Richemont pulls two dot-brand bids

Luxury goods company Richemont has withdrawn two of its original 14 new gTLD applications.
The company, which has been a vocal supporter of dot-brand gTLDs, pulled its bids for .netaporter and .mrporter this week.
Mr Porter and Net A Porter are fashion retail web sites for men and women respectively.
It’s not clear why these two bids have been withdrawn — the company isn’t commenting — but it’s certainly not a signal that Richemont is abandoning the new gTLD program completely.
The company has already entered into ICANN contracts for six dot-brands including .cartier, .montblanc and .chloe.
It has another five applications — four generics and one brand — that are still active: .手表 (“.watches”), .珠宝 (.jewelry), .watches, .jewelry and .jlc.
It has previously withdrawn an application for .love.

ICANN meetings in for big shake-up, more dancing

Could you tolerate an eight-day ICANN meeting?
Could you get all your work done in just four days?
Would you be happy to wait up to nine months between Public Forums?
Do you want to see more regional dancing during ICANN opening ceremonies?
These are question you’re going to have to start asking yourself, because come 2016 ICANN meetings are in for a big change.
Recommendations adopted wholesale by the ICANN board last week would scrap the three six-day meetings schedule and replace it with one six-day meeting at the start of the year, one four-day meeting in the middle and one eight-day meeting towards the end.
The first of the year would be formatted pretty much the same as all meetings are currently.
The second, however, would scrap formalities such as the opening ceremony, as well as the Public Forum and public board meeting. Instead, the focus would be on policy development work within and between advisory committees and supporting organizations.
The final meeting of the year, the AGM, would add two extra days to the regular schedule for outreach sessions and SO/AC policy-making. There would be two Public Forum sessions, one immediately after the opening ceremony on day three, the other on day six as usual.
As this would be the official outreach “event” of the year, the opening ceremony would usually have some display of local culture, such as music or dance. That was once a staple of ICANN meetings, but we haven’t seen much of it the last couple of years.
The shake-up was recommended in a report published by the Meeting Strategy Working Group in February and adopted in its entirely by the ICANN board last week.
The third meeting of the year would be “would have a focus on showcasing ICANN’s work to a broader global audience”, according to the report. It would have an anticipated attendance of over 2,000 people and would therefore likely be held in a large hub city.
The smaller (it is anticipated) second meeting, with its reduced focus on formality and outreach, would (contrarily) be able to visit cities with smaller facilities, perhaps in parts of the world ICANN has not been able to visit before, the report says.
To be honest, I’m not really sure whether what’s been adopted will be any better than what’s in place today.
I’m pretty certain of one effect, however: if bombshells are dropped shortly after the first meeting of the year, you’re looking at somewhere between seven and nine months before you’ll be able to stand at a mic and yell at the ICANN board about it in public.

Where to find new gTLD dropping domain lists

With hundreds of thousands of currently blocked new gTLD domain names about to hit the market, many without premium pricing, some domain investors have been wondering where they can get hold of the lists of soon-to-be available names.
Fortunately, ICANN freely publishes several lists that could prove useful.
As we’ve been reporting this week, names that were previously reserved by new gTLD registries due to name collisions have started to become unblocked, as mandatory 90-day “controlled interruption” phases start to expire.
By definition, a name collision domain has received traffic in the past.
A CSV file containing a list of all domain names currently subject to CI can be downloaded from ICANN here.
Be warned, it’s a 68MB file with millions and millions of lines — your spreadsheet software may not be able to open it. It also changes regularly, so it could get bigger as more new gTLDs begin their CI programs.
The file shows the TLD, the second-level string, the date it went into CI and the number of days it has remained in that status. When the last number hits 90, the block is due to be lifted.
A second CSV file contains all the domains that have completed CI. Find it here. It’s currently almost 7MB, but it’s going to get a lot bigger rather quickly as domains move from one list to the other.
That file shows the TLD, the SLD, the date CI started and the day it ended.
Every domain name in that list is no longer subject to a mandatory ICANN block, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the registry has unblocked it in practice. Some registries are planning to keep hold of the newly available domains and release them in batches at a later date.
Some gTLDs have chosen to wildcard their zones rather than implement a CI response on each individual name collision. In those cases, individual domain names will not show up in the current collisions file. Instead, you’ll see an asterisk.
In those cases, you can find a list of all of each gTLD’s name collisions in separate CSV files accompanying each TLD’s ICANN contract. The contracts can be found here. Click through to the TLD you’re interested in and download the “List of SLDs to Block” file.
Note that there’s a lot of absolute garbage domains in these files. The name collisions program ain’t pretty.

Over 180,000 blocked new gTLD names to drop next week

Several new gTLD registries will release hundreds of thousands of currently blocked domain names — some of them quite nice-looking — next Wednesday.
It’s one of the first big batches of name collisions to be released to market.
The companies behind .xyz, .website, .press, .host, .ink, .wiki, .rest and .bar will release most of their blocked names at 1400 UTC on November 26. These registries all use CentralNic as their back-end.
The gTLD with the biggest “drop” is .host, with over 100,000 names. .wiki, .website and .xyz all have 10,000 to 20,000 releasing names apiece.
According to Radix business head Sandeep Ramchamdani, A smallish number — measured in the hundreds — of the .host, .press and .website names are on the company’s premium domain lists and will carry a higher price.
He gave the following sample of .website domains that will become available at the baseline, non-premium, registry fee:

analyze.website, anti.website, april.website, bookmark.website, challenge.website, classics.website, consumer.website, definitions.website, ginger.website, graffiti.website, inspired.website, jobportal.website, lenders.website, malibu.website, marvelous.website, ola.website, clients.website, commercial.website, comparison.website

Drop-catching services such as Pool.com are taking pre-orders on names set to be released.
Other registries have already released their name collisions domains.
I gather that .archi, .bio, .wien and .quebec have already unblocked their collisions this week.
Donuts tells us it has no current plan for its first drops. Rightside, which runs Donuts’ back-end, is reportedly planning to drop names in a couple dozen gTLDs on the same date in January.
As we reported earlier this week, millions of names are due to be released over the coming months, due to the expiration of the 90-day “controlled interruption” phase that ICANN forced all new gTLD registries to implement.
By definition, name collision names already have seen traffic in the past and may do so again.

Google beaten to .dot for a paltry $700k

Dish DBS, a US satellite TV company, has beaten Google to the .dot new gTLD in an ICANN auction that fetched just $700,000.
It’s further proof, if any were needed, that you don’t need to have the big bucks to beat Google at auction.
Dish plans to use .dot as a single-registrant space, but unusually it’s not a dot-brand. According to its application, the company:

intends to utilize the .dot gTLD to create a restricted, exclusively-controlled online environment for customers and other business partners with the goal of further securing the collection and transmission of personal and other confidential data required for contracted services and other product-related activities.

Google had planned an open, anything-goes space.
.dot was the only new gTLD contention set to be resolved by ICANN last-resort auction this month. The other applicants scheduled for the November auctions all settled their contests privately.

“Cyberflight” rules coming to UDRP next July

It will soon be much harder for cybersquatters to take flight to another registrar when they’re hit with a UDRP complaint.
From July 31 next year, all ICANN-accredited registrars will be contractually obliged to lock domain names that are subject to a UDRP and trademark owners will no longer have to tip off the registrant they’re targeting.
Many major registrars lock domain names under UDRP review already, but there’s no uniformity across the industry, either in terms of what a lock entails or when it is implemented. Under the amended UDRP policy, a “lock” is now defined as:

a set of measures that a registrar applies to a domain name, which prevents at a minimum any modification to the registrant and registrar information by the Respondent, but does not affect the resolution of the domain name or the renewal of the domain name.

Registrars will have two business days from the time they’re notified about the UDRP to put the lock in place.
Before the lock is active, the registrants themselves will not be aware they’ve been targeted by a complaint — registrars are banned from telling them and complainants no longer have to send them a copy of the complaint.
If the complaint is dismissed or withdrawn, registrars have one business day to remove the lock.
Because these change reduce the 20-day response window, registrants will be able to request an additional four calendar days (to account for weekends, I assume) to file their responses and the request will be automatically granted by the UDRP provider.
The new policy was brought in to stop “cyberflight”, a relatively rare tactic whereby cybersquatters transfer their domains to a new registrar to avoid losing their domains.
The policy was approved by the Generic Names Supporting Organization in August last year and approved by the ICANN board a month later. Since then, ICANN staff has been working on implementation.
The time from the first GNSO preliminary issue report (May 27, 2011) to full implementation of the policy (July 31, 2015) will be 1,526 days.
You can read a redlined version of the UDRP rules here (pdf).

IP Mirror rapped for failing to deal with abuse

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a corporate brand management registrar getting smacked by an ICANN breach notice.
Singapore-based registrar IP Mirror has been sent a warning by ICANN Compliance about a failure to respond to abuse complaints filed by law enforcement, which appears to be another first.
Under the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars are obliged to have a 24/7 abuse hotline to field complaints from “law enforcement, consumer protection, quasi-governmental or other similar authorities” designated by the governments of places where they have a physical office.
According to its web site, IP Mirror has offices in Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK, but ICANN’s breach notice does not specify which authority filed the complaint or which domains were allegedly abusive.
Registrars have to respond to such complaints within 24 hours, the RAA says.
The ICANN notice (pdf) takes the company to task for alleged breaches of other related parts of the RAA, such as failure to retain records about complaints and to publish an abuse contact on its web site.
The company has been given until December 5 to come back into compliance or risk losing its accreditation.
IP Mirror isn’t massive in terms of gTLD names. According to the latest registry reports it has somewhere in the region of 30,000 gTLD domains under management.
But it is almost 15 years old and establishment enough that it has been known to sponsor the occasional ICANN meeting. It’s not your typical Compliance target.

Millions of new gTLD domains to be released as collision blocks end

Millions of new gTLD domain names are set to start being released, as ICANN-mandated name collision blocks start getting lifted.
Starting yesterday, domains that have been blocked from registration due to name collisions can now be released by the registries.
About 95,000 names in gTLDs such as .nyc, .tattoo, .webcam and .wang have already ended their mandatory “controlled interruption” period and hundreds of thousands more are expected to be unblocked on a weekly basis over the coming months (and years).
Want to register sex.nyc, poker.bid or garage.capetown? That may soon be possible. Those names, along with hundreds of other non-gibberish domains, are no longer subject to mandatory blocks.
Roughly 45 new gTLDs have ended their CI periods over the last two days. Here are the Latin-script ones:

.bid, .buzz, .cancerresearch, .capetown, .caravan, .cologne, .cymru, .durban, .gent, .jetzt, .joburg, .koeln, .krd, .kred, .lacaixa, .nrw, .nyc, .praxi, .qpon, .quebec, .ren, .ruhr, .saarland, .wang, .webcam, .whoswho, .wtc, .citic, .juegos, .luxury, .menu, .monash, .physio, .reise, .tattoo, .tirol, .versicherung, .vlaanderen and .voting

Another half dozen or so non-Latin script gTLDs have also finished with CI.
There are over 17,500 newly unblocked names in .nyc alone. Over the whole new gTLD program, over 9.8 million name collisions are to be temporarily blocked.
Name collisions are domains in new gTLDs that were already receiving DNS root traffic well before the gTLD was delegated, suggesting that they may be in use on internal networks.
To avoid possible harm from collisions, ICANN forced registries to make these names unavailable for registration and to resolve to the deliberately non-functional and odd-looking IP address 127.0.53.53.
Each affected name had to be treated in this way for 90 days. The first TLDs started implementing CI on August 18, so the first batch of registries ended their programs yesterday.
So, will every domain that was on a registry’s collision list be available to buy right away?
No.
ICANN hasn’t told registries that they must release names as soon as their CI period is over, so it appears to be at the registries’ discretion when the names are released. I gather some intend to do so as soon as today.
Also, any name that was blocked due to a collision and also appears in the Trademark Clearinghouse will have to remain blocked until it has been subject to a Sunrise period.
Some registries, such as Donuts, have already made their collision names available (but not activated in the DNS) under their original Sunrise periods so will be able to release unclaimed names at the same time as all the rest.
Other registries will have to talk to ICANN about a secondary sunrise period, to give trademark holders their first chance to grab the previously blocked names.
Furthermore, domains that the registry planned to reserved as “premiums” will continue to be reserved as premiums.

$10 million to move to a dot-brand? Quebec says “non”

One of the biggest hypothetical barriers to the adoption of dot-brand gTLDs has always been the likely cost of migration, but until now nobody’s really thrown around any figures.
The Government of Quebec has decided against rebranding to the forthcoming .quebec gTLD, saying the migration would cost it CAD 12 million ($10.6 million), according to local reports.
The Canadian Press press reported over the weekend that Quebec will still to its existing gouv.qc.ca addresses and therefore save itself a bundle of cash at a time when austerity measures are in place.
The timing of the revelation is unfortunate for PointQuebec, the .quebec registry, which is due to go to general availability tomorrow.
The application for .quebec, a protected geographic string under ICANN rules, was made with the support of the Canadian province.
The decision by the government is not a death sentence for the gTLD, but it is the loss of a significant anchor tenant at the worst possible moment.
It also highlights what we all already knew — for a large organization, changing your domain name is complicated and expensive.
Not only do myriad IT systems need to be migrated to the new domain, you also need to think about things as trivial as letter heads and signage.
The cost of such a switch is a key reason we’re unlikely to see many dot-brand owners making a full-scale switch to their new gTLD in the short term.

Noss hints at winning .online auction bid

A triumvirate of domain name companies led by Radix paid well over $7 million for the .online new gTLD, judging by comments made by Tucows CEO in an analysts call yesterday.
As the company reported its third-quarter financial numbers, Noss said of .online, which was recently auctioned:

While we are bound by confidentiality with respect to the value of the transaction, we can point to amounts paid in other gTLDs’ auctions in the public domain — like $6.8 million for .tech, $5.6 million for .realty, or the $4.6 million that Amazon paid for .buy — and let you decide what you think .online should be valued, relative to those more narrowly targeted extensions.

Radix won the private auction with financial backing from Tucows and NameCheap.
The three companies intend to set up a new joint venture to manage the .online registry, as we reported yesterday, with each company contributing between $4 million and $5 million.
Assuming at least one company is contributing $4 million and at least one is contributing $5 million, that works out to a total of $13 million to $14 million, earmarked for the auction and seed funding for the new venture.
Based on that knowledge, an assumption that the new company will want a couple of million to launch, and Noss’s comments yesterday, I’d peg the .online sale price in the $10-12 million range.
Radix business head Sandeep Ramchamdani told us yesterday that the company plans to market .online with some “hi-decibel advertising” and participation in events such as Disrupt and South by Southwest.