EURid’s CEO is retiring

EURid’s long-serving CEO is leaving and the company has started looking for someone to fill the role.

A spokesperson for the .eu registry told DI this morning that Marc Van Wesemael is planning to retire after his replacement is found, which should be a matter of months.

Van Wesemael has been CEO (general manager) of the Belgium-based company since its foundation and since it was first awarded the contract to run .eu way back in 2005.

EURid announced without sentiment or fanfare this week that candidates should apply via an agency on this LinkedIn page.

Given the nature of the role as an EU government contractor, the company is looking for somebody familiar with the workings of the European Commission.

Van Wesemael’s departure announcement comes just a few months after EURid was re-awarded the contract to run .eu and its Greek and Cyrillic variants for another five years, giving his successor some breathing room.

Comment Tagged: .eu, eurid

Omicron domain sells for $5,000

The domain name omicronvariant.com, hand-registered less than six months ago, has sold for $5,000 via Sedo, raising all kinds of questions about the value and future of Covid-19 variant-related domains.

The domain, at time of writing, resolves to a Sedo parking page containing ads unrelated (for me) to the pandemic or healthcare.

It was registered in early June, just a day or two after the World Health Organization announced that it would start naming coronavirus variants after letters of the Greek alphabet.

At that time, and to this day, the delta variant is the dominant strain worldwide, and yet deltavariant.com is currently listed for sale for $2,000 at GoDaddy/Uniregistry.

It seems somebody out there is willing to bet that omicron will have the transmissibility speed and longevity to outstrip delta, become dominant, and make dropping $5,000 on the matching .com a wise investment.

Assuming non-nefarious use, I personally struggle to see the end-user value.

It appears that any .com combination of a Greek letter and the word “variant” that had not already been registered by June was quickly snapped up by speculators after WHO revealed its naming scheme.

Some domains, such as alphavariant.com and xivariant.com, were already in use by companies with web sites that predate the pandemic.

The company Nu Variant seems to have dodged a bullet — WHO skipped that letter because it’s a confusing homophone of “new” in some English dialects. It also skipped xi, as it’s a common name that happens to be shared by the premier of China, which was bad luck for the xivariant.com domainer.

All the other letters between delta and omicron have been assigned to variants that fizzled out or have failed to garner much media attention.

At this point, it seems quite possible that WHO will run out of Greek letters in a matter of months, but it reportedly has no current plan for its coronavirus nomenclature after that.

3 Comments Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19, omicron, pandemic, sedo

Hamburg to have second crack at hosting ICANN meeting

The City of Hamburg is to try again to bring in the ICANN crowd, after getting cancelled due to the pandemic last year.

German ccTLD registry DENIC, along with the city and local trade group eco, is taking a run at being selected as the host for ICANN 78, currently penciled in for October 2023, the company said this week.

It had been picked to host ICANN 69 in October 2020, but pandemic travel restrictions scuppered that opportunity.

The last six public ICANN meetings have been online-only, as will next March’s ICANN 73, which had been due to take place in Puerto Rico.

Hamburg’s chances would have to be said to be strong. Three other cancelled host cities — Kuala Lumpur, The Hague and Cancun — have already been confirmed for meetings in 2022 and 2023.

Of course, the ultimate decision-maker is a nucleic acid molecule wearing a spiky protein coat.

Comment Tagged: .eco, .travel, denic, hamburg, ICANN, icann 78, pandemic

.org back-end deal will come up for re-bid, PIR says as it acquires four new gTLDs

The industry’s most lucrative back-end registry services contract will be rebid, Public Interest Registry said today.

The deal, which sees PIR pay Afilias $18.3 million a year to run .org, according to tax records, will see a request for proposals issued in the back half of 2023, according to PIR.

Given that’s two years away, it’s strange timing for the announcement, which came at the bottom of a press release and blog post announcing that the company is acquiring four new gTLDs, three of which belong to Afilias’ new owner, Donuts.

PIR said Donuts is to transfer control of .charity, .foundation and .gives, which will be “reintroduced” to the market. .foundation currently has about 20,000 registered domains; the other two have a few thousand each.

It’s also acquiring the unlaunched gTLD .giving from a company called Giving Ltd.

All four are on-message for PIR’s not-for-profit portfolio, which also includes the barely-used .ngo and .ong for non-governmental organizations.

Those two gTLDs are getting decoupled, allowing registrants to register one without having to buy the other, PIR also said today.

The last time the PIR back-end contract came up for renewal, in 2015, Afilias was also the incumbent but increased competition — it was up against 20 rivals — meant that its slice of .org revenue was cut in half.

Comment Tagged: .charity, .foundation, .gives, .giving, .org, acquisition, afilias, donuts, new gTLDs, pir, rfp

ICANN budget: staff bloat making a comeback

ICANN plans to ramp up its headcount starting next year to support the development of the new gTLD program.

Newly published budgeting documents show that average headcount is expected to rise to 406 for the year ending June 30, 2022, from 395 at the end of this June, with an even steeper increase to 448 a year later.

That’s after several years in which staffing levels have been fairly stable, even sometimes declining a little.

The main culprit is the Operational Design Phase for the next new gTLD round(s), which is expected to kick off soon.

ICANN expects to hire or assign nine people to manage the ODP before the end of June 2022, ramping that up to an average of 22 over the following year. The amount of non-ODP operational staff is expected to rise by 28 over the same period.

ICANN currently advertises 31 open positions on its web site, having added eight listings just this week.

This chart shows the expected growth:

At the time of the last new gTLD application round, in 2012, ICANN had 152 staffers, nine of whom were assigned to new gTLD project — and that was after the programs rules had already been developed, implemented and the application window opened and closed.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, new gTLDs, odp, subpro

ICANN budget: no more new gTLDs before 2028

ICANN is not accounting for any revenue from a future round of new gTLDs in its just-published budget, which plots out the Org’s finances all the way through 2028.

The budget, which I gave a high-level summary of here, even predicts that dozens of 2012-round new gTLDs will disappear over the next six years.

The Org is predicting that there will be 1,091 gTLDs on the internet by the end of its fiscal 2027 (that is, June 30, 2028) down by 58 or 5% from July 2022.

Given that it’s only expecting to lose four gTLDs in FY23, this projection implies a speeding up of the rate at which gTLDs start cancelling their contracts or going out of business in the later part of the five-year budget.

The forecast comes with a big asterisk, however. A footnote reads:

These scenarios do not assume any further TLD delegations arising from the resumption of the New gTLD Program. While there is ongoing work and an intent to launch a subsequent round, the timing of its release remains unclear and potential impact(s) on funding indeterminate. Given this, ICANN org has deemed it prudent not to assume any prospective impacts from a subsequent round across the described scenarios.

In other words, ICANN is not yet ready to commit to a runway for the next application round, subsequent delegations and eventual revenue.

As I reported Monday, the next round is unlikely to be approved until the fourth quarter of next year at the earliest, and my view is that 2024 is the soonest the next application window could open.

I don’t think we can read too much into the fact that ICANN isn’t budgeting for any next-round impact on funding until after 2027.

If you’re pessimistic, you could infer that ICANN believes it’s at least a possibility that the next round could take that long, or not be approved at all, but the safer bet is probably that it merely lacks visibility and is acting in its usual risk-averse manner.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, new gTLDs, odp, subpro

ICANN budget: mild optimism amid maturing industry

ICANN thinks the domain industry, including the new gTLD industry, is maturing and will continue to grow, in its just-published draft budget for fiscal 2023.

The Org is predicting growing transactions across the board, as well as an increase in the number of accredited registrars and a slowing decline in the number of contracted gTLDs.

ICANN is expecting funding of $152 million for FY23, which includes the $4 million bung it negotiated with Verisign as part of the deal to allow the company to raise .com prices.

That’s up from the $149.1 million is expects to receive in the current fiscal year.

As usual, the bulk of the funding comes from gTLD transaction fees — the taxes registrants pay through their registrars and registries whenever they register, renew or transfer a domain name.

Legacy gTLD transaction fees are expected to amount to $93.1 million, up 3% on a forecast of $90.1 million in the current year, while new gTLD transaction fees are expected to rise modestly from $9.5 million to $9.9 million, a 4% increase.

Transactions in legacy gTLDs are expected to be 201.2 million, versus 193.6 million in the current year.

New, post-2012 gTLDs are expected to process 25.8 million transactions, up from 24.8 million, of which 21.1 million will be billable, up from 20.3 million. New gTLDs only pay transaction fees after 50,000 domains under management.

ICANN is expecting to lose four registries in FY23 — this almost always means dot-brands that cancel their contracts — with the total declining from a June 2022 total of 1,149 to 1,145 a year later. This will have a modest impact on fixed registry fees.

But the Org is once again expecting to see an increase in the number of registrars paying fixed accreditation fees, up by 28 to 2,447 at the end of FY23.

Accompanying the budget, ICANN has published some industry trend analysis (pdf) outlining some of the assumptions behind the budget forecasts.

Basically, the document describes what regular readers already know — many domain companies benefited from pandemic-related lockdowns driving small businesses online, but overall industry volumes were driven down by low-cost new gTLDs experiencing huge junk drops.

For ICANN’s purposes, factors such as customer quality and pricing are irrelevant. A spammer registering 1,000 domains in bulk pays ICANN the same amount in fees as 1,000 small businesses building their first web sites.

The document reads:

Taken as a whole, DUMs failed to expand in the past twelve months ending in mid-2021. While this decline is at least partly attributable to lower promotional activity among some of the largest new gTLDs which could be reinitiated in the future, it nonetheless points to an industry that has shifted from a period of rapid expansion to one that is now witnessing steady maturation.

The draft ICANN budget covers the 12 months beginning July 1, 2023, and is now open for public comment before possible revisions and final approval.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, lockdown, new gTLDs, pandemic, verisign

ICANN says ODP will speed up new gTLDs in the long run

A time-consuming process to spec-out the next new gTLD application round before it is even formally approved will actually speed up the program over the long run, an ICANN veep has said.

The so-called Operational Design Phase is a bunch of planning, or issues such as cost and feasibility, that ICANN says it needs to do before the community’s policy recommendations can be put before the board of directors.

The board approved the ODP in September, giving the Org a $9 million budget and a 10-month deadline to complete the project, but the clock doesn’t start ticking until CEO Göran Marby formally starts the process.

Three months later, that still hasn’t happened. ICANN is still “organizing the resources needed and developing the roadmap for the work ahead”, according to a blog post from Karen Lentz, VP of policy research and stakeholder programs.

The Org is doing the preparation for the preparation for the preparation for the next round, in other words.

But Lentz says this will speed up the new gTLD program over the longer term.

We believe the ODP will actually streamline future work. It will have a positive impact on the duration of the implementation process by making the assumptions explicit, answering key questions, and considering how the recommendations on different topics work together in addition to providing a detailed timeline and visibility to the timing of implementation activities. If the Board approves the recommendations, the org and the Implementation Review team would be able to leverage a good amount of work already completed during the ODP. Future rounds would not be possible without the foundational work of an ODP. It’s important to note that without an ODP, this work would still be taking place, but without the structure and transparency that the ODP provides.

Another important consideration to note here is that we are not simply organizing only the next round. We are building a foundational structure for all of the work that the org, the community, and the Board will do over the coming years to continue to evolve the namespace along with the necessary procedures and tools. So the work from this ODP is not only for a single round — this is targeting a long-term plan and for multiple rounds.

If Marby were to start the ODP tomorrow, and ICANN managed to hit its deadline, October 2022 would be the absolute earliest the ICANN board would get the chance to approve the next round.

It’s possible, though not very likely given how intrinsic to ICANN’s mission the opening up of gTLD competition is, that the board could instead decide not to approve the next round.

After the next round gets the thumbs-up, there’s still a whole lot of extra work to do — the aforementioned Implementation Review, hiring contractors, a months-long marketing campaign — before companies would actually get to file their applications.

We’re still looking at 2024 at the earliest for that, in my view, but if there’s one thing we can rely on from ICANN, it’d delay.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, odp, subpro

Be the next “face” of dot-brands

The Brand Registry Group is seeking a new executive director, after incumbent Martin Sutton decided he’s to leave the group next year.

Sutton, who’s been in the role since 2015, said the BRG is looking for somebody to be the new “face of the dotBrand community”.

Arguably the group’s biggest issue right now is the next new gTLD application round, which still appears to be years away after a decade’s worth for navel-gazing by ICANN.

If BRG members are to be believed, a whole lot of companies that missed out on the 2012 round or have been founded since then are champing at the bit for the chance to get their own dot-brands.

It’s pretty clear from Sutton’s job posting that a long-time ICANN community member is being sought, and I can think of maybe two or three people who would make perfect candidates.

The BRG is not a formal ICANN structure, but it gets time on the agenda at ICANN meetings and has some political clout. Its members include the likes of Apple, Amazon, Fox, Honda and JP Morgan & Chase.

The executive director is its only full-time employee role.

Comment Tagged: brand registry group, brg, ICANN

CentralNic makes another registrar acquisition

CentralNic said today it has bought another registrar, Chile-based NameAction, in a $1 million deal.

NameAction has been around since the late 1990s and specializes in ccTLDs in the Latin American region, including offering local presence services for foreign registrants.

It sells gTLD domains too, acting primarily in the brand protection space, but does not appear to be ICANN-accredited in its own right.

CentralNic said the deal will immediately add $2 million to its top line and $200,000 to profits.

CEO Ben Crawford said in a press release that the deal is small but of strategic importance, giving the company a beachhead from which to expand into Latin America.

It’s the fourth acquisition announcement from CentralNic, which describes itself as an industry consolidator, this year.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, centralnic, nameaction