Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China

ICANN has announced the creation of another root server instance in China, which definitely, DEFINITELY won’t let the Chinese government mess with the interwebs.
ICANN said this week that it’s opened an instance of the L-root that it manages in Shanghai.
It’s the third L-root in China but only the first outside of Beijing.
In a press release announcing the installation, which was carried out with technical support from CNNIC and Shanghai Telecom, ICANN decided to preemptively head off any concerns that putting an important piece of internet infrastructure in China comes with added security risk:

Contrary to common misconception, root servers do not control the Internet. The operation of an instance also does not provide any mechanism to alter content of the DNS. Any modification of root zone content will be mitigated by a part of the DNS protocol known as the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and if an instance fail to respond to a query, resolvers will ask the same question to another instance or root server.

It’s merely the latest of 168 L-root installations and 1,015 copies of the 13 logical root servers, which all use IP Anycast to more quickly serve DNS answers to their local users.
Given how big and populous China is, there are surprisingly few root server instances in the country, according to root-servers.org.
In addition to ICANN’s three boxes, Verisign’s J-root and Internet Systems Consortium’s F-root have three in Beijing and two in Hangzhou between them. The K, I and F roots each have one instance in Beijing.
That’s eight nodes in China proper, which has 800 million internet users. Cross the border into semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which has a population of under eight million people, and there are nine root instances.
The city of Bucharest, Romania (pop. 1.8 million) has the same number of root instances as China.

.wang cut off with Chinese red tape

The registry behind .wang and several Chinese-language gTLDs has seen its official registry web site blocked due to Chinese regulations.
Zodiac Registry, which also runs .商城, .八卦 and .网店 (“mail”, “gossip” and “shop”), has seen zodiacregistry.com intercepted by its web host and replaced with a placeholder message explaining that the site lacks the proper government license.

It seems to have happened relatively recently. Google’s cache shows results from the page resolving normally in late May.
Ironically, its host is Alibaba, which also happens to be its largest registrar partner.
There’s no suggestion that registry operations or registrants have been affected. Domain availability checks at registrars for Zodiac TLDs appear to be working as normal.
The downtime appears to be a configuration problem. Alibaba requires customers to submit their Internet Content Provider license number before it will allow their sites to resolve properly.
ICP licenses are part of China’s censorship regime, issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. They must be obtained by any Chinese web site that wants to operate in China.
Zodiac does in fact have such a license, which according to the MIIT web site is active on at least six other domains.
While zodiacregistry.com is the domain officially listed with IANA for the company, it also operates TLD-specific sites such as bagua.wang for the “gossip” registry. None of these have been affected by the licensing issue.
UPDATE June 12: The site is now back online as normal.

.icu gets China nod as it tops 900,000 regs

Chinese regulators have approved .icu for sale and use in China, according to the registry.
ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas told DI today that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved its year-old gTLD for mainland use.
The company plans to launch .icu there formally June 12, he said.
Kopas also said that .icu has recently topped 900,000 registrations.
It’s a remarkable growth achievement for a gTLD with barely a year on the clock, given that SpamHaus stats show that its level of spam abuse is still comparable to .com.
But with prices at around $1.50 at its largest registrars and very little semantic value, one has to assume that a lot of its registrations are speculative. Its first junk drop could be brutal.
MIIT approval may help it continue its growth trend. To date, China-based registrars have recorded no .icu sales.

Huge batch of Afilias TLDs approved in China

Seventeen Afilias-operated gTLDs have been approved for use in China.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced yesterday that the following Afilias-owned TLDs now have its official seal of approval: .archi, .bio, .black, .blue, .green, .lotto, .organic, .pet, .pink, .poker, .promo, .ski, .vote, .voto and .移动 (xn--6frz82g, means “mobile”),
Also approved are .asia and .网站 (.xn--5tzm5g means “website”), which to the best of my knowledge are not owned by Afilias but are quite closely managed by it.
All 17 were approved via the same Shanghai-based Afilias subsidiary, due to MIIT’s local presence requirements.
Chinese approval means Chinese registrants using Chinese registrars will be permitted to have their names resolve in China, subject to the country’s rather stringent censorship practices.
It’s the first batch of Afilias names to get the nod since April 2017, when .info, .pro and .mobi were approved.

.cloud gets the China blessing

.cloud, run by Italian registry Aruba, has become the latest TLD to get the official nod to sell in China.
The blessing from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology came at the end of October and the company announced it today.
The accreditation means .cloud domains sold to residents of the Chinese mainland will now be resolvable, and subject to China’s onerous censorship rules.
It’s the first Latin-script TLD to be approved by MIIT since July.
.cloud says it currently has 155,000 domains registered to customers in 180 countries.

Chinese registrars on the decline

Having been on a growth trajectory for some years, the number of ICANN-accredited registrars based in China appears to be on the decline.
According to my records, so far this year 26 registrar contracts have been terminated, voluntarily or otherwise, 11 of which were Chinese. I’m excluding the mass drop of Pheenix accreditations from these numbers.
The country with the next-highest number of terminations was the USA, with three.
ICANN has terminated nine registrars for breaches of the RAA this year, six of which were Chinese.
All the Chinese notices included non-payment of ICANN fees as a reason for termination, though it appears that most of them had a negligible number of gTLD domains under management.
ICANN Compliance tells me there’s no particular focus of China at the moment, this is all a result of regular day-to-day enforcement.
ICANN has sent breach notices to 28 companies this year, seven of which were to Chinese registrars.
Meanwhile, 22.cn has moved 13 of its accredited shell registrars to Hong Kong. Another registrar moved its base from China to Australia.
Seven Chinese registrars have been newly accredited this year,
Net, this has all reduced the number of accredited registrars based in China to 91.
The country still has the second-most registrars ahead of the US, with its almost 2,000 registrars, and a clear 31 registrars ahead of third-place India.

MMX waving goodbye to .london? Boss puts focus on renewal profits, China

MMX’s revenue from domain renewals could cover all of its expenses within the next 24 months, if everything goes to plan, according to CEO Toby Hall.
Hall was speaking to DI this evening after the company reported its first-half financial results, which saw revenue up 22% to $6.4 million and a net loss of $14.7 million, which compared to a loss of $526,000 a year earlier.
MMX’s huge loss for the period was largely — to the tune of $11.8 million — attributable to the restructuring of an “onerous” contract with one of its gTLD partners.
Hall refuses point blank to name that partner, but for reasons I discussed last year, I believe it is .london sponsor London & Partners, which is affiliated with the office of the Mayor of London.
When L&P selected MMX to be its registry partner for .london back in 2012, I understand a key reason was MMX’s promise to pay L&P a fixed annual fee and commit to a certain amount of marketing spend.
But two years ago, after it became clear that .london sales were coming in waaaay below previous management’s expectations, MMX renegotiated the deal.
Under the new deal, instead of committing to spend $10.8 million on marketing the TLD itself, MMX agreed to give half that amount to L&P for L&P to do its own marketing.
It appears that L&P has already spunked much of that cash ineffectively, or, as MMX put it:

a significant portion of that marketing budget has been spent by the partner with minimal impact on revenues in the current year and no expectation of any material uplift in future periods

MMX seems to have basically written off the .london deal as a bad call, and now that MMX is no longer in the registry back-end or registrar businesses, it seems unlikely that the .london partnership will be extended when it expires in three years.
Again, Hall would not confirm this bad contract was for .london — I’m making an informed guess — but the alternatives are limited. The only other TLDs MMX runs in partnership currently are .review and .country, and not even 2012 MMX management would have bet the farm on those turkeys.
Another $2.1 million of the company’s H1 net loss is for “bad debt provisions” relating the possibility that certain US-based registrar partners may not pay their dues, but this provision is apparently related to a new accounting standard rather than known deadbeats threatening to withhold payments.
If you throw aside all of this accountancy and look at the “operating EBITDA” line, profit was up 176% to $661,000 compared to H1 2017.
While the loss may have cast a cloud over the first half, Hall is upbeat about MMX’s prospects, and it’s all about the renewals.
“Renewal revenue will be more than all the costs of business within 24 months,” he said. To get there, it needs to cross the $12 million mark.
He told DI tonight that “an increasing percentage of our business is based on renewals… just on renewal revenue alone we’ll be over $10 million this year”.
Renewal revenue was $4.7 million in 2017 and $2.4 million in 2016, he said. In the first half, it was was up 40% to $3.4 million.
MMX’s acquisition of porn domain specialist ICM Registry, which has renewal fees of over $60 per year, will certainly help the company towards its 2018 goal in the second half. ICM only contributed two weeks of revenue — $250,000 — in H1.
Remarkably, and somewhat counter-intuitively, the company is also seeing renewal strength in China.
Its .vip gTLD, which sells almost exclusively in China, saw extremely respectable renewals of 76% in the first half, which runs against the conventional wisdom that China is a volatile market
Hall said that .vip renewals run in the $5 to $10 range, so apparently TLD volume is not being propped up by cheap wholesale renewal fees. The TLD accounts for about 30% of MMX’s renewal revenue, Hall said.
About 60% of .vip’s domains under management are with Chinese registrar Alibaba. The biggest non-Chinese registrar is GoDaddy, with about 3% of the namespace.
More exposure to China, and specifically Alibaba, is expected to come soon due to MMX’s repurposing of the 2012-logic gTLD .luxe, which is being integrated into the Ethereum blockchain.
MMX said last week that some six million (mostly Chinese) users of the imToken Ethereum wallet will in November get the ability to register .luxe domains via imToken and easily integrate them with their Ethereum assets.
The announcement was made at the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference in China last week, so you can probably guess imToken’s registrar of choice.

Baidu gets Chinese approval for .baidu

It seems China’s Draconian licensing program for TLD registries is not limited to foreigners.
Chinese internet giant Baidu on Friday became the latest new gTLD registry operator to get the nod to run a TLD by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The approval was for .baidu, which is currently pre-launch with no launch plan on record.
Despite the brand match, it’s not technically a dot-brand gTLD — its ICANN contract has no Specification 13, which contains various carve-outs for single-registrant spaces.
While not particularly well-known in the English-speaking world, Baidu is second only to Google in terms of search engine market share, due to its dominance in China.
The company had 2017 revenue of almost CNY 85 billion ($12.5 billion).

MMX gets four more gTLDs approved for China use

MMX’s Chinese subsidiary has received the government nod for four more of its new gTLDs to operate in the country.
The approved strings are the lifestyle-oriented .fashion, .luxe, .yoga and .fit.
Getting the nod from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology means Chinese registrants will be able to use domains in the the four gTLDs, albeit subject to China’s much more stringent censorship regime.
MIIT this week also approved .时尚, which is the Chinese version of .fashion, managed by Rise Victory, a subsidiary of Yuwei Registry.
.fashion, .fit and .yoga have about 40,000 domains in their zone files, combined, while .luxe does not yet have a launch date.
MMX has had some success in China with its flagship .vip TLD, which had over 884,000 domains under management at the last public count. It recently said preliminary second-quarter renewals there were a very respectable 75%.
It also recently that that .购物 (.shopping) and .law both went on sale in China, and “will be marketed by in-country specialists as high-value domain names”. Investors were advised not to expect high volumes.

.co first ccTLD to get China approval

Repurposed Colombian ccTLD .co has obtained official government approval to operate in China, according to a consultant whose client worked on the project.
Pinky Brand blogged this week that .co is the “first” foreign ccTLD to get the nod, among the raft of gTLDs that have gone down the same route over the last couple of years.
China’s own .cn and Chinese-script equivalents are of course already approved.
Under China’s policy regime, administered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, TLD registries have to set up a local presence and agree to Draconian takedown policies.
Non-approved TLDs are not permitted to have resolving domains, under the rules.
Most companies seeking Chinese approval tend to use a local proxy provider such as ZDNS, which seems to be the route taken by .co here.
.co is managed by Neustar via its Colombian subsidiary .CO Internet.