.fr up for grabs again

The French government has opened up a call for expressions of interest from registries who fancy a bash at running .fr, the local ccTLD.

A brief procurement document was published last month. The deadline for responses is June 30.

.fr, along with several other ccTLDs representing French overseas territories, has been managed by AFNIC since 1997.

It came under government oversight a decade later, with the contract now coming up for renewal every five years. The current contract began in April 2017 and will end next year.

The new procurement document is light on detail, but it seems to me that to dislodge the incumbent would be an uphill battle.

.fr has over 3.7 million domains under management, making it one of the largest TLDs in the world.

The government estimates the value of the deal at €76 million.

Comment Tagged: .fr, afnic

Locked-down .music could launch this year

One of the most heavily contested new gTLDs, .music, could launch this year after new registry DotMusic finally signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

The contract was signed over two years after DotMusic prevailed in an auction against Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX.

It seems the coronavirus pandemic, along with ICANN bureaucracy, was at least partly to blame for the long delay.

I speculated in April 2019 that .music could launch before year’s end, but this time DotMusic CEO Constantinos Roussos tells me a launch in 2021 is indeed a possibility.

The contract the company has signed with ICANN contains some of the most stringent restrictions, designed to protect intellectual property rights, of any I’ve seen.

First off, there’s going to be a Globally Protected Marks List, which reserves from registration the names of well-known music industry companies and organizations, and platinum-selling recording artists.

Second, registrants are going to have to apply for their domains, proving they are a member of one of the registry’s pre-approved “Music Community Member Organizations”, rather than simply enter their credit card and buy them.

DotMusic will verify both the email address and phone number of the registrant before approving applications.

There’s also going to be a unique dispute resolution process, a UDRP for copyright, administered by the National Arbitration Forum, called the .MUSIC Policy & Copyright Infringement Dispute Resolution Process (MPCIDRP).

Basically, any registrant found to be infringing .music’s content policies could be slung out.

The content policies cover intellectual property infringement as you’d expect, but they also appear to cover activities such as content scraping, a rule perhaps designed to capture those sites that aggregate links to infringing content without actually infringing themselves.

The registry is also going to ban second-level domains that have been used to infringe copyright in other TLDs, to prevent the kind of “TLD-hopping” outfits like The Pirate Bay have engaged in in the past.

In short, it’s going to be one of the least rock-n-roll TLDs out there.

Tightly controlled TLDs like this tend to be unpopular with registrars. Despite the incredibly strong string, my gut feeling is that .music is going to be quite a low-volume gTLD. There’s no word yet on pricing, but I’d err towards the higher end of the spectrum.

1 Comment Tagged: .music, copyright, dotmusic, ICANN, new gTLDs, udrp

MMX’s year marked by terrible renewals

MMX saw its revenue dip in 2020, and it reported shocking renewal rates at two of its highest-volume gTLDs, according to the company’s annual financial results, published this morning.

The portfolio registry, which is in the process of selling off essentially its entire operating business to GoDaddy, reported revenue of $16.8 million for the year, down from $17.2 million in 2019.

Profit was up very slighty, to $2.9 million from $2.8 million.

The 2019 results included a few one-off gains, including $588,000 from losing a new gTLD auction, which accounted for most of the 2020 revenue decline.

But the company also reported a 19% decline in domains under management, from 2.46 million to 1.99 million, based on some terrible renewal rates in its .vip and .work gTLDs.

The DUM decline can be attributed mostly to .vip, a popular TLD among Chinese speculators, which started 2020 with around 1.4 million domains but finished the year with just over a million.

.work actually ended the year up on where it started, with around 709,000 names under management.

But MMX today disclosed that the renewal rates for .vip and .work were 36% and 18% respectively. In a business where 70%+ is considered healthy, these are some poor numbers indeed.

However, the company discontinued first-year promotions on these TLDs in 2020, focusing instead on selling domains likely to lead to recurring renewal revenue, which lead to 14% (.vip) and 19% (.work) increases in revenue.

Fewer domains. More money.

MMX said that it is seeing these trends continuing into 2021. Public transaction reports show both these TLDs losing 40-50,0000 names in January. The company expects revenue to fall 4% in the first quarter compared to Q1 2020.

One bright spot appears to be “The Great Relese”, the company’s move last month to mark down hundreds of thousands of premium-priced domains. That’s brought in $170,000 since its April 23 launch.

One basket where the company is placing a lot of its eggs is AdultBlock, the trademark protection service it inherited when it acquired ICM Registry a few years back. It enables customers to block their brands in .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex without actually having to register the names.

The 10-year period ICM allowed brands to block when it launched in 2011 is coming to an end, so MMX is banking on renewals (which retail at $349 to $799 per year before multi-year discounts) to boost revenue.

“While it is early in the AdultBlock Sunrise B renewal period, we are encouraged by Registrar interest and some early sales of this product,” CEO Tony Farrow said in a statement.

This reliance on AdultBlock for short-term organic growth was one of the reasons MMX is selling up to GoDaddy.

The market-leading registrar and fast-emerging registry consolidator agreed to pay $120 million for MMX’s portfolio, which will leave MMX as a shell company only long enough to distribute the cash to investors before fading away quietly.

That deal has an August deadline to close and is dependent on approvals from business partners, ICANN and the Chinese government.

Comment Tagged: .vip, .work, adultblock, china, earnings, financials, godaddy, ICANN, icm, mmx

Biggest .co flip ever — bought for $25, sold for $300,000

A domain investor has reportedly sold the domain eth.co for $300,000, making it the second-highest amount a .co domain has sold since the ccTLD relaunched in 2010.

Domain marketplace Efty today reports that MagnumDomains used its platform to sell the domain via its buy-it-now function, with no broker involvement.

eth.co is expected to refer to Ethereum, the blockchain cryptocurrency, but it doesn’t seem to be clear whether the buyer is an end-user or fellow investor.

It’s believed to be the second most-expensive .co domain ever sold, and the most-expensive sold by a domain investor.

The previous record-holder is o.co, which .co registry .CO Internet (now part of GoDaddy) famously sold to Overstock.com for $350,000 during its relaunch back in 2010.

The eth.co seller bought the domain for $25 back then, before Ethereum existed, and has been sitting on it ever since, according to Efty.

Comment Tagged: efty, eth.co, ethereum, magnumdomains

CentralNic wins .london back-end deal from Nominet

CentralNic today announced that it’s taking over back-end registry operations for .london.

It’s taking over from Nominet, which has run the technical aspects of the registry since 2016 when MMX dumped its registry business.

The contracted registry is London & Partners, the marketing arm of the London mayor’s office.

CentralNic is based in London, whereas Nominet, which runs .uk and .wales, is based in nearby Oxford. Original registry MMX was based in the British Virgin Islands.

.london currently has about 51,000 domains under management, down from a 2018 peak of about 86,000.

Comment Tagged: .london, centralnic, geo, london & partners, new gTLDs, nominet

Donuts offers name spinner to show potential attacks

Donuts has launched a tool to show off its TrueName offering, which blocks potential phishing attacks at the domain registry level.

It’s like a regular name spinner, but instead of showing you available domains it shows you visually confusingly similar domains — homographs — that it will block if you register said name in any of Donuts’ portfolio of 2xx (subs, please check) TLDs.

For example, spinning truename.domains returns results such as trʋenɑme.domains (xn--trenme-exc57b.domains) and trᵫname.domains (xn--trname-xk6b.domains), which could be used in phishing attacks.

How many strings get blocked depends largely on what characters are in your name. The letters I and O have a great many visually confusing variants in other non-Latin scripts, and each instance exponentially increases the potential attack vectors.

For example, if I were to register “domainincite” in one of Donuts’ TLDs, Donuts would block 767 homographs at the registry level, but if I were to register “kevinmurphy”, it would only need to block 119.

It only blocks the homographs in the same TLD as the original name. It’s not a replacement for brand protection in other TLDs.

Donuts doesn’t charge anything extra for this service. It’s included in the price of registration and offered as a unique perk for Donuts’ selection of gTLDs.

I gave TrueName a brief post when it launched last year, but I have to say I really like the idea. It’s a rare example of true innovation, rather than simple money-grubbing, that has come from the new gTLD program.

If Verisign were to roll out something similar in .com, it would eliminate a bunch of phishing and cut down on legal fees for big brands chasing phishers and typosquatters through UDRP or the courts.

It was born out of Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List product, which allows trademark owners to block their brands and homographs across the whole Donuts stable for less money than defensively registering the names individually.

The downside of the spinner tool is of course that, if you’re a bad guy, it simplifies the process of generating samples of homograph Punycode (the ASCII “xn--” string) that can be used in any non-Donuts TLD that supports internationalized domain names.

The tool is limited to 10 domains per spin, however, which limits the potential harm.

Try it out here.

Comment Tagged: donuts, homographs, phishing, truename

Two world wars and one dot-brand? Americans beat Germans in long-running gTLD fight, kinda

A chemicals company called Merck has beaten another chemicals company called Merck for the right to run .merck as a dot-brand gTLD.

But it looks like we may be looking at an unprecedented case of a shared dot-brand.

US-based Merck Registry Holdings and Germany-based Merck KGaA appear to have resolved their long-running battle over the string, with the German company recently withdrawing its application, enabling its rival to sign a contract with ICANN and go live on the internet.

But it’s not as straightforward as one applicant emerging victorious over the other. Recent changes to the American company’s winning gTLD application strongly suggest that the two companies intend to share the space.

The application was substantially rewritten in March to make it clear that American Merck plans to allow unaffiliated third parties to register .merck names, and that it may substantially change its eligibility policies not long after launch.

Whereas its original 2012 application was pretty much boilerplate dot-brand territory, the March 2021 version is more nuanced. It now talks about extending eligibility to “other registrants” rather than merely “licensees”, for example.

The application now says it “reserves the right to consider allowing third party registrants outside of current affiliate or subsidiary relationships to own .MERCK domains at a future date.”

But, more importantly, it now also says that it intends to transfer its .merck Registry Agreement to a new shell company, London-based MM Domain Holdco Ltd, shortly after ICANN signs it off.

Company records show that MM Domain Holdco has directors — trademark lawyers — from both the American and German companies.

So we’re looking at some kind of shared dot-brand, it seems. If you don’t count Amazon’s uneasy deal with South American governments, that’s pretty much unprecedented for new gTLDs.

The US applicant is a subsidiary of Merck & Co Inc, a New York-listed company with a market cap of $197 billion. The German company is listed in Frankfurt with a market cap of €17 billion.

The German firm is 350 years old and was the parent of the American company until it was seized, and eventually re-privatized as a separate entity, by the US government during World War I.

Both have trademark rights to the term “Merck” and a decades-old cooperation agreement, but have nevertheless been in legal disputes over the mark in recent years.

It will be interesting to see whether the two Mercks ultimately share and actively use .merck, or like so many other dot-brands merely own a defensive, inactive gTLD.

The resolution of the contention set comes after the better part of a decade and many years of negotiations and legal tussles with ICANN.

ICANN had been bent on forcing the companies to a last-resort auction of which it would be the financial beneficiary. Whether this was because it wanted to force the Mercks to the negotiating table to resolve their differences amicably, or because it saw dollar signs… you decide. Maybe both.

The Mercks have in recent years repeatedly delayed the auction, using different ICANN appeals mechanisms. The contention set had been in a Cooperative Engagement Process since late last year, but had been slated to go to auction yesterday, May 12.

The settlement occurred before that date, however, so ICANN won’t be getting any auction money this time.

1 Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, merck, new gTLDs, trademarks

Brexit specter creeping up on .eu

The .eu ccTLD shrank a bit in the first quarter as a result of Brexit finally kicking in fully.

Registry EURid reported that there were 3,681,337 registered .eu, .ею and .ευ domains at the end of March, down from 3,684,984 at the end of 2020, a dip of just a few thousand names.

Domains registered by UK registrants, who are still grandfathered in for another couple of months, stood at 59,779 at the end of the quarter, down from 77,000 at the end of 2020.

The top-line numbers were also affected negatively by Portugal, which has seen its numbers up and down over the last couple of years due to a cycle of registrar promotions and deletions.

Under EURid rules, Brits and UK residents have until the end of June to make arrangements for their domains before they are deleted.

Because EU citizens living in the UK and elsewhere outside the EU are now eligible for .eu domains, EURid has started breaking out that number too. It was 15,308, more than names registered in Croatia and Latvia, among other nations.

The Brexit impact was tempered by strong sequential growth of 9.4% in Ireland, from 78,030 to 85,381 domains.

Given the shared border, language, and confusing/controversial current trading relationship between the UK and Ireland, I wonder whether any of this Irish growth can be attributed to some kind of Plastic Paddy effect, in much the same way as applications for Irish passports increased following the 2016 Brexit referendum.

In percentage terms, the place with the strongest .eu growth in Q1 was the French territory of Saint Martin, which DOUBLED(!) its total in the quarter, growing from 1 to 2.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, eurid

ICANN CEO is first to get paid over $1,000,000 a year

ICANN CEO Göran Marby was paid over a million bucks out of the domain-buying public’s pocket in the org’s fiscal 2020, newly released tax documents show.

He’s now, I believe, the best-paid CEO ICANN’s ever had and the first to make more than $1 million per year in the role.

ICANN’s FY20 tax return, which covers the year to June 30, 2020, discloses Marby’s total reportable compensation as $991,557, with another $67,665 in estimated additional compensation, making a total of $1,059,222.

That’s an increase of $193,652 over the $865,570 he received in FY19.

Marby’s been making more than immediate predecessor Fadi Chehadé for a few years, but now he’s also overtaken Rod Beckstrom, who made $961,672 in 2012, his last full year on the job.

Neither Beckstrom nor his predecessor Paul Twomey ever quite made it into seven figures.

This February, ICANN’s board of directors voted to give Marby another 5% pay raise, though a few directors voted against the package.

ICANN’s form 990 tax releases also disclose salaries for another 36 senior staff and board members, showing 19 of them get paid more than $300,000 a year.

Five, including Marby, made over half a million, though a few of those are no longer with the organization.

General counsel John Jeffrey, the second-biggest earner, now has total compensation of $709,784, compared to the $314,628 he was getting 10 years ago when he was in exactly the same job.

2 Comments Tagged: compensation, ICANN, salaries

PDR wins beauty contest to take over Net4’s stranded customers

PublicDomainRegistry.com, part of the new Newfold Digital registrar group, has been picked to take over thousands of domain names from disgraced and defunct Net 4 India.

ICANN seems to have used the beauty contest method of picking Net4’s successor, saying that PDR was picked in part because it already operates in the region. It’s based in Mumbai.

ICANN expects PDR to start reaching out to its new customers next week with instructions on how to get access to their domains at their new registrar.

It goes without saying that Net4 customers should be wary of possible scams, which sometimes accompany this kind of event.

Customers won’t be charged for the transfers, and they won’t have to deal with transfer authorization codes, ICANN said.

PDR was part of the Endurance group until its recent merger with the Web.com group, which created Newfold.

It’s the second-largest registrar group and undoubtedly a safer set of hands than Net4, which has left thousands of customers struggling to renew, manage and transfer their domains for several months.

The bulk transfer to PDR comes after ICANN terminated Net4’s contract for multiple breaches.

Comment Tagged: compliance, ICANN, net 4 india, net4, newfold, pdr, PublicDomainRegistry, termination, transfer