed for good.
That’s a reduction from the $7.9 million liability it had previously estimated.
The company said last week that it will pay an unspecified partner the $5.1 million “as full and final settlement for any further liability or contractual spend” after renegotiating the contract.
In April, MMX said that the deal had cost it $13.7 million since the outset.
While MMX has never publicly fingered the contract in question, which has been a pair of concrete boots for years, its deal with .london’s London & Partners is the only one that fits the bill.
The registry secured L&P, the marketing arm of the London Mayor’s office, as a client during the mayoral reign of Boris Johnson, the man set to be anointed the UK’s next prime minister this week.
It agreed to make millions of dollars in guaranteed payments over the duration of the contract, because it expected to sell a shedload of .london domains.
That never happened. The gTLD peaked at 86,000 names in March 2018 and was down to 54,000 a year later, evidently a fraction of what MMX had planned for.
The renegotiated deal — I believe at least the second time the deal has been amended — is “in principle” for now, with formal approval expected soon.
In its trading statement last week, MMX also said that the first half of the year ended with a 19% increase in regs, ending June at about 1.82 million.
It said it has “stabilised” declining billings in its acquired ICM Registry portfolio of porn-themed TLDs at $2.8 million, and that it has a “clear pathway” to growth from the four zones.
It’s hoping “further new initiatives” — likely a reference to a new trademark-blocking service — will help out in the current half.
MMX also said that it’s spending $1 million of its cash reserves on a stock buyback.

China domain smaller than expected

The Chinese national ccTLD registry has reported 2018 registration figures below what outsiders had estimated.
CNNIC said last week (in Chinese) that it ended last year with 21.24 million .cn domain names under management.
That’s quite a lot below the 22.7 million domains reported by Verisign’s Q4 Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf).
It would also slip .cn into second-place after .tk in the ccTLD rankings, and into third place overall, if the DNIB’s estimate of .tk’s 21.5 million domains is accurate.
Tokelau’s repurposed ccTLD is unusual in that the registry does not delete domains that expire or are suspended for abuse, meaning it’s often excluded from growth comparisons.
China would still be comfortably ahead of Germany’s .de, the next-largest “real” ccTLD, with 16.2 million domains.
CNNIC added that it ended 2018 with 1.72 million registered domains in .中国 (.xn--fiqs8s), which is the Chinese name for China and the country’s internationalized domain name ccTLD.
CNNC has been coy about its reg numbers for the last couple of years.
It stopped publishing monthly totals on its web site in February 2017, when it had 20.8 million .cn domains under management.

.icu joins the million-domains club in one year, but spam triples

Another new gTLD has joined the exclusive list of those to enter seven figures in terms of domains under management.
.icu, managed by ShortDot, topped one million names this week, according to COO Kevin Kopas.
It’s taken about a month for DUM to increase from 900,000 names, and if zone files are any guide half of that growth seems to have happened in the last week.
.icu domains currently sell for between $1 and $2 for the first year at the cheap end of the market, where most regs are concentrated, with renewals closer to the $10 mark.
The gTLD joins the likes of .club, .xyz, .site and .online to cross the seven-figure threshold.
When we reported on the 900,000-reg mark at the end of May, we noted that .icu had a SpamHaus “badness” rating of 6.4%, meaning that 6.4% of all the emails coming from .icu addresses that SpamHaus saw were classified as spam.
That score was roughly the same as .com, so therefore pretty respectable.
But in the meantime, .icu’s badness score has almost tripled, to 17.4%, while .com’s has stayed about the same.
Picking through the Google search results and Alexa list for .icu domains, it appears that high-quality legit web sites are few and far between.
Whether that’s a fixable symptom of .icu’s rapid growth — it’s only about 13 months post-launch — or a predictor of poor long-term potential remains to be seen.