India’s biggest bank switches to dot-brand

State Bank of India has announced plans to migrate all of its web sites to its new dot-brand gTLD.
The company has been responsible for .sbi since it was delegated by ICANN last April, but bank.sbi is its first live domain name.
Currently, while bank.sbi is live and resolving, the old domain sbi.co.in appears to still be its primary address.
However, SBI said “all of the bank’s internet presence… shall soon be migrated to the .sbi gTLD”.
There will be a period of crossover while customers get used to the change, it said in a press release.
The bank said: “a gTLD site like .sbi conveys an assurance to the customer that the site is authorised, genuine and is not an inappropriate or phishing site”.
The move is perhaps significant given that SBI is state-owned, and one might expect some level of nationalism when it comes to domain choice.
But SBI, India’s largest bank with $490 billion in assets under management, is not the first bank to say it plans to use its dot-brand as its primary TLD.
BNP Paribas, the world’s biggest non-Chinese bank, uses .bnpparibas for almost everything, particularly in its native France. It has three domains in the Alexa top 100,000 most-visited web sites.
Others with dot-brands in use include Barclays and Citi.

The biggest dot-brand in the world has 50,000 domains, but are they legit?

The biggest dot-brand gTLD active today has about 50,000 domains under management, but the vast majority of them may not be compliant with ICANN rules.
Real Estate Domains LLC runs .realtor in partnership with the National Association of Realtors, a US-based real estate agent membership organization.
RED/NAR has an ICANN policy exemption that means it does not have to open .realtor to competition between registrars, but it does not appear to be sticking to the promises it made when it asked for that exemption.
RED has told DI that it believes it is fully compliant with its contractual obligations.
The .realtor gTLD is highly unusual, possibly even unique, in the market.
It is, by most comparisons, a thriving new gTLD. It has tens of thousands of domain names and thousands of active web sites.
It’s the 59th-biggest 2012-round gTLD, according to zone file counts. It has more names than .blog, .webcam and .ninja.
It currently has about 48,000 names in its zone file, a bit less than half of its November 2015 peak of 110,000. It’s been offering a free first-year name to NAR members since launch, which may account for the first-year peak and second-year trough.
It’s arguably a “dot-brand”, but its domains are primarily used by fee-paying third parties, which is not the case for the over 500 other dot-brands out there today.
The string “realtor” is in fact an trademark, fiercely guarded by the NAR and apparently at genuine risk of genericide.
To call yourself a realtor, you have to pay NAR local and national membership fees that can run into hundreds of dollars a year.
To register a .realtor domain, you have to be an NAR member. So, even though the price of a .realtor domain is only around $40 at Name Share (the only approved .realtor registrar), the cost of eligibility is much higher.
I think that the way the NAR is selling its names to third-party realtors is very possibly a breach of ICANN rules, but explaining why I think that will get a bit complicated.
To begin with, whether a gTLD is a “dot-brand” depends to a great extent on your definition of the term.
I usually take “dot-brand” to mean any new gTLD that has Specification 13 — which allows registries to ignore ICANN policies such as the otherwise mandatory Sunrise period — in its Registry Agreement.
There are 463 gTLDs that have Spec 13 so far. They’re being used to a greater or lesser extent by the respective registries to promote their own brands.
Some have set up a bunch of domains with redirects to specific URLs on their .com or ccTLD site. Others have built a modest number of custom sites to promote various products, services, offers or marketing campaigns.
A small number have been using their domains to help business partners. Spanish car maker Seat points scores of .seat domains to cookie-cutter sites promoting local car dealerships, but I’ve seen no evidence these dealers have any control over these domains.
Almost all of the time, the only entity actually using the domain is the registry — that is, the brand owner — itself.
There’s also another definition of dot-brand — any gTLD that does not have Spec 13, but does have an exemption to Specification 9 of the standard ICANN Registry Agreement.
Spec 9, also called the “Code of Conduct”, is the part of the RA that requires registries to give equal, non-discriminatory access to all ICANN-accredited registrars.
It’s there to stop registries favoring registrars they have close relationships with and therefore to keep the market competitive.
Every Spec 13 dot-brand has a Spec 9 exemption, but not every TLD with a Spec 9 exemption has signed Spec 13.
There are 66 gTLDs that have the Spec 9 exemption but do not have Spec 13 in their contracts. Almost all of these have fewer than 100 domains in their zone file today.
The Spec 9 exemption was created to avoid the stupid and undesirable situation where a big-name company has to open access to its dot-brand back-end registry to multiple registrars, even though it is the only registrant permitted to register names there.
The Code of Conduct is there to protect registrants. When there is only one registrant, there’s no need for protection. With multiple registrants, competition needs to be enforced.
To get the Spec 9 exemption, dot-brands have to send a letter to ICANN promising three things:

1. All domain name registrations in the TLD are registered to, and maintained by, Registry Operator for the exclusive use of Registry Operator or its Affiliates (as defined in the Registry Agreement);
2. Registry Operator does not sell, distribute or transfer control or use of any registrations in the TLD to any third party that is not an Affiliate of Registry Operator; and
3. Application of the Code of Conduct to the TLD is not necessary to protect the public interest

Those bullets are copied from the March 2014 .realtor letter (pdf), but they’re all basically the same.
The first bullet says that domains have to be registered to the registry operator. In the case of .realtor, that’s RED/NAR.
And in fact, as far as I can tell, every .realtor domain has the RED/NAR listed in the “Registrant” field of its Whois record. The registry owns the lot.
But that bullet also says that .realtor domains have to be “maintained by” and “for the exclusive use of” the registry operator (in this case, the NAR) and its “Affiliates”.
The second bullet says that the registry cannot give “control or use” of any .realtor domain to a third party that is not an “Affiliate” of the registry.
The term “Affiliate” is important here. The Spec 9 exemption states that it is defined by the RA, and the RA defines it like this:

For the purposes of this Agreement: (i) “Affiliate” means a person or entity that, directly or indirectly, through one or more intermediaries, or in combination with one or more other persons or entities, controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with, the person or entity specified, and (ii) “control” (including the terms “controlled by” and “under common control with”) means the possession, directly or indirectly, of the power to direct or cause the direction of the management or policies of a person or entity, whether through the ownership of securities, as trustee or executor, by serving as an employee or a member of a board of directors or equivalent governing body, by contract, by credit arrangement or otherwise.

My reading of this is that an Affiliate is an entity that is controlled, in a corporate sense, by the registry. The definition came about as a way to stop domain companies trying to avoid policy obligations by hiding behind shell companies.
However, in my opinion, the vast majority of .realtor domains today are in fact being controlled and used by third parties that are not registry Affiliates by the RA definition.
The first giveaway is Whois. While RED/NAR is listed as the “Registrant” of pretty much all .realtor domains, in most cases the “Administrative” contact is listed as the person or company who caused the name to be registered. Third-party realtors, in other words.
Second, the registry’s web site states plainly that NAR member realtors can “get” and “use” .realtor domains and goes on to specify that they can use the names to build a web site, set up an email address, and even redirect the domain to an existing site.
Doing a Google search for .realtor sites, you’ll find that realtors are in fact using .realtor domains for these permitted purposes.
This seems to be a case of thousands of non-registry parties paying for “control” and “use” of domains that are supposed to be restricted to the registry’s control and use.
It seems to be true that they don’t “own” the domains that they “use”, but they nevertheless do “use” them in much the same way as I expect a significant majority of non-domainer registrants in other TLDs “use” their domains.
NAR/RED is of course fully aware of its RA obligations, and has written its own terms to accommodate them.
On a .realtor registry web site, its registration agreement, or “License Agreement”, states:

You represent, warrant and agree that you are a REALTOR®, an NAR member, the Canadian Real Estate Association (“CREA”), a member of CREA, an NAR or CREA member Board or Association, an NAR affiliate, an NAR licensee, or otherwise in a contractual relationship with NAR relating to use of NAR’s REALTOR® mark and that, in such capacity, you are deemed an “Affiliate” of RED as such is defined in the Registry Agreement, including as specifically set forth in the Code of Conduct Exemption.

The NAR is basically asking its members to affirm, via the small print of their registration agreement (that the majority won’t read) and the .realtor RA (which I’m sure none of them will read), that the NAR has some kind of corporate control over them.
That’s clearly not the case, in my understanding. The NAR’s members are generally fully independent sole traders or limited companies.
Realtors causing .realtor domains to be registered on their behalf are no more “Affiliates” of RED or the NAR than I would be an Affiliate of Facebook if, perchance, there’s a similar clause in the Facebook terms of service.
While I’ve been asking industry experts about this for the last couple of weeks, it was suggested to me that the fact that .realtor registrants have a “contract” with the registry (to license the Realtor trademark) is enough to satisfy the “Affiliate” definition.
I don’t buy it. Every registrant in every TLD signs a contract whenever they register a domain name. If a contract were sufficient for a Spec 9 opt-out, every gTLD would have the opt-out.
At this point you may be wondering what the harm of this business model is. I wondered the same thing myself.
The main harm, as far as I can see it, is that it sets a precedent for other gTLDs to avoid contractual obligations.
The other is that .realtor registrants (for want of a better term) are locked into the one approved registrar, Name Share, forever. If Name Share were to raise its prices, they would not have the option to move to another registrar.
Name Share, part of the EnCirca registrar family, specializes in niche TLDs and currently charges a not-unreasonable $39.95 per year for a .realtor domain.
There’s also the fact that gTLDs themed around real estate are thin on the ground right now.
RED/NAR also controls the new gTLD .realestate, but it has yet to launch for unknown reasons.
.realtor went from delegation to general availability in less than three months back in mid-2014 — a fast launch — but .realestate was delegated in April 2016 and hasn’t even set out its launch plan yet.
It’s a fully generic, non-brand gTLD but it hasn’t told ICANN when its sunrise, trademark claims or GA dates are yet. It hasn’t even launched its nic.realestate web site yet, which is a contractual obligation also in the RA.
I don’t know why RED/NAR has not started to launch .realestate yet. When I asked RED’s top brass I did not get a reply.
But I do know that a real estate agent in North America today who wants to get a domain in a semantically valuable TLD has one fewer option due to the absence of .realestate from the market.
Another option, buying a .realty domain from Top Level Spectrum, is not possible either because, 18 months after delegation, it also has not launched.
Then there’s .homes, a restricted gTLD operated by Dominion Enterprises, but that has virtually no registrar support and fewer than 100 names in its zone eight months after general availability started.
The only real option right now (other than using an unrelated TLD) is to buy a .realtor domain, but they’d have to pay hundreds of dollars to NAR for membership and then would not have a choice of registrars through which to register.
I put all of my questions about the business model and the Spec 9 exemption to RED last week.
“We believe we are in full compliance with the Spec 9 exemption as granted by ICANN based on our request and posted publicly here,” CEO Matthew Embrescia said in an email (link in original).
Brian Johnson, general counsel for RED, said in a separate email:

our position is that RED is in full compliance as such relates to Spec 9 for .REALTOR. In fact, we think .REALTOR is a very successful example of a TLD with a legitimate business model which incorporates a Spec 9 exemption.

I also pushed Johnson and Embrescia for specific explanations of why I might be wrong in my interpretation of the Spec 9 exemption and how RED is applying it, but I did not get any replies.
A senior ICANN staffer, while declining to comment on the specifics of any TLD or any compliance investigation, told me that my understanding of the Spec 9 exemption is correct.
I gather that all Spec 9-exempt registries are obliged to submit an annual report about their exemption compliance, and that the 2016 report is due tomorrow.
However, I believe .realtor’s business model is well over one year old already, so it’s debateble whether ICANN has been paying attention.

GoDaddy gets its dot-brand

GoDaddy has become a new gTLD registry with the delegation yesterday of .godaddy.
It’s a dot-brand, so domain name registrations will not be made available to the general public.
In one of the shortest mission statements found in new gTLD applications, the company describes .godaddy like this:

The mission or purpose of the .GODADDY gTLD is strictly for branding protection and internal use. The gTLD .GODADDY will give visitors to any .GODADDY site the assurance that they are truly dealing with Go Daddy and not an imposter or cybersquatter.

GoDaddy has not yet gone live with its nic.godaddy site.
It’s not the first domain name firm to get its own dot-brand. Notably, Neustar and Verisign own .neustar and .verisign.
It’s not the only registrar with a dot-brand, either. France’s OVH got there first with .ovh.
GoDaddy originally applied for two other gTLDs — .home and .casa — but withdrew their applications almost immediately after a shift of company strategy.

Amazingly, .blockbuster will soon be a gTLD

Video rental chain Blockbuster may have gone the way of the the 8-track, the VCR, and the Nokia cell phone, but it will soon have a gTLD of its own.
The .blockbuster gTLD application completed its pre-delegation testing with ICANN this week and is now with IANA/Verisign, ready to go live on the internet in the coming week or so.
It’s a fairly straightforward dot-brand application, even though the brand itself is pretty much dead.
Blockbuster, which at its peak in 2004 had 9,000 rental stores in its chain, was rescued from its Netflix-induced bankruptcy by TV company Dish Network back in 2011.
Dish applied for .blockbuster in 2012 when the brand was still, if only barely, a going concern.
However, since that time all of its remaining Blockbuster stores have been closed down and the Blockbuster-branded streaming service has been renamed Sling.
The web site at blockbuster.com is a husk that hasn’t been updated since 2014.
And yet the brand will shortly be at the cutting edge of online branding by having its own new gTLD.
A dot-brand without a brand? Surely this will be among the most useless new gTLDs to hit the ‘net.

African brands wiped off the map as ICANN flips the kill switch on 10 gTLDs

Ten dot-brand gTLDs may never see the light of day, after ICANN sent termination notices to the applicants.
The move means that the number of African-owned dot-brand gTLDs to go live in the current round will be precisely zero.
The 10 affected gTLDs are .naspers, .supersport, .mzansimagic, .mnet, .kyknet, .africamagic, .multichoice, .dstv and .gotv, which were applied for by four South African companies, and .payu, which came from a Dutch firm.
In each case, the applicant had signed a Registry Agreement with ICANN in early 2015, but had failed to actually go live in the DNS within the required 12-month window.
All had deadlines in February or March but failed to meet even extended deadlines.
The condemned gTLDs make up more than half of the total applications originating in Africa.
Of the original 17 African applications, only ZACR’s .joburg, .capetown and .durban city gTLDs have actually been delegated.
Another application, the generic .ummah from Ummah Digital of Gambia, was withdrawn in 2013.
The League of Arab States’ .arab and عرب. are both currently in pre-delegation testing, having signed ICANN contracts in November.
The remaining two applications are both for .africa, which is currently stuck in litigation.
We’re looking at a maximum of six African-owned gTLDs, of a possible 16, going live in the 2012 round.
ICANN was criticized back in 2012 for not doing enough to raise awareness of the new gTLD program, criticisms that have been raised again recently as the community starts to seriously look at how things can be improved for the next round.
UPDATE: This article originally stated that .ummah was a dot-brand application. It was not. The text has been corrected accordingly.

Two more dot-brands self-terminate

The dot-brand dead-pool is now up to three gTLDs.
FLSmidth, which supplies machinery to the cement industry, and Emerson Electric, which also makes industrial machinery, have both decided that they don’t need their new gTLDs.
The affected gTLDs are .flsmidth and .emerson.
Both companies have filed cursory notices of termination with ICANN, indicating that they no longer wish to have a new gTLD Registry Agreement.
Neither company has yet received a preliminary determination from ICANN, a step that will lead to a month-long public comment period before the contracts are terminated.
In Emerson’s case, .emerson has not been delegated so there will be no impact on the number of TLDs in the root.
FLSmidth’s dot-brand has been live since September 2014, but the company never made the transition away from its .com.
While registry reports show that six domains have been registered, its latest zone file shows only the obligatory nic.flsmidth domain is active.
The first new gTLD to cop out was .doosan, the dot-brand for Korean conglomerate Doosan. It took over four months from filing its notice last October to the TLD being retired.

Amazon files appeal on rejected .amazon domain

Amazon has appealed the rejection of its proposed .amazon new gTLD.
The company this week told ICANN that it has invoked the Independent Review Process, after 18 months of informal negotiations proved fruitless.
Amazon’s .amazon application was controversially rejected by ICANN in May 2014, due to advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee.
The GAC, by a consensus, had told ICANN that .amazon should be rejected.
South American nations that share the Amazonia region of the continent had said the string was “geographic” and should therefore be unavailable to the US-based company.
The word “Amazon” is not protected by ICANN’s geographic string rules, because “Amazon” is not the name of a region, and was only rejected due to governmental interference.
The GAC’s decision came only after the US, which had been preventing consensus in order to protect one of its biggest native internet companies, decided to step aside.
Amazon has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process — an informal set of talks designed to avoid the need for too many lawyers — since July 2014.
Those talks have now ended and Amazon has told ICANN that an IRP is incoming, according to ICANN documentation published on Tuesday (pdf).
The IRP documents themselves have not yet been published by ICANN.
UPDATE: This article originally incorrectly stated that the US withdrew its objection to the GAC consensus on .amazon after the IANA transition was announced. In fact, it did so several months prior to that announcement.

ICANN tests emergency registry with dead dot-brand

ICANN is running a test of its Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, using the dead dot-brand gTLD .doosan as its guinea pig.
Doosan Group, a large Korean conglomerate, decided to kill off its gTLD, .doosan, last September. ICANN revealed the news in October.
The dot-brand had never been put to productive use and really only ever had nic.doosan live.
As it’s a dot-brand, it’s protected by the part of the Registry Agreement that prevents it being transferred to another registry operator.
Rather than letting the gTLD slip away into the night, however, ICANN is taking it as an opportunity to test out its EBERO system instead. ICANN says:

Simulating an emergency registry operator transition will provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of procedures for addressing potential gTLD service interruptions. Lessons learned will be used to support ICANN’s efforts to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet and the Domain Name System.

EBERO is the process that is supposed to kick in when (or if, I guess) a gTLD with a significant number of third-party registrations goes out of business and no other registry wants to take it over.
The EBERO provider takes over the running of the TLD’s critical functions for a few years so it can be wound down in an orderly fashion, giving registrants enough time to migrate to other TLDs.
Nominet, one of the designated EBERO operators, has taken over .doosan for this test, which is only a temporary measure.
Its IANA record was updated today with Nominet named as the technical contact and ICANN as the sponsor and administrator. Its name servers have switched over to Nominet’s.
Right now, www.nic.doosan resolves to ICANN’s EBERO web page. The non-www. version doesn’t seem to do anything.
ICANN said it will provide updates when the test is over.

Baidu, China’s Google, gets its dot-brand gTLD

Chinese web giant Baidu had its dot-brand gTLD, .baidu, go live in the DNS root zone today.
With the extraordinary amount of focus on China in the domain industry currently, this could be one of the dot-brands to watch in 2016.
There are no active domain names in .baidu just yet, but we will likely see nic.baidu put to some use or another over the coming days.
Unusually for a dot-brand gTLD, Baidu’s contract with ICANN does not contain specifications 9 or 13, which allow dot-brands to operate differently to regular gTLDs.
This suggests an open registration policy under which any registrar can sell .baidu domains to any registrant.
However, Baidu’s original gTLD application spells out quite a different plan, focused primarily on trademark protection. It says:

All available second-level strings of .BAIDU (e.g. example .BAIDU) will be initially allocated only to limited number of eligible registrants and for internal corporate business purposes. BAIDU plans to adopt this approach and expects to maintain it for 3 years from the launch of the “.BAIDU” registry service. Such approach will be regularly evaluated and adjusted if appropriate and necessary. Depending a various internal and external factors, including market demand and user expectation, BAIDU may consider a phased roll-out approach for a broader commercial marketplace but will do so after the conclusion of the initial 3-year period.

I wouldn’t expect .baidu to launch properly any time soon.
Not only is the company probably going to want to get its dot-brand contractual protections in place, it’s also showed no huge enthusiasm for making its way through the new gTLD delegation process so far.
It signed its ICANN contract January 8 last year, meaning this week was pretty much the latest date it could permissibly go into the root.
Like most dot-brands, it’s been dragging its feet, in other words.
Baidu is the leading web property in China, dwarfing even Google in terms of search market share locally.

Tata’s bid for .tata gTLD scuppered by Morocco

Tata Group, the humongous Indian conglomerate, has been told its flagship application for a dot-brand gTLD has been refused.
ICANN on Friday changed the status of the application for .tata from “On Hold” to “Will Not Proceed”, a limbo state that is usually expected to lead to the application being withdrawn.
It is believed that Tata’s row with Morocco is to blame.
While Tata Group is a 150-year-old, $100 billion-a-year company, Tata is also a province of Morocco with a population of about 120,000.
Under the rules of the ICANN new gTLD program, the string “tata” is therefore a protected geographic name, for which the applicant needs to show the unequivocal support or non-objection of the relevant government.
Tata was the last applicant to pass its ICANN evaluation, when in July 2014 it finally managed to pass its Geographic Names Review on the basis of a letter from a Moroccan official.
However, in September last year the Moroccan’s government’s digital economy minister denied that the letter indicated support for .tata.
This February, ICANN threw Tata back into a Geographic Names Review, where the onus was on the company to prove that it really did have support.
That support has evidently not been forthcoming.
Morocco has indicated in letters to ICANN that it may want the .tata gTLD itself in future.
Tata unit Tata Motors has already been delegated the dot-brand gTLD .tatamotors.