PIR will launch .giving next month with unusual landrush rules

Public Interest Registry has revealed the launch dates for its recently acquired gTLD .giving, and it seems the former registry will also play a prominent role.

PIR has told ICANN it will run .giving’s sunrise period from October 13 to December 13. It’s an “end date” sunrise, where domains are only allocated at the end of the period, but the criteria for resolving competing claims is first-come-first-served.

The landrush period will run from December 20 to January 20, but there’s an unusual twist requiring registrants to buy, or at least “evaluate”, an e-commerce service:

As a condition to registering a domain name in the .GIVING during Landrush (December 20, 2022 through January 20, 2023), you agree that by registering your domain name, you represent and warrant that: (a) you currently use one of Blackbaud’s digital giving solutions or will evaluate the free Giving Checkout solution offered by JustGiving from Blackbaud available at this link and (b) you acknowledge and agree that the Registry or the registrar can cancel the registration of the domain name if your warranty is found to be untrue, incomplete, incorrect, or misleading.

Blackbaud is the company that operates JustGiving, a fund-raising web site chiefly popular in the UK. It was also the original registry for .giving, although of course it never actually launched the TLD.

PIR says general availability will begin January 20. It appears there will be six premium-price tiers, but renewals will be at the regular fee.

.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.

Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant

Over six years after the last new gTLD application window closed, more than one in 10 new gTLDs have yet to launch, even though some have been delegated for over four years.
Once you filter out duplicates, withdrawals and terminations from the original 1,930 applications, there were a maximum of roughly 1,300 potential new gTLDs from the 2012 round.
But, by my calculations, 144 of those have yet to even get around to their sunrise period. Most of those haven’t even filed their launch plans with ICANN yet.
Here’s 10 from that list I’ve picked based on how interesting they appear to me, in no particular order.
Yes, DI is doing listicles now. Hate-mail to the usual address.
.forum
This one’s owned by Jay Westerdal’s Top Level Spectrum, the same company behind .feedback, .realty and others. I quite like the potential of this string — the internet is chock-full of forums due to the easy availability of open-source forum software — but so far nobody’s gotten to register one. It was delegated back in June 2015 and doesn’t have a published launch plan as yet. An FAQ reading just saying “Jay was here !!!!! Test deploy..delete me later…” has been up on its site since at least last September. TLS is also sitting on .contact and .pid (for “personal ID”) with no launch dates in sight.
.scholarships
Owned by Scholarships.com, there’s a whiff of the defensive about this one. It’s been in the root since March 2015 but its site states the registry “is still finishing launch plans and will provide updates as they become available”. Scholarships.com is a site that connects would-be higher education students to potential sources of funding. It’s difficult to imagine many ways the matching gTLD could possibly help in that mission.
.giving
JustGiving, the UK-based charity campaign aggregator, won this gTLD and had it delegated in August 2015, but seemingly still hasn’t figured out what it wants to do with it. It’s not a dot-brand, so it’s presumably mulling over ways to give .giving domains to fundraisers in a way that does not compromise credibility. Whatever its plans, it’s taking its sweet time over them.
.cancerresearch
This is a weird one. Delegated four years ago, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation rather quickly went live with a bunch of interlinked .cancerresearch web sites, using its contractually permitted allotment of promotional domains. Contractually, it’s not a dot-brand, but it’s basically acting like one, having never actually given ICANN any info about sunrise, eligibility, trademark claims, general availability, etc. Technically, it’s still pre-launch, and I can’t see any reason why it would want to budge from that status. Huge loophole in the ICANN rules?
.beauty
Another whiff of gaming here. International woman-shaming powerhouse L’Oreal still has no announced plans to launch .beauty, .skin or .hair, which it had originally wanted to run as so-called “closed generics” (presumably to keep the keywords out of the hands of competitors). Of its small portfolio of generic gTLDs, delegated in 2016, it has actually launched .makeup already, with a $6,000 retail price and a strategy seemingly based on registry-owned domains matching the names of makeup-focused social media influencers. At least it’s actually selling names, even if nobody’s bought one yet.
.budapest
One of three city TLDs that were delegated back in 2014 but have yet to start selling domains. MMX is to run it in partnership with the local government of the Hungarian city, if it ever gets off the ground. Madrid (.madrid) and Zurich (.zuerich) have both also yet to roll out, although Zurich has settled on early 2019 for its launch.
.fan
Regular DI readers won’t be surprised to see this one on the list. In what may turn out to be a shocking waste of money, .fans registry Asiamix Digital acquired the singular .fan from Donuts back in 2015 and promptly let it sit idle for the next three years. Currently, with .fans turning out to be a flop, Asiamix has money troubles and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it under new ownership before too long. It’s not a terrible string, so there’s some potential there.
.ком, etc
.ком is one of 11 internationalized domain name transliterations of .com — .कॉम, .ком, .点看, .คอม, .नेट, .닷컴, .大拿, .닷넷, .コム, .كوم and .קוֹם — that Verisign had delegated back in 2015. To date, only the Japanese .コム has launched, and the registry reportedly arsed it up quite badly. Records show .コム peaked at over 28,000 names and sits at fewer than 7,000 today. None of the remaining IDNs have launch dates attached.
Anything owned by Google or Amazon
When it comes to sitting on dormant gTLDs, you can’t top Google and Amazon for sheer numbers. Google has 19 strings in pre-launch states right now, while Amazon has a whopping 34. Amazon is letting the likes of .free, .wow, .now, .deal, .save and .secure sit idle, while Google is still stroking its chin on the likes of .eat, .meme, .fly and .channel. At the snail’s pace these companies roll out gTLDs, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these strings never hit the market.
.bom
Portuguese for “.good”, .bom was delegated to local ccTLD registry Nic.br in 2015 but has no published launch dates and no content on its nic.bom registry web site. I’d say more, but I expect a certain prolific DI commenter could do a better job of it, so I’ll turn it over to him…