.CLUB CEO on selling to GoDaddy, Clubhouse, and .club’s “twerking moment”

.CLUB Domains CEO Colin Campbell says he’s planning to continue to promote the .club gTLD long after its acquisition by GoDaddy Registry, announced earlier today, closes.

The deal was one of several announced last night by GoDaddy, the highlight being the $120 million purchase of MMX’s portfolio of 28 gTLD contracts.

While the price of the .club deal was not disclosed, Campbell confirmed that it’s a contract reassignment rather than a purchase of the company. He’s not expecting any ICANN regulatory friction, pointing out that .club is relatively small fry in the grand scheme of things.

But .club is arguably one of the success stories of the new gTLD program.

It currently stands at over a million domains under management, recently boosted by the launch of the third-party audio conferencing app Clubhouse, which has driven demand.

“I think Clubhouse was the twerking moment for .club,” Campbell said. “It’s the moment everyone realized — holy shit this is the best domain on the market to start a community, to start a club.”

“Our volume of premium domains went up 700% in January,” he said. “We exploded.”

I understand a “twerking moment” to be a nodal point in a business’s performance so sensational that one feels obliged to stand up at one’s desk and “twerk“. I’d rather not think about it too much, to be honest.

Campbell said the volume decline .club was experiencing prior to Clubhouse launching — its zone file shrank by 200,000 names in 2020 — is misleading as a metric of measuring growth.

“We’ve always been growing,” he said. “What we’ve been doing the last few years is raising prices for the first year, so our quality of registrations is higher now than it’s ever been. Volume’s a joke… what we’re talking about is real registrations, real users. It’s all about usage.”

He was ambivalent on whether the GoDaddy deal would have happened without the Clubhouse boost.

“.club was growing very fast with real usage,” he said. “Clubhouse had nothing to do with this — in my opinion — but who knows, you’d have to ask GoDaddy.”

It seems .CLUB Domains the company will wind up eventually, but Campbell said it will continue to promote the TLD even after the deal closes in a few months.

“I will never stop supporting .club, this is part of my DNA,” Campbell said. Pressed, he said that the company will continue to operate until at least the end of the year.

But why sell his baby? Campbell said “.club was never for sale”, so it appears GoDaddy reached out to .CLUB first. But Campbell sees GoDaddy as a safe pair of hands.

“The people that run GoDaddy Registry are Nicolai [Bezsonoff], and Lori Anne [Wardi], who were the co-founders of .co and they’ve done a good job of promoting .co and I really believe that can promote .club in a similar way,” Campbell said.

1 Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, acquisition, assignment, clubhouse, godaddy, ICANN, new gTLDs

GoDaddy buys 30 new gTLDs for over $120 million

GoDaddy Registry has just announced it is acquiring 28 new gTLDs from rival MMX, along with the TLDs .club and .design.

The MMX deal is worth at least $120 million; the value of the other two deals was not disclosed.

GoDaddy is also taking over the back-ends for .rugby and .basketball, which had been contracted to MMX, and said it has won the back-end deal for the dot-brand, .ally.

It’s the most significant pieces of registry consolidation since Donuts and Afilias hooked up in December.

GoDaddy Registry will wind up being the contract holder or back-end for over 240 TLDs, with over 14 million domains under management, the company said.

It’s not entirely clear which gTLDs GoDaddy is acquiring right now, but it appears to be all of those listed on the MMX web site.

It’s currently listed by IANA as the sponsor for 21 gTLDs: .cooking, .fishing, .horse, .miami, .rodeo, .vodka, .beer, .luxe, .surf, .nrw, .work, .budapest, .casa, .abogado, .wedding, .yoga, .fashion, .garden, .fit, .vip and .dds.

MMX subsidiary ICM Registry runs .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex, not an easy fit with the family-friendly image GoDaddy has attempted to cultivate in recent years.

MMX also manages geographic gTLDs .boston, .london and .bayern on behalf of their respective local governments.

The company hinted in January that it was considering selling off some of its under-performing registries, after a crappy 2020 that saw it forced to restate revenues, lay off staff and can its top executives.

MMX, which is publicly traded in London, has yet to make a statement on the deal but we should no doubt expect something in the morning before the markets open.

The deal appears to be bad news for Nominet, which runs the back-end for most MMX gTLDs. GoDaddy will very likely migrate them over to its own platform eventually.

MMX aside, GoDaddy is also buying .club from .CLUB Domains, according to its press release.

.CLUB is a bit of a rarity — a single-string new gTLD registry that done really rather well for itself without tarnishing its brand by becoming synonymous with cheap domains and spam.

.design, the other GoDaddy acquisition today, is run by Top Level Design, which also runs .ink, .wiki and .gay.

.design has over 120,000 domains in its zone file today, while .club has over 1 million. Both have been on a growth trajectory recently.

GoDaddy also said as part of the same announcement that it has signed Ally Financial’s dot-brand business for .ally, but as Ally was already a client of Neustar (which GoDaddy owns) I’m not entirely sure what it’s getting excited about.

Comment Tagged: .club, .design, acquisition, consolidation, godaddy, godaddy registry, mmx, new gTLDs

Nominet members wail as ousted director made CEO

Nominet has been accused of being “tone deaf” to its members’ criticisms after it appointed two staffers to its board of directors and named a recently ousted director as interim CEO.

The .uk registry told members last week that Eleanor Bradley will occupy the corner office “for approximately 6 months” while a permanent replacement for Russel Haworth is sought.

Haworth quit last month rather than face the wrath of members at an Extraordinary General Meeting that shortly thereafter voted to remove Bradley and three other directors from the board.

Bradley has been with the company for many years and was head of registry at Nominet, and seems like an obvious pick for an internal appointment, but members took to social media to express their displeasure.

The EGM was held after a campaign to round up the votes at PublicBenefit.uk, organized by Simon Blackler of Krystal Hosting. Members had hoped to install Sir Michael Lyons and Axel Pawlik on the board as chair and deputy chair.

But Nominet said that its bylaws would not allow directors to be selected this way, and there was no vote on that motion.

Instead, after the vote, relatively new director Rob Binns has taken the acting chair’s job and CIO Adam Leach and company secretary Rory Kelly joined the board from staff.

Binns informed the members of the appointments in a letter March 31 (pdf), which also said that Pawlik has been offered a consulting gig but had declined.

While eating a generous slice of humble pie, assuring members that the EGM was “an opportunity to reset and begin rebuilding the relationship between membership and Nominet”, the plan for the company he outlined was not a million miles away from the plan Nominet had put forward to address members’ concerns under its previous management.

Crucially, Nominet is still backing its non-core security business, which many members believe is an unnecessary diversification that diverted focus from the registry and profits from public benefit causes.

Binns said: “We believe those capabilities are integral to the public benefit we provide, so we want to develop a refreshed structure that protects that capability while addressing members’ desire for Nominet to focus more on its core activities.”

He also backed plans for a Registry Advisory Council, which would have seats for members, and said Nominet will bring back its web-based member discussion forum, which was closed down last year.

His letter contains no mention of reducing prices, one of the five big asks the PublicBenefit.uk campaign made.

Most of the social media reaction to Binns’ letter was negative. Notably, Richard Kirkendall, CEO of Namecheap, one of the largest registrars to publicly expressed its support for the campaign, tweeted:

Quite honestly, your decisions after the EGM and your public statements are absolutely tone deaf. The proposed RAC and the fact that your sticking to the same plan proposed by the previous board is ludicrous.

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) March 31, 2021

Others had similar points of view, and some speculated that a second EGM may be required to set Nominet on the path the majority of its members appear to want.

Comment Tagged: egm, namecheap, nominet, publicbenefit.uk

XYZ adds .tickets to its gTLD stable

XYZ.com has taken over the ICANN registry agreement for the gTLD .tickets, according to records.

It looks to be the registry’s 23rd TLD, the latest of XYZ’s acquisitions of unused or floundering new gTLDs.

In the case of .tickets, it’s picking up a low-volume, high-price TLD with some rather onerous registration restrictions.

The TLD was originally set up by UK-based Accent Media to provide a space where people going to music, theater and sporting events, for examples, could buy tickets in the assurance that the sellers were legit.

Would-be .tickets registrants have a five-day waiting period before their domains go live, while the registry manually verifies their identities from paper records such as passports or driving licenses.

That high-friction reg process is one reason the shelf price for a .tickets domain is well over $500 a year.

It’s also a reason why very few .tickets domains have been sold. The registry peaked at fewer than 1,200 names in its zone file in 2018 and has been on the decline ever since.

It had 769 names in its zone at the end of March this year.

Registry reports show that the majority of its names are registered via brand-protection registrars and are likely unused. Searches for active .tickets sites return fewer than 100 results.

XYZ might be able to turn this around by smoothing out the reg friction and lowering the price.

But even just 1,000 names at $500 a year could be considered a nice little earner as part of a portfolio with low overheads from economies of scale. XYZ already runs even higher-priced, lower-volume zones such as .cars and .auto.

Comment Tagged: .tickets, accent media, acquisition, assignments, ICANN, new gTLDs, xyz.com

EFF rages as Ethos closes Donuts buy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the acquisition of Donuts by “secretive” private equity group Ethos Capital represents a risk to free speech.

The deal, which sees Ethos buy a controlling stake from fellow PE firm Abry Partners, closed earlier this week, having apparently received no official objection from ICANN.

But the EFF now wants ICANN to force Donuts to change its gTLD registry contracts to make it harder for the company to engage in what it calls “censorship-for-profit”.

The group’s senior staff attorney, Mitch Stoltz, raised the issued at the Public Forum session of last week’s ICANN 70 virtual public meeting, and expanded upon his thinking in a blog post this week. He wrote:

Donuts already has questionable practices when it comes to safeguarding its users’ speech rights. Its contracts with ICANN contain unusual provisions that give Donuts an unreviewable and effectively unlimited right to suspend domain names—causing websites and other internet services to disappear.

He pointed to Donuts’ trusted notifier program with the Motion Picture Association, which streamlines the takedown of domains used for pirating movies, as an example of a registry’s power to censor.

Donuts runs gTLDs including ones with social benefit meanings that the EFF is particularly concerned about, such as .charity, .community, .fund, .healthcare, .news, and .university.

Stoltz also makes reference to the Domain Protected Marks List, a Donuts service that enables trademark owners to block their marks, and variants, across its entire portfolio of 240+ gTLDs.

In effect, this lets trademark holders “own” words and prevent others from using them as domain names, even in top-level domains that have nothing to do with the products or services for which a trademark is used. It’s a legal entitlement that isn’t part of any country’s trademark law, and it was considered and rejected by ICANN’s multistakeholder policy-making community.

The DPML is not unique to Donuts. Competitors such as UNR and MMX have similar services on the market for their gTLDs.

When Stoltz raised the EFF’s concerns at last week’s ICANN meeting, CEO Göran Marby basically shrugged them off, saying he didn’t understand why one PE firm buying an asset off another PE firm was such a big deal.

I have to say I agree with him.

Ethos came under a lot of scrutiny last year when it tried to buy .org manager Public Interest Registry, turning it into a for-profit entity, generating cash for Ethos’ still-undisclosed backers.

(This week, Ethos disclosed in a press release that its investors include massive hedge funds The Baupost Group and Neuberger Berman “among others”, which appears to be the first time these names have been mentioned in connection with the company).

But a pretty good case could be made that .org is a unique case, that has had a non-profit motive baked into its DNA for decades. That does not apply to Donuts, which was a profit-making venture from the outset.

It’s not entirely clear why the EFF is suddenly concerned that Donuts will start exercise its contractual right-to-suspend more frequently under Ethos than under Abry. Stoltz wrote:

As we learned last year during the fight for .ORG, Ethos expects to deliver high returns to its investors while preserving its ability to change the rules for domain name registrants, potentially in harmful ways. Ethos refused meaningful dialogue with domain name users, instead proposing an illusion of public oversight and promoting it with a slick public relations campaign. And private equity investors have a sordid record of buying up vital institutions like hospitals, burdening them with debt, and leaving them financially shaky or even insolvent.

Even with the acquisition passing through ICANN easily, the EFF wants Donuts to change its contracts to make it more difficult for the company to suspend domain names on a whim.

I believe the language causing the controversy comes from anti-abuse policies in the Public Interest Commitments found in almost all Donuts’ contracts with ICANN, which state in part:

Registry Operator reserves the right, at its sole discretion and at any time and without limitation, to deny, suspend, cancel, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold, or similar status as it determines necessary for any of the following reasons:

a. to protect the integrity and stability of the registry;

b. to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement, or any dispute resolution process;

c. to comply with the terms of this Registry Agreement and the Registry Operator’s Anti-Abuse Policy;

d. registrant fails to keep Whois information accurate and up-to-date;

d. domain name use violates the Registry Operator’s acceptable use policies, or a third party’s rights or acceptable use policies, including but not limited to the infringement of any copyright or trademark; or

e. as needed during resolution of a dispute.

As a voluntary PIC, this language is unique to Donuts, though other registries have similar provisions in their registry agreements.

3 Comments Tagged: abry, acquisition, afilias, donuts, eff, ethos, ICANN, new gTLDs

Outrage at ICANN’s new “clown shoes” social distancing mandate

ICANN has been slammed by community members after announcing a return to in-person public meetings this year, but only to attendees wearing clown shoes.

The Org said the new rule, which will come into force at ICANN 71 in The Hague this June, was “a bold but necessary measure to enforce social distancing in the pandemic era”.

ICANN CEO Göran Marby said in a blog post that the clown shoes will have to be “brightly colored” and a minimum of 3ft (0.91 meters) in length, to ensure attendees are standing at least 6ft (1.82 meters) away from each other at all times.

“ICANN is the most important organization in the world, and it is imperative that we return to in-person meetings as quickly as possible,” he wrote.

“As your leader, I firmly believe that a compulsory clown shoes mandate is the best way to achieve this goal,” he said.

Clown shoes will be handed out to attendees at the front desk of The Hague Convention Center “after they receive their lanyards but before they receive their anal swab”, added VP of global communications Karen K Karenson.

Small teams of ICANN Compliance staff will patrol the halls of the venue, looking for rule-breakers, ICANN warned.

Those found to be not wearing clown shoes will have a bucket of water thrown over them, Marby said.

“I can’t stress this enough — it really is water in the bucket,” he said. “No, for reals, it’s water in there, trust me.”

The new policy immediately came under fire from influential community members, including the chair of the GNSO Outrage Committee, They Them.

“I’ve been coming to ICANN meetings for 20 years,” Them said. “If admitting that wasn’t humiliating enough, now I’ve got to wear clown shoes too?”

Them additionally complained that the policy discriminates against less-abled meeting attendees, such as those using wheelchairs.

ICANN said in response that it has purchased a tiny, battery-powered clown car that can comfortably fit up to 25 such community members for as much as 20 minutes before the doors all fall off in a puff of confetti.

The new rule is believed to be the brainchild of ICANN’s deputy general counsel, Dave O’Hallorohalloran, who has been wearing clown shoes for his entire career.

Sources say he had been suggesting the clown shoes policy for many years before the pandemic hit.

3 Comments Tagged: april 1

ICANN refuses to say why it allowed Donuts to buy Afilias

ICANN appears determined to make its decision-making process when it comes to industry consolidation as opaque as possible.

The Org has denied a request from two rival registries for information about how it approved the acquisition of Afilias by Donuts last December, apparently exploiting a loophole in its bylaws.

The transaction got the nod from ICANN after its December 17 board of directors meeting, at which the board discussed the deal and gave CEO Göran Marby the nod to go ahead and process the request.

What it didn’t do was pass a formal resolution approving the deal, which seems to have given it the room to wriggle out of its transparency requirements, such as publishing its rationale and briefing materials.

It’s a trick it also used last year when it decided to bar Ethos Capital from acquiring Public Interest Registry.

In response to a Documentary Information Disclosure Process request (pdf) last month, filed by Dot Hotel and Domain Venture Partners, ICANN said:

ICANN org makes available, as a matter of due course, on the ICANN website the resolutions taken, preliminary report, minutes, and the Board briefing materials for each Board meeting… ICANN org has already published all materials for the 17 December 2020 Board meeting.

No new information was published.

The DIDP was filed by two applicants for the new gTLD .hotel, which are competing with applications originally filed by both Donuts and Afilias.

They’d also asked for ICANN’s rationale for allowing Donuts to own two .hotel applications post-acquisition, but ICANN said it had no documents reflecting that rationale.

The .hotel contest is also the subject of an Independent Review Process case and a lawsuit, in which DVP is a plaintiff.

Comment Tagged: .hotel, afilias, didp, donuts, dot hotel, dvp, ICANN, new gTLDs, transparency

ShortDot bought another gTLD. Guess what .sbs stands for now?

Growing new gTLD portfolio registry ShortDot has acquired another unwanted dot-brand, .sbs, which it intends to repurpose as an open, generic TLD.

.sbs was originally owned by SBS, for Special Broadcasting Service, an Australian public-service broadcaster. But the company never used it.

Now, while launch plans are still in development, ShortDot intends to relaunch .sbs to mean something entirely different, much as it recently did with .cfd.

“.sbs will be branded as shorthand for ‘Side by Side’, perfect for social causes, charitable organizations and other philanthropic initiatives,” ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas told us.

That does not appear to be a meaning of the acronym in common usage.

ShortDot is currently two weeks away from general availability for its next most-recent acquisition, .cfd, which originally stood for the financial term “contracts for difference” but is now being marketed as “clothing and fashion design”.

The company, best known for high-volume .icu, which has sold and lost over five million registrations over the last two years, now has five gTLDs in its stable, including unused dot-brand .bond and .cyou.

Comment Tagged: .cfd, .sbs, acquisition, assignements, ICANN, new gTLDs, shortdot

As Net4 goes dark, NIXI says customers won’t lose their expired domains

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI has thrown a life vest to the owners of some 73,000 .in domain names, giving them a way to transfer out of slowly sinking registrar Net 4 India.

NIXI also said that it will not cancel expired domains that registrants have been unable to renew due to Net4’s ongoing problems.

“NIXI has decided not to discontinue the .IN Services for those .IN domain end users whose renewal is due,” the company said in a statement (pdf).

It sounds rather like registrants will be able to renew directly with the registry. They’ll also be able to transfer to a new registrar by emailing NIXI from the address in the Whois or mailing proof of company identity.

Why NIXI has chosen to act now, when Net4’s troubles have been known for almost year, is not clear.

“In the recent days, NIXI was informed that Net 4 India, who is one of the registrars of NIXI for Country code domain “.IN” has some issues in maintaining domains,” its statement says.

Net4’s web site isn’t resolving right now, at least for me, which probably has something to do with it.

The company has been in insolvency proceedings since 2017, a fact ICANN discovered when it started missing payments two years ago, but it was not until mid-2020 that Net4’s customers started complaining en masse about problems renewing and transferring their domains.

ICANN has processed thousands of complaints since then.

The registrar was told last month that ICANN was terminating its accreditation to sell gTLDs. Registrants of names in .com for example should be pretty safe, with their names automatically transferred to a new registrar, should ICANN follow through on its threat.

The termination was challenged in the insolvency court shortly before it would have become effective two weeks ago.

While ICANN does not believe it is subject to the court’s jurisdiction, it has decided to wait for an official ruling on the matter.

Comment Tagged: .in, compliance, ICANN, insolvency, net 4 india, net4, nixi, termination

.sucks mystery deepens. Who the hell is Pat Honeysalt?

Another two .sucks domain names registered by the gTLD’s most prolific registrant have been found to be cases of cybersquatting, but now the squatter’s true identity is becoming more opaque.

In two recently decided UDRP cases before WIPO, registrant Honey Salt Ltd was found to have cybersquatted by registering and offering for sale bfgoodrich.sucks, uniroyal.sucks and tetrapak.sucks.

While earlier cases filed with the Czech Arbitration Forum had identified Honey Salt as a Turks & Caicos company, the latest few WIPO cases say it is a UK-based company.

However, searches at UK Companies House do not reveal any company matching that name.

The latest WIPO cases also identify an individual allegedly behind said company as a respondent, one “Pat Honeysalt”.

That’s either a pseudonym, or we’ve found one of those people who have somehow managed to keep their name out of Google’s index despite being well-funded and tech-savvy.

Honey Salt is believed to be the registrant of thousands of .sucks domains, all matching the trademarks of big companies, which all point to Everything.sucks, a wiki-style web site comprising scraped third-party criticism targeting the brands in question.

Its defense in its UDRP cases to date has been that it is providing non-commercial free speech criticism, and that the inclusion of “.sucks” in the domain means users could not possibly believe the site is officially sanctioned by the brand.

All but one UDPR panel has so far not believed this defense, with panelists pointing out that the domains in question are usually listed for sale on the secondary market (sometimes at cost, sometimes at an inflated price).

They further point out that the criticism displayed on the Everything.sucks site was written by third parties, often prior to the registration of the domain in question, so Honey Salt cannot claim to be exercising its own free-speech rights.

Honey Salt is represented in its UDRP cases by the very large US-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which also represents .sucks registry Vox Populi.

1 Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, honey salt, new gTLDs, orrick, trademarks, udrp, vox populi, wipo