You can’t use money to buy .box domains

In what is probably the strangest domain launch to date, the crypto-focused new gTLD .box has gone on sale, but you can’t use actual money to buy domains there.

The unique selling point of .box domains is that they work on both the regular consensus DNS — .box is an ICANN-approved and contracted gTLD — and the Ethereum Name Service blockchain alt-root, so registrants can use their domains to address their crypto wallets.

From a business model perspective, registry Intercap is doing a lot of things differently.

For starters, it’s not accepting hard currency. The regular general availability price at My.Box, which appears to be the only registrar, is $120 a year, but you can only pay in crypto coins — either Ethereum or USD Coin, a crypto coin that has its value linked 1:1 to the US dollar.

My.Box is using ICANN-accredited top-10 registrar NameSilo to register names, but NameSilo’s own web store does not appear to support them.

The current Early Access Period is also different to the norm. Instead of the price reducing by a certain amount every day at midnight, it’s constantly ticking down, minute by minute, at a rate of 50% a day, so you can get a name for less if you just hang on a few hours (or minutes, or seconds).

EAP pricing started at $7,680 last Thursday and at time of publication is around $470. Judging by zone files, about 30 domains have been sold during EAP so far.

Dropping domains pricing is also handled in what I believe is a unique way. Instead of dropped domains entering the available pool at regular GA pricing, they instead are returned to EAP pricing — so they’ll cost $7,680 to re-register the moment after they drop and you’ll have to wait a full seven days to get them at the regular base price..

I can see the potential for controversy here, but it doesn’t seem much different to registrars auctioning off their customers’ domains after they expire.

My.Box also asks its customers to manage their domain via its app, and it does not allow them to assign their own nameservers — they have to use the nameservers assigned by the registry.

Three more straggler new gTLDs coming soon

Three more new gTLDs from three different registries are set to launch this (northern hemisphere) summer.

Identity Digital is gearing up to launch .watches in June, while newcomer Digity will launch .case in July and Intercap will launch .box in August, according to ICANN records.

.watches was bought from luxury goods maker Richemont, which hadn’t used it, in 2020. It’s currently in sunrise and will go to general availability June 7.

Digity, which is affiliated with the registrar Sav, bought .case from CentralNic, which in turn bought it from industrial machinery maker CNH Industrial. It was a dot-brand, but will be repurposed as an open generic targeting the legal field.

Intercap is planning to start .box’s sunrise August 9 and go to general availability the following month, September 13. The gTLD was originally bought for $3 million before Intercap acquired it in 2020.

Amazon sold rights to .box gTLD for $3 million

Amazon relinquished its rights to the .box gTLD five years ago for $3 million, according to court documents seen by DI.

Amazon was one of two applicants for .box, the other being a company called NS1 (that’s the numeral 1; this has nothing to do with Network Solutions).

According to a complaint filed a couple of years ago that I came across today, Amazon agreed to withdraw its application, giving its rival an unobstructed shot at the gTLD, for $3 million.

It was a private settlement of the contention set and the payout was not publicly revealed at the time.

A $3 million deal puts .box in the same ballpark as public auctions such as MMX’s .vip and Johnson & Johnson’s (now XYZ.com’s) .baby.

While the deal is years old, I thought the data point was worth publishing.

NS1’s application suggests that its business plan was to offer registrants cloud storage services, along the lines of DropBox.

But the ICANN contract was sold to Intercap, which also runs .inc and .dealer, earlier this year. The plan now appears to be to operate it as an open niche gTLD, but no launch dates have been announced.

It’s not known how much the gTLD sold for second time around.

The latest industry C-suite musical chairs

There have been several top-level hires at big new gTLD players in the last week.
Donuts has announced it has appointed Mina Neuberg as chief marketing officer. Neuberg appears to be a newcomer to the domain industry, having most recently worked at a learning software company called Revolution Math. It’s the first time has had a named top marketing exec on its web site since VP Judith McGarry left a year ago.
Her appointment follows February’s announcement that Donuts hired Randy Haas as chief financial officer. He was previously CFO of Rhapsody/Napster, the online music company.
Meanwhile, Shayan Rostam has moved from Intercap Holdings, the registry for .inc, .dealer and .box, where he was chief registry officer, to portfolio registry Uniregistry, where he will be chief growth officer, a newly created position.
And DNW is reporting that new gTLD registry MMX has made two new C-level hires, both coming from Uniregistry: Vaughn Lilely has been recruited as chief growth officer while Ben Anderson is coming in as chief operating officer.

Pricey .inc does quite well in sunrise

The new gTLD .inc, which goes into general availability today, had a better-than-average number of sales in its sunrise period.
Intercap Registry, which runs .inc, said today that it had “over 270” sunrise registrations.
It’s not a massive amount, but it’s probably enough to put the TLD into the top 50 sunrises to date.
There had been 491 sunrise periods as of December 2018, according to ICANN data. The average number of sunrise regs was 137. The median was 77.
The largest sunrise to date was Google’s .app, which sold 2,908 domains during its sunrise last year.
Only five new gTLDs have racked up more than 1,000 sunrise sales, and three of those were porn-related. The fifth was .shop.
Based on 270 domains .inc would rank alongside similarly themed .llc, but also the likes of .solutions, .world and .team, where the case for a defensive reg is less clear.
While one can see a clear risk for companies whose names end in “Inc”, the expected retail price of .inc will be around $2,000, which Intercap says will deter cybersquatters.
Sunrise registrants will have paid a substantial markup on this regular price.
For those without zone file access, Intercap is actually posting the names and logos of the companies that have registered on its web site.

Registry offers “$2,500” in sweeteners for .inc registrants

The newly launching .inc gTLD may be eye-wateringly expensive, but the registry is offering a package of incentives it reckons adds up to a $2,500 value to new registrants.
Intercap Registry’s .inc went into sunrise today. It’s expected to have retail price of $2,000 and up when it goes to general availability May 7. Sunrise registrants can expect to pay a couple thousand more.
Given the high price, and the fact that many businesses that end in “Inc” will likely view it primarily as an opportunity to waste yet more cash on defensive registrations, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of this particular gTLD.
But I’ve got to give the registry credit for at least making an effort to bump up its value proposition.
It’s currently listing 17 freebies, provided mostly by partners, that new .inc registrants can cash in to soften the dent in their wallets.
Registrants can get a free business formation package from LegalZoom and a free press release announcing their new business issued on GlobalNewsWire, for example. Together, that’s worth over a grand, Intercap says.
Most of the other benefits on offer are discounts on services such as telephony, shared office space, printing, accounting, payment processing and advertising services. Some require additional spending before they can be cashed in.
Partners include Google, Ting, Delta Airlines, Vistaprint and Quickbooks. Some of the offers look like typical affiliate marketing deals.
I imagine different registrants will find different benefits appealing. Some may use none at all. Intercap says more sweeteners will be added in future.
The registry says that its high pricing is there to deter cybersquatters. I imagine this will be successful to a large extent, but that it will probably attract a healthy defensive registration business also.

Bad.monster? Two more gTLDs have been acquired

Two more new gTLDs have changed hands, DI has learned.
XYZ.com has picked up former dot-brand .monster from recruitment web site Monster.com, while newbie registry Intercap Holdings has acquired .dealer from Dealer.com.
Both ICANN contracts were reassigned last month.
Neither acquiring company has announced their purchases or published their launch plans yet.
That said, XYZ has already registered a few intriguing domains: bad.monster, good.monster, my.monster and go.monster.
It appears that go.monster — slogan: “It’s Alive!” — will be the registry’s launch site. It’s the only one I could get to resolve.
It’s the second example I can think of of a dot-brand gTLD being acquired by a registry that intends to run it as a generic.
In 2016, Top Level Spectrum acquired .observer from the newspaper of the same name.
Most dot-brands that don’t want their TLDs any more choose to retire them. That number is up to 45 now.
.dealer wasn’t technically a dot-brand — it had no Spec 13 in its contract — but its 2012 application certainly made it look like a dot-brand, with most of the domains reserved for Dealer.com and its affiliates. It looked defensive.
Shayam Rostam, chief registry officer of ICH, told me the plan for .dealer is to primarily target car dealers (also its former owner’s market) but that it will be unrestricted and open to all comers.
Intercap wants to get its January launch of .inc out of the way before turning its attention to .dealer, so we’re probably looking at mid-late 2019 for a launch, Rostam said.
It also needs to do some housekeeping such as moving the TLD to Uniregistry’s back-end.
What do y’all think about these TLDs? Could .monster be the next .guru? Could .dealer find a home in the burgeoning legal cannabis market? Comment below!

Two controversial new gTLDs launching in January

Five years after the first batch of new gTLDs hit the market, registries continue to drip-feed them into the internet.
At least two more are due to launch on January 16 — .dev and .inc.
.dev is the latest of Google’s portfolio to be released, aimed at the software developer market.
It proved controversial briefly when it first was added to the DNS in 2014, causing headaches for some developers who were already using .dev domains on their private networks.
Four years is plenty of time for all of these collisions to have been cleaned up, however, so I can’t imagine many problems emerging when people start buying these names.
.dev starts a one-month sunrise January 16, sells at early access prices from February 19 to 28 before going to regular-price general availability.
Google has already launched one of its own products, web.dev, a testing tool for web developers, on a .dev domain.
Launching with a pretty much identical phased launch plan is .inc, from new market entrant Intercap Holdings, a Caymans-based subsidiary of a Toronto firm founded by .tv founder Jason Chapnik and managed by .xyz alumnus Shayan Rostam.
Intercap bought the .inc contract from Edmon Chong’s GTLD Limited earlier this year for an undisclosed sum. GTLD Ltd is believed to have paid in excess of $15 million for the TLD at auction.
.inc has proved controversial in the past, attracting criticism from states attorneys general in the US, which backed another bidder.
It may prove controversial in future, too. I have a hunch it’s going to attract more than its fair share of cybersquatters and will probably do quite well out of defensive registration fees.