101domain shifts blame to Google as premium buyers offered 50% discount

101domain has offered a 50% discount to customers that were sold premium new gTLD domains for a vastly reduced price, and has tried to shift some of the blame to the registry, Google.
The offer was made in a letter (pdf) to affected registrants — previously hit with delayed invoices for thousands of dollars for domains they bought for $12.99 — sent yesterday.
It indicates that the registrar is prepared to eat at least part of its pricing error on both first-year registrations and subsequent annual renewals.
101domain told customers:

• You now have until June 23, 2014 to make a decision whether to delete the name or pay for the premium name.
• If you want to keep the name(s), 101domain will offer you a 50% discount on the first year premium price and a 25% discount on premium annual renewals.
• If you give up your name(s), we will give you a credit on 101domain.com for any future purchases equal to 25% of the price of the premium name.

Previously, affected registrants had been told to pay up or have their domains deleted the following day.
As we reported last week, almost 50 domains in Google’s .みんな (“.everyone”) were sold for $12.99, despite some being earmarked by the registry as “premiums” with annual fees of up to $7,000.
In its letter to customers yesterday, 101domain characterized Google’s system for handling premiums as non-standard and difficult for registrars to work with.
Google’s list of premium names was circulated to registrars via an email, and the registry had no EPP commands for checking out whether a name was premium in real-time, the registrar says.
There was also no way for registrars to prevent the registration of premiums and no way to check with the registry for premium sales, it added.
It seems clear from the letter that the discounts now on offer mean that if registrants choose to keep their names they’ll be getting them at less than the registry fee — 101domain will eat the difference.

We contacted Google and requested them to work with us on the matter since we felt strongly that both sides were responsible to right the situation. Google offered no assistance other than extending the date to delete the names — telling us it was our problem.

Despite this seemingly generous response to domainer outrage, at the least one affected customer is not impressed.
In an email to DI last night the original registrant that first alerted us to the pricing problem described the latest 101domain offer as “lame”.

Guy hit with $1,600 bill a month after registering “premium” name for $12.99

101domain has sent out almost 50 invoices, believed to total many thousands of dollars, to customers who had bought “premium” domain names for $12.99 well over a month ago.
One DI reader, who said he’d rather not be named, received a bill from the registrar today for $1587.01 for a .みんな domain name he hand-registered March 10 for the base fee of $12.99.
The email from 101domain stated that unless he pays the bill by 5pm PST tomorrow, his domain will be deleted:

It has come to our attention that the .みんな registry considers certain name(s) that you have registered with us as premium names and that there were some intermittent pricing errors on our website allowing you to purchase these name(s) at regular pricing. The cause of this error has been resolved and we sincerely apologize for the error.
In order to correct these pricing errors, the Registry has granted us the option to delete these names if we are unable to collect the premium pricing from our customers.
…
Due to a short deadline, payment must be received by Thursday, April 24, 2014, 5pm PST in order for deletion of the name not to occur. In the event that payment isn’t received by Thursday, April 24, 2014, 5pm PST the domain name(s) will be deleted, released back into the pool of available domain names, and any payments previously received for the domain names will be fully refunded to you.

The registrar offered a full refund of the $12.99 and a 20% discount coupon as compensation.
“I am not sure what’s the legal status of this,” the registrant told DI. “Also asking for this a more than a month later (purchased on 10th of March), besides being not cool, is just wrong.”
.みんな is one of Google’s new gTLDs. It’s Japanese for “everyone”.
101domain COO Anthony Beltran told DI that “fewer than 50” names were affected by the pricing error, all of them in .みんな.
“Literally every registry is doing things differently, but we have committed to offering them as our customers overwhelmingly demand them,” he said. “Most of them understand, as early adopters, there will be occasional issues, and our disclaimers and T&Cs speak to this.”
He offered the following explanation for the error:

In order to offer pre-paid orders, 101domain’s practice is to put up pricing as soon as it is confirmed and as soon as we receive lists of premium names, reserved names, and name collisions from a registry. This is generally well before EPP is available so there is no live domain:check. Our search queries these lists internally to offer accurate pricing well before most other registrars do so that our clients are well ahead of the curve with plenty of time to research and submit orders. Mistakes do rarely occur; some premium lists are fluid, complications have been introduced with SEDO and AFTERNIC getting exclusive listings of premium names (while we have access through their distribution channels like SEDO MLS), or names are snapped up in Sunrise, EAP, or Landrush. We will typically notify clients prior to names becoming active of any changes in pricing or availability and promptly refund in full if requested. With this TLD, this did not happen properly unfortunately.

Nobody’s claiming Google did anything wrong.
I’m not sure what American or Californian consumer protection law says about this kind of thing, but it is a quite startling situation.
Are there any other fields of commerce where you can be billed a month later because a retailer got confused about its wholesale prices?

Turkey blocks Google DNS in Twitter crackdown

The Turkish government has reportedly blocked access to Google’s public DNS service from with its borders, as part of its recently instituted censorship of Twitter.
According to local reports, the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 — Google’s public DNS servers — were banned after they became widely used to circumnavigate blocks on Twitter’s domain names.
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week vowed to “wipe out” Twitter, after the company refused to take down tweets criticizing his government over corruption allegations ahead of an election next week.
Twitter is encouraging Turkish users to use SMS to send tweets instead. Many Turks are also turning to VPNs to evade this bizarre piece of Draconian censorship.

Google giving away 5,000 free new gTLD domains

Google is giving away free .みんな domains.
According to a company spokesperson, the first 5,000 people to submit a .みんな web site idea via a campaign web site will receive a coupon for a free one-year registration in the new namespace.
The offer expires April 5.
The regular retail price at registrars appears to be about $13 a year.
.みんな means “everyone” in Japanese and is apparently pronounced “.minna”. It’s the second IDN gTLD to go to general availability so far, and currently has roughly 2,500 registered names.
The web site appears to show examples of domains that are being registered under the program, as well as commentary from something called Google+, which appears to be some kind of social network.

Google’s first new gTLD racks up 2,300 domains

Google’s Charleston Road Registry reached 2,300 .みんな domain names on the new gTLD’s first day of general availability, immediately making it the biggest IDN gTLD by volume so far.
The string is Japanese for “everyone”. As you might expect, it’s an unrestricted space.
About 230 names — 10% of the TLD — are non-IDNs. I believe the number also includes some sunrise registrations.
It actually went into GA on Tuesday, but data was not available yesterday.
While it’s not in the same ballpark as the likes of .guru, it nevertheless overtook the only other IDN gTLD to launch so far, dotShabaka’s شبكة. (Arabic for “web”), which has 1,643 names.
Google sold the names via 17 accredited registrars, only one of which appears to be Japanese. The list excludes most of the biggest registrars.
.みんな is unusual in that Google intends to run its Trademark Claims service forever, rather than turning it off after the 90 days required by its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

ICANN reveals gTLD objections appeals process

Two new gTLD applicants would get the opportunity to formally appeal String Confusion Objection decisions that went against them, under plans laid out by ICANN today.
DERCars and United TLD (Rightside), which lost SCOs for their .cars and .cam applications respectively, would be the only parties able to appeal “inconsistent” objection rulings.
DERCars was told that its .cars was too similar to Google’s .car, forcing the two bids into a contention set. But Google lost similar SCO cases against two other .cars applicants.
Likewise, Rightside’s .cam application was killed off by a Verisign SCO that stated .cam and .com were too similar, despite two other .cam applicants prevailing in virtually identical cases.
Now ICANN plans to give both losing applicants the right to appeal these decisions to a three-person panel of “Last Resort” operated by the International Centre for Dispute Resolution.
ICDR was the body overseeing the original SCO process too.
Notably, ICANN’s new plan would not give Verisign and Google the right to appeal the two .cars/.cam cases they lost.

Only the applicant for the application that was objected to in the underlying SCO and lost (“Losing Applicant”) would have the option of whether to have the Expert Determination from that SCO reviewed.

There seems to be a presumption by ICANN already that what you might call the “minority” decision — ie, the one decision that disagreed with the other two — was the inconsistent one.
I wonder if that’s fair on Verisign.
Verisign lost two .cam SCO cases but won one, and only the one it won is open for appeal. But the two cases it lost were both decided by the same ICDR panelist, Murray Lorne Smith, on the same grounds. The decisions on .cam were really more 50-50 than they look.
According to the ICANN plan, there are two ways an appeal could go: the panel could decide that the original ruling should be reversed, or not. The standard of the review is:

Could the Expert Panel have reasonably come to the decision reached on the underlying SCO through an appropriate application of the standard of review as set forth in the Applicant Guidebook and procedural rules?

The appeals panelists would basically be asked to decide whether the original panelists are competent or not.
If the rulings were not reversed, the inconsistency would remain in place, making the contention sets for .car, .cars and .cam stay rather confusing.
ICANN said it would pay the appeals panel’s costs.
The plan (pdf) is now open for public comment.

Google registers its first new gTLD domain

Google took part in dotShabaka Registry’s Sunrise period, according to today’s zone files.
The company registered جوجل.شبكة, in the .شبكة (Arabic “.web”) TLD, via MarkMonitor at some point prior to December 30.
“جوجل” seems to be the Arabic transliteration of “Google”.
The domain is not resolving, but Whois says it belongs to Google and it’s configured to use Google name servers.
It’s only the fifth confirmed Sunrise registration in the .شبكة space — the only new gTLD to so far conclude a Sunrise period.
Rolex registered its trademark and Richemont International registered three of its luxury goods brands. So far, Rolex is the only confirmed new gTLD registrant that is not also an applicant.
None of the registrants to date are from the Arabic-speaking regions.
These may all be defensive registrations, of course, and may never resolve to anything useful.

Bing already recognizes new gTLDs (Google doesn’t)

Microsoft seems to be ahead of its rival Google when it comes to recognizing new gTLDs in their respective search engines.
Doing an advanced search for sites within specific new gTLDs on Bing is returning results today. The same cannot be said for Google, however.
Here’s an example of a search results page limited to Uniregistry’s .sexy:

The same type of search seems to work for .tattoo (Uniregistry) and .ruhr (Regiodot) but not for .uno or for any of Donuts’ many Latin-script gTLDs (which all currently redirect to donuts.co).
Sometimes the searches work with a dot, sometimes they don’t.
Searching for Donuts’ and other registries’ IDN gTLDs also seems to work in Bing, but only when you search for the A-label (eg .xn--unup4y) rather than the U-label (.游戏).
New gTLD support appears to be a work in progress at Microsoft, in other words, but the company does seem to be further along than Google, which so far doesn’t return any results for the same queries.

Here’s how to display new IDN gTLDs in Chrome

A lot of people have noticed since the first four new gTLDs were delegated yesterday that Google’s Chrome browser doesn’t seem to handle internationalized domain names.
In fact it does, but if you’re an English-speaking user you’ll probably need to make a few small configuration changes, which should take less than a minute, to make it work.
If you’re using Chrome and you click this link http://nic.сайт chances are your address bar is going to automatically translate it and display it as http://nic.xn--80aswg/.
As far as the DNS is concerned, these are the same URLs. They’re just displayed differently by Chrome, depending on your browser’s display languages settings.
If you want to see the Cyrillic version in your address bar, simply:

• Go to the Chrome Settings menu via the toolbar menu or by typing chrome://settings into the address bar.
• Click the “Language and input settings” button. It’s in the Advanced options bit, which may be hidden at first. Scroll all the way down to unhide.
• Click the Add button to add the languages you want to support in the address bar.

Right now, you can see all three active IDN gTLDs in their intended scripts by adding Arabic, Chinese (Simplified Han) and Russian. As gTLDs in other scripts are added, you’ll need to add those too.
Simple.
Thanks to DNS jack o’ all trades Jothan Frakes for telling me how to do this.

Google signs first new gTLD contract

Google has signed its first Registry Agreement with ICANN, covering the new gTLD .みんな.
The string means “everyone” in Japanese. It had priority number 34.
Google proposes to use it as an open TLD, available for anyone to register names in.
Signed by Google subsidiary Charleston Road Registry, it’s the 34th new gTLD contract ICANN has executed.
Google has 96 new gTLD applications remaining. One of them, for .search, is still Initial Evaluation.