.rich promises new marketing after pitiful launch

I-Registry’s .rich may have taken the ignominious title of Worst New gTLD Launch Yet, but the company says it’s not in any rush and is planning to start its marketing campaign in about a month.
According to zone files, .rich has 22 registered names, despite the fact that it’s been in general availability for a week. All 22, according to the registry, were registered during its sunrise period.
The price has certainly got a lot to do with that — the registry fee is $1,750 and you can find registrars selling for as much as $2,599 — but the non-existent marketing may have also played a part.
Visiting the I-Registry web site today won’t give you any idea where you can buy the names or any indication that they’re even available.
As I and others have pointed out, the .rich string is a hard sell. Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire, with his tongue only a little in his cheek, doesn’t reckon it passes “The Douche Test“.
But I-Registry’s Michael Hauck told DI that the company is planning to launch a revamped nic.rich site, possibly as early as next week, with an all-new “marketing site” to follow about a month later.
“It will communicate the right message around .RICH,” Hauck said of the nic.rich site. “Clients will understand much better what we intend .RICH to be. And of course you will find a list of supporting registrars there, which today amounts to over 40 registrars.”
The marketing site will offer to sell .rich names directly via an ICANN registrar, he said. Email, hosting, privacy and other stuff will be included in the price, he said. He added:
“We will be also offering an affiliate program with a very attractive PPS program for people who are not registrars or resellers to market this domain product and give them all the margin that usually a registrar has,” he said.
“So a guy who is running for example a millionaire’s dating website or is writing about exclusive products and services in his blog is able to work with us and to promote .RICH,” he said.
Given that the registry doesn’t seem to have sold a single domain during its first week of GA, I think it’s going to need as much marketing support as it can get.

TLDH and others sign first gTLD registry contracts

Top Level Domain Holdings and a few other new gTLD registries signed their first Registry Agreements with ICANN this week.
Its six new RAs were among 15 registry contracts ICANN signed this week. TLDH and its subsidiaries signed for: .horse, .cooking, .nrw (as Minds + Machine GmbH), .casa, .fishing and .budapest.
I’d heard some concerns at ICANN 48 this week about TLDH’s lack of signed contracts to date, but the concerns seem to have been misplaced.
Monolith Registry, partly owned by Afilias, has also signed RAs for .voto and .vote, the latter of which was won at auction.
Small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings got its second and third gTLD contracts: .商城 (“.mall”) and .八卦 (“.gossip”).
German registry I-Registry got .rich and Russian registry The Foundation for Network Initiatives got .дети (“.kids/children”).
Previously contracted parties Donuts and Uniregistry added .tools and .expert (Donuts) and .christmas (Uniregistry) to their portfolios on Friday.
The total number of new gTLDs with RAs is now about 130.

New gTLD plans November 30 sunrise

I-Registry, which signed an ICANN Registry Agreement for the new gTLD .onl this week, plans to launch its Sunrise period on November 30, according to the company.
It’s the first date for a new gTLD Sunrise period I’ve come across to date, though it is of course an informal target rather than a firm commitment.
ICANN has signed contracts covering a few dozen gTLDs but as yet none have been delegated. As anyone who has been following dotShabaka’s diary on DI will know, there’s still a lot of uncertainty
.onl, which is short for “online”, is expected to be an open gTLD with no registration restrictions.
I-Registry plans to donate a portion of its profits to charity.

.vip and .now clear objections

The latest batch of Legal Rights Objection results has seen two proposed new gTLDs — .vip and .now — emerge unscathed from the objections phase of the new gTLD program.
There are six applications for .vip and one of the applicants, I-Registry, had filed LROs against its competitors.
Starbucks (HK), a cable company rather than a coffee chain, had also filed LROs against each of its five rivals for .now.
With yesterday’s decisions, all 10 objections have now been rejected.
In the case of .vip, every applicant wants to run it as a generic term, but I-Registry had obtained a European trademark on its proposed brand.
But Starbucks’ .now was to be a dot-brand reflecting a pre-existing mark unrelated to domain names. WIPO panelists found that trademark did not trump the proposed generic use by other applicants, however.
Both strings will now head to contention resolution, where an auction seems the most likely way to decide the winners.

First three new gTLD objections thrown out

Three objections against new gTLD applications have been thrown out by the World Intellectual Property Organization, two of them on the basis that they were blatant attempts to game the system.
The objections were all Legal Rights Objections. Essentially, they’re attempts by the objectors to show that for ICANN to approve the gTLD would infringe their existing trademark rights.
The applications being objected to were Google’s .home, SC Johnson’s .rightathome and Vipspace Enterprises .vip.
The decisions are of course completely unprecedented. No LROs have ever been decided before.
Let’s look at each in turn.
Google’s .home
The objector here was Defender Security Company, a home security company, which has also applied for .home and has objected to nine of its competitors for the string.
Basically, the objection was thrown out (pdf) because it was a transparent attempt to game the trademark system in order to secure a potentially lucrative gTLD.
Defender appears to have bought the application, along with associated companies, domains, social media accounts and trademarks, from CGR E-Commerce, a company owned by .music applicant Constantine Roussos.
The panelist in the case apparently doesn’t have a DomainTools subscription and couldn’t make the Roussos link from historical Whois records, but it’s plain to see for those who do.
The case was brought on the basis of a European Community trademark on the term “.home”, applied for in December 2011, just a few weeks before ICANN opened the new gTLD application window, and a US trademark on “true.home” applied for a few months later.
The objector also owned dothome.net, one of many throwaway Go Daddy domain name resellers Roussos set up in late 2011 in order to assert prior rights to TLDs he planned to apply for.
The panelist saw through all the nonsense and rejected the objection due to lack of standing.
Here’s the money quote:

The attempted acquisition of trademark rights appears to have been undertaken to create a basis for filing the Objection, or defending an application. There appears to have been no attempt to acquire rights in or use any marks until after the New gTLD Program had been announced, specifically two weeks before the period to file applications for new gTLDs was to open.

For the EC trademark, lack of standing was found because Defender didn’t present any evidence that it actually owned the company, DotHome Ltd, that owned the trademark.
For the US trademark, which is still not registered, the panelist seems to have relied upon UDRP precedent covering rights in unregistered trademarks in his decision to find lack of standing.
The panelist also briefly addresses the Applicant Guidebook criteria for LROs, although it appears he was not obliged to, and found Defender’s arguments lacking.
In summary, it’s a sane decision that appears to show that you can’t secure a gTLD with subterfuge and bogosity.
It’s not looking good for the other eight objections Defender has filed.
Vipspace Enterprises’ .vip
This is another competitive objection, filed by one .vip applicant against another.
The objector in this case is German outfit I-Registry, which has applied for four gTLDs. The respondent is Vipspace, which has only applied for .vip.
In this case, both companies have applied for trademarks, one filed one month before the other.
The panelist’s decision focuses, sanely again, on the generic nature of the string in question.
Because both trademarks were filed for the word “VIP” meaning “Very Important Person”, which is the intended meaning of both applications, it’s hard to see how either is a proper brand.
The panelist wrote (pdf):

while SOAP, for example, may be a perfectly satisfactory trade mark for cars, it cannot serve as a trade mark for the cleaning product “soap”.
…
While the parties have used the term, “VIP”, in various forms on their website to indicate the manner in which the term will be used if they are successful in being awarded the domain, there is nothing before the Panel (beyond mere assertion) to show that either of them has yet traded under their marks sufficiently to displace the primary descriptive meaning of the term and establish a brand or at all.

In other words, it’s a second case of a WIPO panelist deciding that getting, or applying for, a trademark is not enough to grant a company exclusive rights to a new gTLD string.
Sanity, again, prevails.
SC Johnson’s .rightathome
While it contains the word “home”, this is a completely unrelated case with a different objector and a different panelist.
The objector here was Right At Home, a Nebraska-based international provider of in-home elderly care services. The applicant is a subsidiary of the well-known cosmetics company SC Johnson, which uses “Right@Home” as a brand.
It appears that both objector and applicant have really good rights to the string in question, which makes the panelist’s decision all the more interesting.
The way the LRO is described in ICANN’s new gTLD Applicant Guidebook, there are eight criteria that must be weighed by the panelist.
In this case, the panelist does not provide a conclusion showing how the weighting was done, but rather discusses each point in turn and decides whether the evidence favors the objector or the applicant.
The applicant here won on five out of the eight criteria.
The fact that the two companies offer different products and/or services, accompanied by the fact that the phrase “Right At Home” is in use by other companies in addition to the complainant and respondent appears to have been critical in tipping the balance.
In short, the panelist appears to have decided (pdf) that because SC Johnson did not apply for .rightathome in bad faith, and because it’s unlikely internet users will think the gTLD belongs to Right At Home, the objection should be rejected.
I am not a lawyer, but it appears that the key takeaway from this case is that owning a legitimately obtained brand is not enough to win an LRO if you’re an objector and the new gTLD applicant operates in a different vertical.
This will worry many people.