Chehade tries to explain domain “hogging” comments

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has distanced himself from comments in which he seemed to equate domain investing with “cybersquatting”.
In January, Chehade said in a Huffington Post interview that new gTLDs would help prevent domain “hogging”, which was widely interpreted as his taking a dim view of domaining.

When asked about his remarks last month, he did not backtrack.
Now he has backtracked, responding to an angry letter from the Internet Commerce Association, which represents many of the largest domainers.
In March 24 letter (pdf) published over the weekend, Chehade said that he interpreted the HuffPo interviewer’s question to refer to the practice of registries holding back premium domains, rather than secondary market activity:

I regret that the ICA interpreted some of my comments in the interview as expressing a “disdainful view” of domain investing. As you might have gathered from the reporter’s questions, some people have asked whether the new gTLD program might have created an opportunity for “land grabb[ing]” by industry insiders. It was not my impression that the question being asked referred to established practices in the secondary market; rather, I believe the reporter was inquiring about some of the very practices by registries you cited in your letter. My response — that alternatives are available in different gTLDs — was intended to try to allay the concern that the program was creating artificial scarcity of domains, not to criticize participants in the marketplace.

Was this a fair interpretation of the interviewer’s question? Is this just a misunderstanding?
Watch the two-minute video above to make up your own mind.
Addressing the ICA’s concerns that he had equated domain investing with cyberquatting, Chehade wrote:

We are in complete agreement that there is a very important legal distinction between registering generically-termed domain names and cybersquatting.

“Halt perverted .sucks shakedown now!” demands IPC

Intellectual property interests have asked ICANN to put an immediate stop to the roll-out of the .sucks new gTLD.
A letter to Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah, sent by the Intellectual Property Constituency this evening and seen by DI, calls the registry’s plans, which include an “exorbitant” $2,500 sunrise fee, a “shakedown scheme”.
It’s also emerged that Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, has agreed to pay ICANN up to a million dollars in mysterious fees that apply to no other new gTLD registry.
The IPC letter states.

the Intellectual Property Constituency is formally asking ICANN to halt the rollout of the .SUCKS new gTLD operated by Vox Populi Registry Inc. (“Vox Populi”), so that the community can examine the validity of Vox Populi’s recently announced plans to: (1) to categorize TMCH-registered marks as “premium names,” (2) charge exorbitant sums to brand owners who seek to secure a registration in .SUCKS, and (3) conspire with an (alleged) third party to “subsidize” a complaint site should brand owners fail to cooperate in Vox Populi’s shakedown scheme.

Vox Populi intends to take .sucks to sunrise on Monday, so the IPC wants ICANN to take immediate action.
The high price of registration, the IPC believes, will discourage trademark owners from using the sunrise period to defensively register their marks.
Meanwhile, the registry’s plan to make the domains available for $10 under a “Consumer Advocate Subsidy”, will encourage cybersquatting, the IPC says.

by discouraging trademark owners from using a key RPM, we believe that the registry operator’s actions in establishing this predatory scheme are complicit in, and encourage bad faith registrations by third parties at the second level of the .SUCKS gTLD, and thus drastically increase the likelihood of trademark infringement, all for commercial gain

The letter goes on to say that Vox Populi may be in violation of its registry contract and the Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Policy, which was created to prevent registries turning a blind eye to mass cybersquatting.
There’s also a vague threat of legal action for contributory trademark infringement.
The IPC has particular beef with the registry’s Sunrise Premium program. This is a list of strings — mostly trademarks — that have been defensively registered in earlier sunrise periods.
Sunrise Premium names will always cost $2,500, even after sunrise, when registered by the trademark owner.
The IPC says:

Vox Populi is targeting and punishing brand owners who have availed themselves of the RPMs or shown that they are susceptible to purchasing defensive registrations… This will have a chilling effect on TMCH registrations and consequently discredit all of the New gTLD Program RPMs in the eyes of brand owners, whose buy-in and adoption of new gTLDs is widely acknowledged to be critical to the success of the new gTLD program.

Finally, and perhaps more disturbingly, the IPC has discovered that the .sucks registry agreement calls for Vox Populi to pay ICANN up to a million dollars in extra fees.
As well as the usual $25,000-a-year fee and $0.25 per-transaction fee, .sucks has already paid ICANN a $100,000 “registry access fee” and has promised to pay a $1 “registry administration fee” per transaction on its first 900,000 domains.
Its contract states:

Registry Operator shall also pay ICANN (i) a one-time fixed registry access fee of US$100,000 as of the Effective Date of this Agreement, and (ii) a registry administration fee of US$1.00 for each of the first 900,000 Transactions. For the avoidance of doubt, the registry administration fee shall not be subject to the limitations of the Transaction Threshold.

This makes ICANN look absolutely terrible.
What the hell is a “registry access fee”? What’s a “registry administration fee”?
One guess would be that it’s ICANN stocking up its legal defense fund, suspecting the kerfuffle .sucks is going to cause.
But by taking the Vox Pop shilling, ICANN has opened itself up to accusations that it’s complicit in the “shakedown”.
If it does not block .sucks (which was probably the most likely outcome even without mysterious fees) the IPC and other .sucks critics will be able to point to the $1 million as a “bribe”.
The behavior is not without precedent, however.
There’s a reason ICM Registry pays ICANN a $2 fee for every .xxx registration, rather than the much lower fees charged to other gTLD registries.
Read the IPC letter here.

Governments go on a kill-crazy rampage with new two-letter domain veto

ICANN has confirmed to new gTLD registries that governments now get to unilaterally block two-letter domains that match their home ccTLDs.
The organization has essentially given nations a veto — already enthusiastically exercised — over domains including il.army, it.pizza and fr.domains.
I’m not making this up. The Italian government has banned anyone from registering it.pizza.
Governments have already started invoking their new-found right, with dozens of domains already heading to the block-list.
The veto was revealed in a letter from Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, to the Registries Stakeholder Group yesterday.
It has not been published yet, but I’ve had its contents confirmed by a few registries and I understand the RySG mailing list is buzzing about it today.
In it, Atallah says that two-letter strings that do not receive objections from the government with the matching ccTLD will be released within seven to 10 days of comment periods closing.
However, strings that do receive objections will remain blocked.

For labels that receive objections from relevant governments, the labels will remain reserved. Should the registry operator and the objecting government reach an agreement regarding the release of the label, the registry operator shall notify ICANN that it has reached agreement, and ICANN will approve the release request and issue an authorization. The label will no longer be a reserved name.
…
until there is Consensus Policy or a Board Resolution on this matter, ICANN can only follow the process outlined above. ICANN encourages further community discussions to resolve this matter, and until then, negotiation between the objector and the registry operator as a means to release this class of labels from the reserved names list.

New gTLD registries believe, as they explained in a recent letter (pdf), that neither ccTLD operators nor their governments own these two-character strings. They believe ICANN is creating new rights.
So far, two-character domains have been banned by default in all new gTLDs. It was kind of a placeholder policy in order to get the new gTLD program launched a few years ago.
ICANN did enable the release of letter-number, number-letter and number-number strings in December, but made letter-letter combinations subject to government comments.
Following a GAC outcry last month, the comment periods were extended.
All comments were to be “fully considered”, but it wasn’t clear what that meant until the RySG asked and Atallah replied yesterday.
Some governments are already using the comment period to exercise their new veto.
The European Commission, for example, has objected to eu.credit, eu.creditcard, eu.auction, eu.casino, eu.bingo and eu.law.
The basis for the EU objections is in most of the cases: “The new TLD at hand corresponds to a regulated market in many EU countries. Its release might generate confusion and possible abuses at the end users level.”
It’s a wonder that the EU doesn’t seem to care about those strings in its own .eu ccTLD, where they’re all registered by people that I suspect may lack credentials.
Does credit.eu look to you like the registrant is a credentialed member of a regulated financial services industry? If he was, he may be able to afford a better web site.
The Commission also objects to eu.community, because:

the terms “EU Community” or “European Community” are widely used

That is true, which makes me wonder why the EU is allowing community.eu to languish parked at Sedo. You’d have to ask the Commission.
Israel, meanwhile, objects to il.casino, il.bingo, il.law, il.chat, il.bible, il.country, il.airforce, il.navy and il.army
The Vietnamese ccTLD registry has objected to several vn. domains, but it’s not clear to me whether it has veto authority.
Italy has objected to it.pizza, it.bingo and it.casino. Really, Italy? You’re objecting to “it.pizza”?
Côte d’Ivoire objects to all ci. domains.
Spain objects to es.casino, es.bingo and es.abogado.
Again, I invite you to check out bingo.es and casino.es and make a judgement as to whether the registrants are licensed gambling establishments.
Taiwan has vetoed the release of .tw in all city gTLDs (such as tw.london, tw.berlin etc) over a “concern that the release of above-mentioned domain names may cause the degradation of statehood”.
France has objected to “fr” in .archi, .army, .airforce, .bank, .bet, .bio, .casino, .cloud, .dentist, .doctor, .domains, .finance, .lawyer, .navy and .sarl.
Again again, several of these domains are just parked if you flip the words to the other side of the dot.
As a reminder, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said recently:

Come on guys, do not apply rules that you’re not using today to these new folks simply because it’s easy, because you can come and raise flags here at ICANN. Let’s be fair.

Does Chehade agree with Donuts on .doctor?

Should governments have the right to force business-limiting restrictions on new gTLD operators, even though they don’t have the same rules in their own ccTLDs?
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade evidently believes the answer to that question is “No”, but it’s what ICANN is controversially imposing on Donuts and two other .doctor applicants anyway.
Donuts recently filed a Request for Reconsideration appeal with ICANN over its decision to make the .doctor gTLD restricted to medical professionals only.
It was an unprecedented “Public Interest Commitment” demanded by ICANN staff in order to keep the Governmental Advisory Committee happy.
The GAC has been asking for almost two years for so-called “Category 1” gTLD strings — which could be seen to represent highly regulated sectors such as law or medicine — to see a commensurate amount of regulation from ICANN.
Governments wanted, for example, registrants to show professional credentials before being able to register a name.
In the vast majority of instances, ICANN creatively reinterpreted this advice to require registrants to merely assert that they possess such credentials.
These rules were put in registries’ contracts via PICs.
But for some reason in February the organization told Donuts that .doctor domains must be “ascribed exclusively to legitimate medical practitioners.”
According to Donuts, this came out of the blue, is completely unnecessary, an example of ICANN staff making up policy on the spot.
Donuts wants to be able to to sell .doctor names to doctors of any discipline, not just medical doctors. It also wants people to be able to use the names creatively, such as “computer.doctor” or “skateboard.doctor”.
What makes ICANN’s decision especially confusing is that CEO Fadi Chehade had the previous day passionately leaped to the defense of new gTLD registries in their fight against unnecessary GAC-imposed red tape.
The following video, in which Chehade uses .dentist as an example of a string that should not be subject to even more oversight, was taken February 11 at a Q&A with the Domain Name Assocation.
The New gTLD Program Committee meeting that authorized ICANN staff to add the new PIC took place February 12, the very next day. Chehade did not attend.

It’s quite remarkable how in line with registries Chehade seems to be.
It cuts to the heart of what many believe is wrong with the GAC — that governments demand of ICANN policies that they haven’t even bothered to implement in their own countries, just because it’s much easier to lean on ICANN than to pass regulations at home.
Here’s the entire text of his answer. He’s describing conversations he’d had with GAC members earlier in the week.

They’re saying stop all the Category 1 TLDs. Stop them. Freeze them!
And we said: Why do we need to freeze them? What’s the issue?
They said: It’s going to harm consumers.
How will it harm consumers? We started having a debate.
It turns out that they’re worried that if somebody got fadi.casino or fadi.dentist, to pick one of Statton’s [Statton Hammock, VP at Rightside, who was present], that this person is not a dentist and will pluck your ear instead of your teeth. How do you make sure they’re a dentist?
So I asked the European Commission: How do you make sure dentist.eu is a dentist?
They said: We don’t. They just get it.
I said: Okay, so why do these guys [new gTLD registries] have to do anything different?
And they said: The new gTLD program should be better or a model…
I said: Come on guys, do not apply rules that you’re not using today to these new folks simply because it’s easy, because you can come and raise flags here at ICANN. Let’s be fair. How do you do it at EU?
“Well, if somebody reports that fadi.dentist.eu is not a dentist, we remove them.”
Statton said: We do the same thing. It’s in our PICs. If fadi.dentist is not, and somebody reports them…
They said: But we can’t call compliance.
You can call compliance. Anyone can call compliance. Call us and we’ll follow up. With Statton, with the registrar.

What we have here is Chehade making a passionate case for the domain name industry’s right to sell medical-themed domain names without undue regulation — using many of the same arguments that Donuts is using in its Reconsideration appeal — then failing to show up for a board meeting the next day when that specific issue was addressed.
It’s impossible to know whether the NGPC would have reached a different decision had Chehade been at the February 12 meeting, because no formal vote was taken.
Rather, the committee merely passed along its “sense” that ICANN staff should carrying on what it was doing with regards implementing GAC advice on Category 1 strings.
While Chehade is but one voice on the NGPC, as CEO he is in charge of the ICANN staff, so one would imagine the decision to add the unprecedented new PIC to the .doctor contract falls into his area of responsibility.
That makes it all the more baffling that Donuts, and the other .doctor new gTLD applicants, are faced with this unique demand to restrict their registrant base to one subset of potential customers.

Identify.com terminated

ICANN has terminated the accreditation of defunct registrar Identify.com.
The company received its final compliance notice (pdf) last week and will lose its contractual ability to sell gTLD domains April 17.
Not that many will notice or care.
According to the notice, ICANN has been informed that the company is no longer in business.
Identify.com does not currently resolve to a web page, at least for me. According to registry reports, it had just six domain names under management in November.
Back in 2011, its DUM was measured in the low hundreds. Most transferred out or deleted in the meantime.
According to the notice, the registrar failed to provide information about its dealings with the owner of a specific domain name, patschool.com.
According to DomainTools, that domain has never been registered with Identify.com.
It’s ICANN’s third registrar termination in 2015.

Verisign adds 750,000 .com names instantly with reporting change

Verisign has boosted its reportable .com domain count by almost 750,000 by starting to count expired and suspended names.
The change in methodology, which is a by-product of ICANN’s much more stringent Whois accuracy regime, happened on Friday afternoon.
Before the change, the company reported on its web site that there were 116,788,107 domains in the .com zone file, with another 167,788 names that were registered but not configured.
That’s a total of 116,955,895 domains.
But just a few hours later, the same web page said .com had a total of 117,704,800 names in its “Domain Name Base”.
That’s a leap of 748,905 pretty much instantly; the number of names in the zone file did not move.
.net jumped 111,110 names to 15,143,356.
The reason for the sudden spikes is that Verisign is now including two types of domain in its count that it did not previously. The web page states:

Beginning with the first quarter, 2015, the domain name base on this website and in subsequent filings found in the Investor Relations site includes domains that are in a client or server hold status.

I suspect that the bulk of the 750,000 newly reported names are on clientHold status, which I believe is used much more often than serverHold.
The clientHold EPP code is often applied by registrars to domains that have expired.
However, registrars signed up to the year-old 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement are obliged by ICANN to place domains on clientHold status if registrants fail to respond within 15 days to a Whois verification email.
The 2013 RAA reads (my emphasis):

Upon the occurrence of a Registered Name Holder’s willful provision of inaccurate or unreliable WHOIS information, its willful failure promptly to update information provided to Registrar, or its failure to respond for over fifteen (15) calendar days to inquiries by Registrar concerning the accuracy of contact details associated with the Registered Name Holder’s registration, Registrar shall either terminate or suspend the Registered Name Holder’s Registered Name or place such registration on clientHold and clientTransferProhibited, until such time as Registrar has validated the information provided by the Registered Name Holder.

Last June, registrars claimed that the new policy — which came after pressure from law enforcement — had resulted in over 800,000 domains being suspended.
It’s an ongoing point of contention between ICANN, its registrars, and cops.
Verisign changing its reporting methodology may well be a reaction to this increase in the number of clientHold domains.
While its top-line figure has taken a sharp one-off boost, it will still permit daily apples-to-apples comparisons on an ongoing basis.
UPDATE:
My assumption about the link to the 2013 RAA was correct.
Verisign CFO George Kilguss told analysts on February 5.

Over the last several years, the average amount of names in the on-hold status category has been approximately 400,000 names and the net change year-over-year has been very small.
While still immaterial, during 2014, we saw an increase in the amount of names registrars have placed on hold status, which appears to be a result of these registrars complying with the new mandated compliance mechanisms in ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement or RAA.
In 2014, we saw an increase in domain names placed on hold status from roughly 394,000 names at the end of 2013 to about 870,000 at the end of 2014.

.tk registrar gets ICANN breach notice

OpenTLD, the registrar owned by .tk registry Freenon, has received an odd contract-breach notice from ICANN.
The company apparently forgot to send ICANN a Compliance Certificate for 2014, despite repeated pestering by ICANN staff.
It’s the first time I’ve seen ICANN issue a breach notice (pdf) for this reason.
A Compliance Certificate, judging by the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, seems to be a simple form letter that the CEO must fill in, sign and submit once a year.
Coming back into compliance would be, one imagines, five minutes’ work.
As well as being an ICANN-accredited registrar, OpenTLD is part of Freenom. That’s the registry that repurposes under-used ccTLDs with a “freemium” model that allows free registrations.
Its flagship, .tk, is the biggest ccTLD in world, with over 30 million active names.

ICANN slashes new gTLD revenues by 57%, forecasts renewals at 25% to 50%

ICANN has dramatically reduced the amount of revenue it expects to see from new gTLDs in its fiscal 2015.
According to a draft 2016 budget published this morning, the organization now reckons it will get just $300,000 from new gTLD registry transaction fees in the year ending June 30, 2015.
That’s down 75% from the $1.2 million predicted by its FY 2015 budget, which was approved in December.
Transaction fees are paid on new registrations, transfers and renewals, but only by gTLDs with over 50,000 billable transactions per year.
Today, only 14 of the 522 delegated new gTLDs have added more than 50,000 names. ICANN says that only 17 registries are currently paying transaction fees.
It’s not only the transaction fees where ICANN has scaled back its expectations, however.
The organization also expects its fixed new gTLD registry fees — the $6,250 each registry must pay per quarter regardless of volume — to come in way below targets.
The new budget anticipates $12.7 million from fixed registry fees in FY15, down 24% from the $16.7 million in its adopted FY15 budget.
This is presumably due to larger than expected numbers of would-be registries either withdrawing or dragging their feet in the path to delegation.
Registrar transaction fees are now anticipated at $1.1 million, compared to $2 million and $3.2 million predicted by the adopted and draft FY15 budgets respectively.
Taking all three revenue sources together, ICANN now expects new gTLDs to contribute just $14.1 million to its fiscal 2015 revenue, down 29% from the $19.8 million forecast in its adopted FY15 budget.
That’s down 57% from the $32.7 million in the original draft budget for the period.
The current budget assumes 15 million new gTLD registrations in the 12-month period, revised down from the 33 million domains predicted in its draft FY15 budget a year ago.
With just a few months left until the end of the fiscal year, there are currently fewer than 4.5 million domains in published new gTLD zone files.
ICANN plainly no longer expects new gTLDs to get anywhere close to 15 million domains.
Renewals expected to be weak, weak, weak
The organization is taking a conservative view about renewals for 2016.
The 2016 budget expects renewals at just 50% for regular gTLDs and 25% for registries — presumably ICANN has .xyz in mind — that gave away domains for free at launch.
That 50% is both ICANN’s “best” and “high” estimate. Its “low” estimate is 35% for non-free domains.
Obviously, 50% is a very low renewal number for any registry (70%+ is the norm). Even شبكة. (.shabaka) told us recently that 55% of its registrants are renewing before their domains expire.
Conversely, 25% may be a very optimistic number for free domains (when Afilias gave away free .info names a decade ago, almost all of them dropped rather than being renewed).
For fiscal 2016, which begins July 1, 2015, ICANN expects new gTLD revenue to be $24.1 million — about a quarter off its original plan for 2015.
That breaks down as $19.9 million from registry fixed fees, $2 million from registry transaction fees, and $2.3 million from registrar transaction fees.
ICANN said it is is assuming that it will start the year with 602 registries and end it with 945.
The proposed FY16 budget, now open for comment, can be found here.
For comparison purposes, the adopted FY15 budget is here (pdf) and the draft FY15 budget is here (pdf).

Here’s why trademark owners will think .sucks sucks

Vox Populi Registry is to launch its .sucks gTLD at the end of the month, and its plans are likely to piss off trademark owners no end.
As previously reported, the company has backpedaled on its idea of pricing its sunrise period names at $25,000 per name per year, but it’s introducing some new concepts that seem almost designed to get hackles up in the IP community.
From March 30 to May 29, any company with a trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to buy their matching .sucks domains at sunrise for $2,499. That’s also the annual renewal fee.
It’s a tenth of the price previously touted, but still pretty steep even by sunrise standards.
Vox Pop isn’t doing anything particularly unusual with its sunrise, which is governed by policies closely regulated by ICANN.
But its big new idea is its “Sunrise Premium” list, a list of strings dominated by famous trademarks.
Vox Pop CEO John Berard told DI yesterday that the Sunrise Premium list has been compiled from strings registered or blocked in other TLDs’ sunrise periods.
While he declined to characterize it as a list of trademarks, he acknowledged that it will be trademark-heavy.
If your mark is on this list, you will never be able to get a .sucks domain at the regular general availability retail price of $249 a year. It will always be $2,499 a year.
Despite the name, Sunrise Premium names are only available during general availability, which begins June 1.
On the one hand, this mandatory premium pricing for the world’s most well-defended marks appears to have benefits for some trademark owners.
While Sunrise Premium names are not restricted to owners of matching marks, the $2,499 fee applies whether you’re the mark owner, a legitimate third-party registrant, or a cybersquatter.
So the high price looks like a deterrent to cybersquatting, suggesting that Vox Pop is fighting from the IP corner.
But then we discover that Sunrise Premium names will never be eligible for the .sucks “Block” service — similar to .xxx’s Sunrise B, a Block is a non-resolving registry reservation — which is expected to retail at a discounted $199 per year.
Berard said that the registry wants to encourage use.
“If you are on the Sunrise Premium list or want a premium name, those can’t be blocked,” Berard said. “It’s all part and parcel of us trying to put more power in the hands of individuals and to cultivate a commitment on behalf of the commercial world to participate in the dialogue.”
But the fact remains: if you have a track record of defensively registering your trademark, Vox Pop is essentially penalizing you with higher fees.
Feel those hackles rising yet?
Vox Pop’s stated goals are to give companies a way to manage customer feedback and individuals a way to exercise their rights to criticize.
“A company would be smart to register its name because of the value that consumer criticism has in improving customer loyalty, delivering good customer service, understanding new product and service possibilities,” Berard said.
“They’re spending a lot more on marketing and customer service and research. This domain can another plank in that platform,” he said. “On the other hand, we also want to make sure that these names are also accessible to individuals who have something to say.”
Companies on the Sunrise Premium list have an additional thing to worry about: the .sucks Consumer Advocate Subsidy, which will bring the price of a .sucks domain down to $9.95 per year.
The subsidy will only be available to registrants unaffiliated with the trademark-owning company, and they’ll have to direct their domains to a discussion forum platform called Everything.sucks.
Berard said Everything.sucks will be operated by a third party, but could not yet disclose the details.
The subsidy program will be available on regular and Sunrise Premium names, but not Sunrise names. It is not expected to launch until September.
It’s not yet clear how flexible and configurable the service will be.
It seems likely that if somebody wants to write a blog, say, criticizing a certain company, product, service or public figure, they will incur the usual $249 annual reg fee.
It’s not exactly “free” speech.
On the whole, the finalized policies and fees may look like they’re specifically designed to irk the IP lobby, but they do seem to be aligned with Vox Pop’s mission statement.
If you’re of the view that trademark owners should have the sole right to use the string matching their mark as a domain name, you’re likely to be unhappy with what Vox Pop is doing.
If, on the other hand, you’re an advocate of the right of every free person to stick it to The Man, you may view the policies more favorably.
Either way, it could be a money-spinner for Vox Pop.
I’m expecting .sucks to be only the third new gTLD to top 1,000 sunrise registrations (assuming .porn and .adult will be the first).
Assuming the registry’s slice of the $2,499 fee is over $2,000, the company is looking to clear in excess of $2 million in annually recurring sunrise revenue alone.

Rightside to release 20,000 two-character domains

A week from now, new gTLD registry Rightside is to release over 20,000 two-character domain names.
The releases will come across all of its delegated gTLDs, but exclude letter-letter combinations.
Only letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations will be available, following ICANN’s partial lifting of the ban on two-character domains back in December.
Strings such as “a1”, “2b” and “69” will presumably become available.
Rightside said the domains will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, with prices ranging from $200 to $50,000.
The registry has almost 30 delegated new gTLDs, including .auction, .software, .lawyer, .sale and .video.
If you’re interested, set your alarms for 1700 UTC on March 18. That’s when all 20,000 drop.
Two-letter domains are still reserved, pending the outcome of ICANN’s government-delayed release process.