Facebook rebrand: did one new gTLD or domainer just hit the jackpot?

Facebook is reportedly just days away from unveiling a major corporate rebranding, which will raise only one question in the minds of DI readers: what domain is it going to use?

Citing an unnamed source, The Verge is scooping that a name change is coming in the next week or so “to reflect its focus on building the metaverse”.

The article suggests that we’re looking at a new parent company, with a new umbrella brand, for services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, along the same lines as Google’s reorganization under the Alphabet monicker a few years back.

You’ll recall that Alphabet famously chose abc.xyz as its domain, giving a huge early boost to marketing efforts at XYZ.com’s .xyz registry.

Could a different TLD registry get a similar leg-up from a new Facebook identity?

If the company has chosen a dictionary word for its brand, we’re looking at either something in a new gTLD, or a .com that would likely have to have been purchased from a domain investor.

If the domain has been bought on the secondary market, it almost certainly would have been acquired via a pseudonymous proxy, to avoid price gouging and to keep the name a secret.

Other options are that Facebook has come up with some fanciful neologism and bought the domain at reg price, or has selected a brand from a domain already in its portfolio.

The Verge expects a revelation by the company’s Connect conference October 28, but says it could come sooner.

5 Comments Tagged: facebook, new gTLDs

.basketball domain emerges under GoDaddy with fewer hoops

The .basketball gTLD has finally had its coming-out party, with the registry announcing general availability this week.

Fédération Internationale de Basketball has outsourced management of the gTLD to sports marketing agency Roar Domains, doing business here as Roar.Basketball, which in turn is using GoDaddy Registry for the technical registry functions.

The domain has been in a seemingly interminable series of qualified launch programs, community priority registration phases and sunrise periods for the last four years, but FIBA said yesterday .basketball is now open to all-comers.

Technically, it’s been in general availability for a few months, but the broader marketing effort only began this week.

Right now, it’s being marketed via Roar’s site at be.basketball, where the base registration price is $50 a year. Premiums are available at higher prices.

Roar appears to be using Australian registrar Bombora Technologies, which GoDaddy acquired as part of its Neustar deal last year, as its primary — possibly exclusive — registrar.

Roar’s FAQ states that be.basketball “is the only site where you can register and manage a .basketball domain name”.

Other registrars are accredited, and almost 20 have a handful of presumed sunrise regs, but currently Bombora holds 80% of the 600 domains currently under management.

Weirdly, GoDaddy itself does not appear to currently sell .basketball names through its primary storefront.

Roar/FIBA originally had MMX as its partner, with CentralNic as its back-end, but that changed earlier this year when GoDaddy acquired most of MMX’s assets, including the .basketball relationship.

Comment Tagged: .basketball, bombora, fiba, godaddy, new gTLDs, roar domains

Donuts shuts down 14 registrars, but it’s “not related to DropZone”

Donut has let 14 of its shell registrar accreditations expire, but told DI it’s not related to its recently approve drop-catching service, DropZone.

ICANN records show that the companies, with names such as Name118 Inc and Name104 Inc, all basically mini-clones of Name.com, recently had their registrar contracts terminated.

This kind of thing happens fairly regularly with companies resizing the networks they use for catching dropping domains. Donuts still has at least half a dozen active accreditations, records show.

But the move comes just weeks after ICANN approved a controversial new Donuts service called DropZone, which would see dropping domains across Donuts’ portfolio of 250+ gTLDs being handled by a dedicated parallel registry.

DropZone would reduce the need for owning vast numbers of shell accreditations in order to effectively drop-catch, but has faced criticism from rival DropCatch because a) Donuts may charge registrars for access and b) claims that Donuts-owned registrars would have an advantage.

But Donuts says the two things are unrelated. Name.com senior product marketing manager Ethan Conley said in an email:

We did recently let 14 ICANN registrar accreditations expire. These accreditations had become an administrative headache and a point of confusion for customers. This decision was not related to DropZone, and the domain drop business has not been a core focus of Name.com for quite some time.

It’s worth noting that cancelling registrar accreditations would also have an affect on the ability to catch names in other, unaffiliated gTLDs, including .com.

Comment Tagged: donuts, drop catching, dropcatch.com, ICANN, name.com, termination, turncommerce

EURid fends off rivals for .eu contract

EURid has been renewed as the European Union’s ccTLD operator for another five years.

The organization announced yesterday that the European Commission has asked it to continue to run .eu and associated internationalized domain names until October 2027.

EURid beat off competition from three competitors — the Estonian ccTLD registry and two Luxembourg non-profits that appeared to have been formed just to bid on the contract.

EURid has been running .eu since its inception in 2005.

Comment Tagged: .eu, eurid

Guy fills exact-match domain with porn, wins UDRP anyway

A Chinese registrant has managed to survive a UDRP over an exact-match domain name, despite not responding to the complaint and filling the associated web site with porn.

An ADR Forum panelist yesterday ruled the registrant could keep the domain boltonmenk.com (NSFW) despite Bolton & Menk, a Minnesota engineering firm that says it was founded in 1949, claiming infringement of common-law trademark.

Bolton & Menk has used the hyphenated version, bolton-menk.com, since 1996.

The non-hyphenated version at issue in this case has been in the hands of third-party registrants for at least 15 years, with at least 13 drops, according to DomainTools.

It seems to have been mostly parked with regular, inoffensive ads, and it was presumably only the recent addition of hard-core pornography that caught the complainant’s attention.

But the UDPR panelist ruled that Bolton & Menk, which has only a pending US trademark application, had failed to provide enough evidence that its brand also operates as a common-law trademark.

The complaint was therefore dismissed for the complainant’s lack of rights without even considering the registrant’s bad faith or legitimate interests.

It looks like a case of the bad guy getting away with it due to a less-than-comprehensive complaint.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, trademarks, udrp

Bahrain to relaunch ccTLD globally

The government of Bahrain has announced that it is relaunching its .bh and البحرين. ccTLDs with a simplified, automated, standardized registration process.

The domains will be available globally, the local Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said: “The new process of registration is fast, simple, and secure cutting the time of registration from days to minutes.”

Names will be “available for local and international customers”, the TRA said.

It looks like Bahrain has switched its back-end to CentralNic, and will be operating a standard EPP system.

While launch dates, registration rules and participating registrars were not announced, the TRA did indicate that the launch would begin with a sunrise period for trademark owners some time in the fourth quarter.

Bahrain is small but wealthy island state in the Persian Gulf with about 1.5 million inhabitants. The number of current registrations in .bh is not known.

Comment Tagged: .bh, bahrain, cctld, centralnic

CentralNic says it’s making more money than expected

Domain all-rounder CentralNic this morning told the markets it thinks it will hit or beat expectations this year.

CEO Ben Crawford said in a statement this morning that at the end of 2021 the company expects to be “at or above” analyst estimates of $348.6 million to $355.3 million at the top line and profit of $41.1 million to $42.0 million.

For the nine month ended September 30, CentralNic expects revenue to come in at $280 million or above, with adjusted EBIDTDA of at least $32 million, up 66% and 45% respective on the same 2020 period.

That represents organic growth, normalizing the impact of acquisitions, or 29%, the company said.

While the company did not reveal the drivers behind its growth, in recent quarters the best performer has been its domain monetization business, which provides revenue from parking ads and traffic redirection.

It will report its results November 22.

Comment Tagged: centralnic, revenue

Most registrars did NOT “fail” abuse audit, ICANN says

Most registrars did not “fail” a recent abuse audit, despite what I wrote in my original coverage, according to ICANN.

“Referring to a certain blog, none of the registrars failed the audit,” ICANN senior audit manager Yan Agranonik said during a session of ICANN 72’s Prep Week last night.

He’s talking about ME! He’s talking about ME!

“Failure would mean that there’s an irreparable finding of deficiency that can not be corrected timely or it just goes against the registrar’s business model,” Agranonik said.

An accompanying presentation reads:

None of the registrars “failed” the audit. “Failure” means that the auditee did not acknowledge/remediate identified violations of the RAA or their business practices are not compatible with RAA.

At the risk of prolonging a tedious semantic debate, what I reported in August, when the results of the audit were announced, was: “The large majority of accredited registrars failed an abuse-related audit at the first pass, according to ICANN.”

A bunch of registrar employees, and now apparently ICANN’s own head auditor, disagreed with my characterization.

ICANN had issued a press release stating that of 126 audited registrars, it had identified 111 “that were not fully compliant with the RAA’s requirements related to the receiving and handling of DNS abuse reports.”

To me, if ICANN checks whether you’re doing a thing you should be doing and you’re not doing the thing, that’s a fail.

But to ICANN, if ICANN checks whether you’re doing a thing you should be doing and you’re not doing the thing, and it tells you you’re not doing the thing you should be doing, so you start doing the thing, that’s not a fail.

I think reasonable people could disagree on the definitions here.

But I did write that the registrars “failed… according to ICANN”, and that appears to be inaccurate, so I’m happy to correct the record today.

1 Comment Tagged: abuse, audit, compliance, ICANN, icann 72

Surprise eleventh-hour picks for NomCom leadership after ICANN U-turn

ICANN has named the new chair of its influential Nominating Committee, and it’s not who you might have expected.

The Org last night said Michael Graham will chair NomCom for the 2022 cycle, with Damon Ashcraft taking the chair-elect role.

The news came weeks later than expected — live during an online Prep Week session of ICANN 72 last night in fact — and followed a secretive ICANN vote that saw the board of directors U-turn on its initial selection.

ICANN said that 2021 chair-elect Tracy Hackshaw — who under ICANN convention was the heir apparent for the chair, replacing Ole Jacobsen — had “withdrew his candidacy for 2022 NomCom Chair due to a new professional role he has taken”.

No additional information on the withdrawal, which came as a surprise even to NomCom insiders, was made available. Hackshaw has not responded to an October 5 request for comment and does not appear to have addressed his withdrawal in public.

It’s the second time in recent years a chair-elect has not gone on to take the chair. In 2015, Ron Andruff was snubbed after poor peer-evaluation results. Hackshaw, however, appears to have scored more respectably in his review.

While the leadership picks were not revealed until the 11th hour, it seems ICANN actually made its choice in secret two weeks ago.

In a September 30 vote, the board selected Graham and Ashcraft.

But that resolution actually overrode and replaced a September 12 resolution, which was never published, appointing Hackshaw as NomCom chair. The September 30 resolution states:

Whereas, prior to publishing the Approved Resolutions of the 12 September 2021 Board meeting, the Board became aware of new information that is relevant to the evaluation of candidates.

Whereas, taking into account this new information, the BGC has recommended that the Board rescind its previous resolution and approve Michael Graham be appointed as the 2022 NomCom Chair and J. Damon Ashcraft be appointed as the 2022 NomCom Chair-Elect

That resolution was redacted in its entirety until last night. For some reason ICANN found it necessary to keep its NomCom picks secret until the very last moment.

The 2022 NomCom has the responsibility of picking three ICANN directors, one member of the Public Technical Identifiers board, two ALAC reps, and one member each of the ccNSO Council and GNSO Council.

Both chair and chair-elect are IP lawyers. New chair Graham is travel company Expedia’s top IP guy, and Ashcraft is a partner at the law firm Snell & Wilmer. It’s Ashcraft’s second go at the job in recent years, having chaired the 2019 committee.

Due to the leadership kerfuffle, the NomCom is starting its work on this cycle slightly later than usual.

4 Comments Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

Man with broken shift key sues ICANN and GoDaddy over Bitcoin domain

Sometimes I wonder if all they teach you at American law schools is how to correctly use upper-case letters.

A Georgia man who lost a cybersquatting case with Sotheby’s, concerning his registration of sothebysauctionbitcoin.com, has taken the auction house, along with ICANN, GoDaddy, and ADR Forum to court.

Harris’ case is filed pro se, which is Latin for “he doesn’t have a lawyer, his complaint makes no sense, and the case is going to get thrown out of court”.

He claims a UDRP decision that went against him recently was incorrect, that ADR Forum is corrupt and biased, and that the UDRP itself is flawed.

The domain was registered with GoDaddy, and ADR Forum was the UDRP provider.

He wants his domain back, along with root-and-branch reform of the UDRP and “self-regulating lumbering Monopolistic Behemoth” ICANN, which is apparently still working under the auspices of the US Department of Commerce.

Here’s a flavor of the filing (pdf), which was filed in a Georgia District Court yesterday:

We are ASKING THE Court to find the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure) #FA2108001961598 (Sotheby’s and SPTC v Harris) Arbitration process and resulting ruling was Fatally Flawed; whereas ICANN failed to properly parse the “Provider” and we believe allowed Sotheby’s Counsel of Record in those proceeding to have specifically chosen ADR Form ADR FORUM whose history is tainted by a Consent Decree in their previous corporate iteration as an arbitration Provider for bad behavior and is also known to be a pro Claimant Provider.

In the version published to PACER, the complaint ends abruptly mid-sentence and seems to have one or more pages missing.

The decision in the original UDRP case is equally enlightening. Harris apparently sent nine responses to the complaint, many of which seemed to argue that Sotheby’s should have made an offer for the domain instead of “intimidating and bullying” him.

Harris apparently argued that the registration was a “legitimate investment”, thereby conferring rights to the domain.

Sole panelist Neil Anthony Brown seems to have taken pity on Harris, who had declared that Sotheby’s citation of previous UDRP cases was “irrelevant”, by deciding the case (against him, of course) without direct reference to prior precedent.

It was basically a slam-dunk decision, as I expect this lawsuit will also be.

5 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, godaddy, ICANN, sotheby's, udrp