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Porn firm wins .cam after years of objections

Kevin Murphy, December 18, 2015, Domain Registries

The controversial new gTLD .cam has been won at auction by Dutch porn site operator AC Webconnecting, putting an end to over two years of back-and-forth objections.
Rival applicants Rightside and Famous Four Media both withdrew their applications earlier this week.
The contest for .cam was marked by several objections and appeals.
In 2013, Verisign filed and lost String Confusion Objections against AC Webconnecting and Famous Four, but won its near-identical objection against Rightside.
Verisign had claimed that .cam and .com are so similar-looking that confusion among internet users is bound to arise.
Because the SCO panels in the three cases returned differing opinions, Rightside was one of two applicants given the right to appeal by ICANN in October 2014.
I never quite understood why Verisign wasn’t also given the right to appeal.
Rightside won the right to stay in the .cam contention set almost a year later.
Despite all that effort, it did not prevail in the resulting auction.
Separately, back in 2013, AC Webconnecting filed and lost Legal Rights Objections against its two rivals, based on a “.cam” trademark it acquired purely for the purpose of fighting off new gTLD competitors.
I’d be lying if I said I knew a lot about the soon-to-be registry.
Based in Rotterdam, its web site comes across as a wholly safe-for-work web design firm.
However, it seems to be mainly in the business of operating scores, if not hundreds, of webcam-based porn sites.
Its application for .cam states that it will be for everyone with an interest in photography, however.
When it goes live, its most direct competitor is likely to be Famous Four’s .webcam, which already has an 18-month and 70,000-domain head start.
It remains to be seen whether its clear similarity to .com will in fact cause significant confusion.

English beats Portuguese in $2.2m .hotels auction

Kevin Murphy, November 19, 2015, Domain Registries

Booking.com has won the right to operate .hotels after an auction concluded a protracted fight over the gTLD.
In an ICANN-run auction yesterday, Booking.com prevailed with a winning bid of $2.2 million.
Its sole competitors was Travel Reservations (formerly Despegar Online), which had applied for the Portuguese word .hoteis.
In 2012, a String Similarity Review panel concluded that .hotels and .hoteis look too similar to coexist, due to the likelihood of confusion between I and l in sans-serif fonts.
Neither applicant agreed with that decision, knowing that it would result in a expensive auction, and Booking.com filed a Request for Reconsideration and then, in March 2013, an Independent Review Process complaint.
After two years, it lost the IRP. But the panel said it had “legitimate concerns” about the fairness of the SSR process and ordered ICANN to pay half of its costs.
Now, Booking.com has had to fork out another $2.2 million for the string.
That’s not particularly expensive as ICANN-auctioned gTLDs go. Eight of the 13 other strings ICANN has auctioned have sold for more.
ICANN’s auction proceeds to date now stands at $63,489,127, which is being held in a separate bank account for purposes yet to be determined.

Web.com just gave itself another reason to bid high for .web gTLD

Kevin Murphy, November 9, 2015, Domain Registrars

Registrar group Web.com is changing its stock market ticker symbol to WEB tomorrow, in another sign that it really, really wants to be identified with the string.
The switch from WWWW may indicate that the NASDAQ-listed company’s six rivals for the new gTLD .web have a fight — and a possible big payday — on their hands when .web finally goes to auction.
Web.com is competing with Nu Dot Co, Radix, Google, Donuts, Afilias and Schlund for the gTLD.
The company has already fiercely defended its “right” to .web, filing successful String Confusion Objections against .webs applicant Vistaprint.
Vistaprint subsequently filed an ICANN Independent Review Process complaint to appeal its SCO loss.
Last month, the IRP was won by ICANN, but the panel left the door open for ICANN to reconsider its decision.
The .web auction is not likely to go ahead until the Vistaprint issue is resolved.
If ICANN decides the two strings can be delegated separately, what I think is the last barrier to the .web auction going ahead disappears.
If not, then Vistaprint finds itself as the seventh contender in the auction, which may give it the impetus to carry on challenging the ruling.
ICANN’s board plans to discuss the issue at its next meeting, December 10.
Which way it leans will give an indication of how long it will be before .web goes to auction.

Correction: .shop auction weirder than I thought

Kevin Murphy, November 2, 2015, Domain Registries

The upcoming auction for .shop and .shopping new gTLDs is weird, but in a different way to which I reported on Friday.
The actual rules, which are pretty complicated, mean that one applicant could win a gTLD auction without spending a single penny.
The nine applicants for .shop and the two applicants for .shopping are not necessarily all fighting it out to be a single victor, which is what I originally reported.
Rather, it seems to be certain that both .shop and .shopping will wind up being delegated.
The ICANN rules about indirect contention are not well-documented, as far as I can tell.
When I originally reported on the rules exactly two years ago today, I thought an animated GIF of a man’s head exploding was an appropriate way to end the story.
In the .shop/.shopping case, it seems that all 11 applications — nine for .shop and two for .shopping — will be lumped into the same auction.
Which applicant drops out first will determine whether both strings get delegated or only one.
Uniregistry and Donuts have applied for .shopping, but only Donuts’ application is in contention with Commercial Connect’s .shop application (due to a String Confusion Objection).
As Donuts has applied for both .shop and .shopping, it will be submitting separate bids for each application during the auction.
The auction could play out in one of three general ways.
Commercial Connect drops out. If Commercial Connect finds the .shop auction getting too rich for it and drops out, the .shopping contention set will immediately become an entirely separate auction between Uniregistry and Donuts. In this scenario, both .shop and .shopping get to become real gTLDs.
Donuts drops its .shopping bid. If Donuts drops its bid for .shopping, Uniregistry is no longer in indirect contention with Commercial Connect’s .shop application, so it gets .shopping for free.
Commercial Connect wins .shop. If Commercial Connect prevails in .shop, that means Donuts has withdrawn from the .shopping auction and Uniregistry wins.
It’s complicated, and doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, but it seems them’s the rules.
It could have been even more complex. Until recently, Amazon’s application for .通販 was also in indirect contention with .shop.
Thanks to Rubens Kuhl of Nic.br for pointing out the error.

Who wants ICANN’s $60m gTLD windfall?

Kevin Murphy, September 9, 2015, Domain Policy

ICANN has opened a formal public comment period to move forward discussions on how it should spend the almost $60 million it has so far received in new gTLD auction proceeds.
It’s not yet looking for concrete suggestions on how to spend the money — this is a pre-consultation consultation — it’s only looking for comments on the principles that should be considered when discussions take place.
ICANN has so far raised $58.8 million from “last resort” new gTLD auctions. With 27 contention sets remaining, that number could go up if one or more applicants refuse to participate in private auctions.
The GNSO Council has been moving to create a Cross-Community Working Group to discuss how the money should be spent, but clashed briefly with the ICANN board, which has said it will make the ultimate decision, earlier this year.
The new paper (get it here) basically asks questions along the lines of: who should decide where the money goes? How should conflicts of interest be handled? How much third-party expert opinion should be solicited? How much say should the board have? How much outreach should there be?
Underpinning it all is the implicit problem that the longer, more detailed and more convoluted the process, the less money there will be to actually distribute at the end.
Knowing the ICANN community’s propensity for convolution, I wouldn’t be surprised if it managed to spunk the whole lot on expert advice, working group travel, lawsuits and coffee.
(Okay, I would actually be surprised, but you get my point).
The paper also includes links to about 20 spending suggestions that have been made in various public fora over the last couple of years.
Some ideas include: giving it back to the applicants, funding open source DNS software, reducing the new gTLD application fee, marketing new gTLDs to registrants, and donating it to charity.
It does not appear to be true that ICANN slipped in one of its own management’s suggestions in an attempt to funnel off new gTLD money into the unpopular NetMundial initiative, as has been alleged elsewhere today. The NetMundial suggestion referred to in the paper actually came from Danny Aerts of Swedish ccTLD manager IIS.

M+M gets $3.5m from two gTLD auctions

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2015, Domain Sales

Minds + Machines secured loser fees totaling $3.5 million from its participation in .art and .data new gTLD auctions, the company disclosed today.
It seems .data was auctioned recently. It was a three-applicant string and none of the applicants have yet withdrawn their applications.
It seems either Donuts or brand applicant Dish DBS won the string.
The .art auction happened well over a month ago, with the final losing applicant withdrawing on July 23.
UK Creative Ideas won .art. Whatever it paid for the string would have been shared between nine competing applicants.
M+M also said that “strong interest” (presumably no sales yet) has been expressed in its $15,000+ “super premium” registry-reserved names, and that it has sold 20 premium names in its .london auction last month.

Another new gTLD up for sale with $750,000 reserve

Kevin Murphy, July 27, 2015, Domain Registries

Another new gTLD contract is hitting the market, with Dotversicherung-registry offering .versicherung at auction next month.
The August 26 auction, to be managed by RightOfTheDot and Heritage Auctions, has a $750,000 reserve.
The string is the German word for “insurance”. The gTLD launched 10 months ago.
“There are over 3,000 domain names registered to the German speaking insurance industry at 99 euro’s a year with virtually no advertising, marketing or promotion,” RightOfTheDot’s Monte Cahn said.
Retail prices range from 150 euros to 250 euros a year.
The registry has 10,000 reserved keyword domains that will pass to the buyer, according to RightOfTheDot.

Dot London auctioning 50 registry-owned premium names

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2015, Domain Sales

Dot London is to auction off 50 premium .london domains over the next two weeks.
The names are all currently registry-owned, and include the likes of dentist.london, flats.london and coffee.london. The full list can be viewed here.
The auctions are scheduled to end on July 30 and all have £100 ($155) starting bids.
According to the registry, it has sold over 3,000 names from its premium list since its launch last year. Some live examples include golf.london and catering.london.
The .london gTLD has a tad over 63,000 names in its zone file today.

Donuts: glitch revealed price we would pay for gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2015, Domain Registries

The recently discovered security vulnerability in one of ICANN’s web sites revealed how much Donuts was willing to pay for contested gTLDs at auction.
This worrying claim emerged during a meeting between registries and the ICANN board of directors at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires yesterday.
“We were probably the largest victim of the data breach,” Donuts veep Jon Nevett told the board. “We had our financial data reviewed numerous times, dozens of times. We had our relative net worth of our TLDs reviewed, so it was very damaging information.”
He was referring to the misconfiguration in the new gTLD applicants’ portal, which allowed any user to view confidential application attachments belonging to any applicant.
ICANN discovered the problem in February, two years after the portal launched. The results of a security audit were revealed in late April.
But it was not until late May that it emerged that only one person, dotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, was suspected by ICANN of having deliberately viewed data belonging to others.
Nevett said communication should have been faster.
“We were in the dark for a number of weeks about who saw the data,” he told the board. “That was troubling, as we were going to auctions in that interim period as well.”
Donuts, which applied for over 300 new gTLDs, is known to have taken a strictly numbers-driven approach to string selection and auction strategy.
If a rival in a contention set had known how much Donuts was prepared to pay for a string, it would have had a significant advantage in an auction.
In response to Nevett’s concerns, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said that ICANN had to do a thorough investigation before it could be sure who saw what when.

XYZ buys .security and .protection from Symantec

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2015, Domain Registries

XYZ.com has added .security and .protection to its portfolio of new gTLDs under a private deal with security software maker Symantec.
Symantec originally applied for both as closed generics, but changed its plans when ICANN changed its tune about exclusive access gTLDs.
The company won .security in an auction against Donuts and Defender Security late last year; .protection was uncontested. It lost auctions for .cloud and .antivirus.
Symantec’s .symantec and .norton, both dot-brands, are currently in pre-delegation testing.
XYZ already owns .college, .rent and of course .xyz.
In other news, Afilias has acquired .promo, which was in PDT with applicant Play.Promo Oy, in a private auction.
UPDATE: A couple of hours after this post was published, XYZ announced it has also acquired .theatre, which will compete with Donuts’ .theater, from KBE gTLD Holding Inc.