.film gTLD sees spike after dropping restrictions

The .film gTLD saw a small spike in registrations this week after dropping eligibility requirements.
The Australia-based registry, Motion Picture Domain Registry, went fully unrestricted February 22 and immediately saw at least 100 new names in its zone file.
It’s a small increase, but it meant .film, which sells for roughly $70 (101domain) to $120 (GoDaddy, its biggest channel) a year, topped 4,000 names for the first time.
It has not seen seen any additional growth since the weekend, however.
.film, from its 2015 launch, was restricted to registrants that could show a nexus to the film industry and was touted as an anti-piracy measure.
It does not appear to have been particularly well-policed, however. Its most popular domains (per Alexa rank) appear today to be piracy sites.
Despite the old restrictions, and despite being more than twice the price, .film has so far actually proved more popular than Donuts’ .movie gTLD, which has been wobbling around the 2,000 to 3,000 domain mark for the last couple of years.
I expect this is probably due to the fact that the word “film” means the same thing in many languages, whereas “movie” is a distinctly American English term.

Namazi named new GDD boss

Cyrus Namazi has been appointed as the new head of ICANN’s Global Domains Division.
He’s been in the role on an interim basis since November, when former GDD president Akram Atallah left to lead Donuts.
Namazi won’t be “president” though, his new job title is senior vice president. He was previously VP of DNS industry engagement, having joined ICANN in 2013.
He’ll be on the executive team and report to CEO Göran Marby, ICANN said.
Namazi and Atallah worked together in their pre-ICANN days at technology firm Conexant Systems.
The GDD basically overseas everything related to ICANN’s gTLD contracted parties.

Yanks beat Aussies to accountancy gTLD

The contention set for .cpa has been resolved, clearing the way for a new accountancy-themed gTLD.
The winner is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which submitted two bids for the string — one “community”, one vanilla, both overtly defensive in nature — back in 2012.
Its main rival, CPA Australia, which also applied on a community basis, withdrew its application two weeks ago.
Commercial registries Google, MMX and Donuts all have withdrawn their applications since late December, leaving only the two AICPA applications remaining.
This week, AICPA withdrew its community application, leaving its regular “single registrant” bid the winner.
AICPA is the US professional standards body for accountants, CPA Australia is the equivalent organization in Australia. ACIPA has 418,000 members, CPA Australia has 150,000.
Both groups failed their Community Priority Evaluations back in 2015 on the basis that their communities were tightly restricted to their own membership, and therefore too restrictive.
AICPA later amended its community application to permit CPAs belonging to non-US trade groups to register.
Both organizations were caught up in the CPE review that also entangled and delayed the likes of .music and .gay. They’ve also both appealed to ICANN with multiple Requests for Reconsideration and Cooperative Engagement Process engagements.
CPA Australia evidently threw in the towel after a December 14 resolution of ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee decision to throw out its latest RfR. It quit its CEP January 9.
It’s likely a private resolution of the set, perhaps an auction, occurred in December.
The winning application from AICPA states fairly unambiguously that the body has little appetite for actually running .cpa as a gTLD:

The main reasons for which AICPA submits this application for the .cpa gTLD is that it wants to prevent third parties from securing the TLD that is identical to AICPA’s highly distinctive and reputable trademark

So don’t get too excited if you’re an accountant champing at the bit for a .cpa domain. It’s going to be an unbelievably restrictive TLD, according to the application, with AICPA likely owning all the domains for years after delegation.

The internet is about to get a lot gayer

Seven years after four companies applied for the .gay top-level domain, we finally have a winner.
Three applicants, including the community-driven bid that has been fighting ICANN for exclusive recognition for years, this week withdrew their applications, leaving Top Level Design the prevailing bidder.
Top Level Design is the Portland, Oregon registry that already runs .ink, .design and .wiki.
The withdrawing applicants are fellow portfolio registries Donuts and MMX, and community applicant dotgay LLC, which had been the main holdout preventing the contention set being resolved.
I do not yet know how the settlement was reached, but it smells very much like a private auction.
As a contention set only goes to auction with consent of all the applicants, it seems rather like it came about after dotgay finally threw in the towel.
dotgay was the only applicant to apply as a formal “community”, a special class of applicant under ICANN rules that gives a no-auction path to delegation if a rigorous set of tests can be surmounted.
Under dotgay’s plan, registrants would have to have been verified gay or gay-friendly before they could register a .gay domain, which never sat right with me.
The other applicants, Top Level Design included, all proposed open, unrestricted TLDs.
dotgay, which had huge amounts of support from gay rights groups, failed its Community Priority Evaluation in late 2014. The panel of Economist Intelligence Unit experts awarded it 10 out the 16 available points, short of the 14-point prevailing threshold.
Basically, the EIU said dotgay’s applicant wasn’t gay enough, largely because its definition of “gay” was considered overly broad, comprising the entire LGBTQIA+ community, including non-gay people.
After dotgay appealed, ICANN a few months later overturned the CPE ruling on a technicality.
A rerun of the CPE in October 2015 led to dotgay’s bid being awarded exactly the same failing score as a year earlier, leading to more dotgay appeals.
The .gay set was also held up by an ICANN investigation into the fairness of the CPE process as carried out by the EIU, which unsurprisingly found that everything was just hunky-dory.
The company in 2016 tried crowdfunding to raise $360,000 to fund its appeal, but after a few weeks had raised little more than a hundred bucks.
Since October 2017, dotgay has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process, a form of negotiation designed to avert a formal, expensive, Independent Review Process appeal, and the contention set had been on hold.
The company evidently decided it made more sense to cut its losses by submitting to an auction it had little chance of winning, rather than spend six or seven figures on a lengthy IRP in which it had no guarantee of prevailing.
Top Level Design, in its application, says it wants to create “the most safe, secure, and prideful .gay TLD possible” and that it is largely targeting “gay and queer people as well as those individuals that are involved in supporting gay cultures, such as advocacy, outreach, and civil rights.”
But, let’s face it, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of porn in there too.
There’s no mention in the winning bid of any specific policies to counter the abuse, such as cyberbullying or overt homophobia, that .gay is very likely to attract.
Top Level Design is likely to take .gay to launch in the back end of the year.
The settlement of the contention set is also good news for two publicly traded London companies.
MMX presumably stands to get a one-off revenue boost (I’m guessing in seven figures) from losing another auction, while CentralNic, Top Level Design’s chosen back-end registry provider, will see the benefits on an ongoing basis.

No .web until 2021 after Afilias files ICANN appeal

Afilias has taken ICANN to arbitration to prevent .web being delegated to Verisign.
The company, which came second in the $135 million auction that Verisign won in 2016, filed Independent Review Process documents in late November.
The upshot of the filing is that .web, considered by many the best potential competitor for .com — Afilias describes it as “crown jewels of the New gTLD Program” — is very probably not going to hit the market for at least a couple more years.
Afilias says in in its filing that:

ICANN is enabling VeriSign to acquire the .WEB gTLD, the next closest competitor to VeriSign’s monopoly, and in so doing has eviscerated one of the central pillars of the New gTLD Program: to introduce and promote competition in the Internet namespace in order to break VeriSign’s monopoly

Its beef is that Verisign acquired the rights to .web by hiding behind a third-party proxy, Nu Dot Co, the shell corporation linked to the co-founders of .CO Internet that appears to have been set up in 2012 purely to make money by losing new gTLD auctions.
Afilias says NDC broke the rules of the new gTLD program by failing to notify ICANN that it had made an agreement with Verisign to sign over its rights to .web in advance of the auction.
The company says that NDC’s “obligation to immediately assign .WEB to VeriSign fundamentally changed the nature of NDC’s application” and that ICANN and the other .web applicants should have been told.
NDC’s application had stated that .web was going to compete with .com, and Verisign’s acquisition of the contract would make that claim false, Afilias says.
This means ICANN broke its bylaws commitment to apply its policies, “neutrally, objectively, and fairly”, Afilias claims.
Allowing Verisign to acquire its most significant potential competitor also breaks ICANN’s commitment to introduce competition to the gTLD market, the company reckons.
It will be up to a three-person panel of retired judges to decide whether these claims holds water.
The IRP filing was not unexpected. I noted that it seemed likely after a court threw out a Donuts lawsuit against ICANN which attempted to overturn the auction result for pretty much the same reasons.
The judge in that case ruled that new gTLD applicants’ covenant not to sue ICANN was valid, largely because alternatives such as IRP are available.
ICANN has a recent track record of performing poorly under IRP scrutiny, but this case is by no means a slam-dunk for Afilias.
ICANN could argue that the .web case was not unique, for starters.
The .blog contention set was won by an affiliate of WordPress maker Automattic under almost identical circumstances earlier in 2016, with Colombian-linked applicant Primer Nivel paying $19 million at private auction, secretly bankrolled by WordPress.
Nobody complained about that outcome, probably because it was a private auction so all the other .blog applicants got an even split of the winning bid.
Afilias wants the .web IRP panel to declare NDC’s bid invalid and award .web to Afilias at its final bid price.
For those champing at the bit to register .web domains, and there are some, the filing means they’ve likely got another couple years to wait.
I’ve never known an IRP to take under a year to complete, from filing to final declaration. We’re likely looking at something closer to 18 months.
Even after the declaration, we’d be looking at more months for ICANN’s board to figure out how to implement the decision, and more months still for the implementation itself.
Barring further appeals, I’d say it’s very unlikely .web will start being sold until 2021 at the very earliest, assuming the winning registry is actually motivated to bring it to market as quickly as possible.
The IRP is no skin off Verisign’s nose, of course. Its acquisition of .web was, in my opinion, more about restricting competition than expanding its revenue streams, so a delay simply plays into its hands.

Nevett lands at PIR

Donuts alumnus Jon Nevett has been named the new CEO of Public Interest Registry.
Non-profit PIR, which runs .org and related gTLDs, said he will start in the role December 17.
Nevett was most recently executive VP at Donuts, the new gTLD registry he co-founded.
He left Donuts in October, not long after he cashed out when the company was sold to private equity firm Abry Partners.
The PIR corner office had been empty since May, after the unexpected and still unexplained resignation of Brian Cute.
Jay Daley, a member of the board of directors, was filling the role on an interim basis, but told us definitively in September that he was not interested in taking over permanently.

Uniregistry working on bulk trademark blocking service

Uniregistry is planning to launch a bulk trademark block service, along the same lines as Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List.
But it’s going to be roughly 50% more expensive than DPML, on a per-TLD basis.
The company has applied to ICANN to run what it calls “Uni EP” across its whole portfolio of 26 gTLDs.
Uni EP would be “largely identical” to DPML, according to Uniregistry’s Registry Service Evaluation Requests.
This means that anyone who has their trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to block the matching string in all of Uniregistry’s TLDs.
Nobody else would be able to register that mark unless they also had a TMCH-validated trademark for the same string.
The pricing would be lower than if the brand owner individually defensively registered in each of the 26 TLDs.
With Donuts, which manages a portfolio almost 10 times as large, DPML tends to be priced around the $6,000 mark retail for a five-year block. That works to about $5 per TLD per year.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said Uni EP could be priced as low as $200 per year. That would work out to about $7.70 per TLD.
The relatively higher pricing might make sense when you consider the larger variation in regular pricing for Uniregistry TLDs, compared to Donuts.
It has several that retail for around $100 a year, and three — .cars, .car and .auto — that sell for close to $3,000 a year.
Still, the Uni EP price is obviously going to be a lot cheaper than regular defensive registrations.
Companies that have already purchased defensively would get to add their domains to the block service after the current registration expires, the RSEP states.
Like DPML, Uni EP would also have a “Plus” version, in which confusingly similar strings in eight scripts would also be blocked.
Uniregistry says it consulted with three brand protection registrars — CSC, MarkMonitor and Safenames — about the service and that their reactions were “favorable”.
Uniregistry’s current portfolio comprises .country, .audio, .car, .blackFriday, .auto, .cars, .christmas, .click, .diet, .flowers, .game, .gift, .guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy, and .tattoo.

ICANN probing Donuts and Tucows over anti-Jewish web site

ICANN is investigating Tucows and Donuts over a web site that hosts antisemitic, white supremacist content.
CEO Goran Marby said in a letter published this week that he has referred a complaint about the web site judas.watch to ICANN’s Compliance department.
The web site in question says it is dedicated to documenting “anti-White traitors, agitators and subversives & highlighting Jewish influence.” It appears to be half database, half blog.
Its method of “highlighting Jewish influence” is possibly the most disturbing part — the site tags people it believes are Jewish with a yellow Star of David, mimicking the way the Nazis identified Jews during the Holocaust.
The site is quite liberal in how it applies these stars, going so far as to label UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been fighting off his own allegations of antisemitism for years, as Jewish.
Over 1,600 people and organizations are currently listed. Posts there also seem keen to highlight its subjects’ sexual orientation.
As far as I can tell, there are no direct calls to violence on the site, and the level of what you might call “hate speech” is pretty mild. It publishes the social media handles of its subjects, but I could not find any physical addresses or phone numbers.
The complaint to ICANN (pdf) came from WerteInitiative (“Values Initiative”), which appears to be a small, relatively new Jewish civil society group based in Germany.
WerteInitiative said judas.watch “poses a direct threat to the named persons with unforeseeable consequences for them, and especially so for the identified Jews”.
“We want this site banned from the Internet and ask for your help in doing so: can you help us to find out who behind this page is, so we can get it banned in Germany?” the letter concludes.
The domain has been behind Whois privacy since it was registered in 2014, so the registrant’s name was not public even prior to GDPR.
Marby, in response (pdf), says the complaint “raises a serious issue”.
While he goes to some lengths to explain that ICANN does not have the authority, contractual or otherwise, to demand the suspension of any domain name, he said he has nevertheless referred the complaint to Compliance.
Compliance has already reached out to the organization for more information, Marby said.
He also encouraged WerteInitiative to talk to .watch registry Donuts and judas.watch registrar eNom (owned by Tucows), as well as the hosting company, to see if that could help resolve the issue.
While ICANN is always adamant that it does not venture into content regulation, it strikes me that this exchange shows just what a tightrope it walks.
It comes against the backdrop of controversy over the suspension by GoDaddy of the domain Gab.com, a Twitter clone largely hosting far-right voices that have been banned from other social media platforms.

US not happy with Donuts hiring Atallah

The US government appears to have reservations about Donuts’ recent hiring of ICANN bigwig Akram Atallah as its new CEO.
Speaking at a session of ICANN 63 here in Barcelona today, National Telecommunications and Information Administration head David Redl alluded to the recent hire.
Atallah was president of the Global Domains Division and twice interim CEO.
While most of Redl’s brief remarks today concerned internet security and Whois, he concluded by saying:

While the community has greatly improved ICANN’s accountability through the IANA stewardship transition process, there are still improvements to be made.
As one example, we need safeguards to ensure that ICANN staff and leadership are not only grounded ethically in their professional actions at ICANN, but also in their actions when they seek career opportunities outside of ICANN.
One potential fix could be “cooling off periods” for ICANN employees that accept employment with companies involved in ICANN activities and programs. This is an ethical way to ensure that conflicts of interest or appearances of unethical behavior are minimized.

ICANN faced similar scrutiny back in the 2011, when ICANN chair Peter Dengate Thrush pushed through the new gTLD program and almost immediately began working for a new gTLD applicant.
That was the same year Redl moved from being head of regulatory affairs at CTIA — lobbying for wireless industry legislation — to counsel to the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee — helping to craft wireless industry legislation.
Here are his remarks. Redl starts speaking at around the 38-minute mark.

Co-founder Nevett leaves Donuts

Donuts executive vice president of corporate affairs Jon Nevett has left the company, Donuts said yesterday.
He’s the last of the four co-founders of the new gTLD portfolio owner to step aside from their original roles over the last couple of years.
There’s no word on whether he’s got a new gig lined up, but given the recent acquisition of Donuts by Abry Partners, which gave the founders the opportunity to dispose of their shares, Nevett presumably will be in no rush.
Donuts said in a statement that Nevett, who led policy at the company, will continue to act as an advisor.
He follows Dan Schindler and Richard Tindal as co-founders who have since left the company.
Founding CEO Paul Stahura stepped into the executive chair role a couple of years ago to make way for Bruce Jaffe, who led the firm through its merger with Rightside and subsequent sale to Abry.
Jaffe himself will leave next month to allow former ICANN bigwig Akram Atallah into the hot seat. Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade is one of Abry’s lead overseers of Donuts.