Nevett headhunts top execs from three rivals
Public Interest Registry has filled out its executive team by poaching senior staff from rivals Afilias, Donuts and Neustar.
Judy Song-Marshall of Neustar has joined as chief of staff, Joe Abley of Afilias is the new chief technology officer and Anand Vora has joined from Donuts as VP of business affairs.
They’re the first senior level appointments to be announced since Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett was appointed CEO three months ago.
PIR, the non-profit which runs .org and related gTLDs, has also let it be known that it’s looking for a chief financial officer. The job ad can be found here.
Neustar completes .in migration
The transfer of India’s suite of ccTLDs from Afilias to Neustar is done.
NIXI, the .in registry, announced today: “The transition of .IN to its new Neustar-backed Registry platform is now complete.”
With 2.2 million names, not counting names in NIXI’s plethora of localized transliterations, .in is the third-largest TLD migration, behind the 3.1 million .au names that made the reverse journey from Neustar to Afilias last year and the 2.7 million .org names that went from Verisign to Afilias in 2003.
The .in migration started yesterday. NIXI had expected up to 48 hours downtime at the registry EPP level, with obviously no DNS downtime.
The name servers for .in and its IDN equivalents currently all simultaneously include Afilias-owned and Neustar-owned servers.
An Afilias lawsuit against the Indian government, which claimed Neustar lacked experience with Indian scripts and attempted to block the transition, appears to have been dropped last week.
Neustar is reportedly charging NIXI $0.70 per transaction, $0.40 less than Afilias had bid to renew its contract. It won the contract after an open bidding process last August.
ICANN director Burr leaving Neustar
Neustar is losing its chief privacy officer, Becky Burr, who also sits on ICANN’s board of directors.
Burr, a lawyer, said last week that she’s decided to return to private practice after almost seven years at the registry.
Her last day will be March 1, but she’ll continue to advise the company as outside counsel on issues such as privacy and .us policy.
Lips are sealed on her exact destination, but it’s apparently small, Washington, DC-based, and focused on data protection.
Prior to Neustar, Burr worked for the law firm Wilmer Hale. Prior to that, she was in the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she helped create ICANN 20 years ago.
Despite no longer being directly employed by a registry or registrar, Burr said she’s hoping to be reelected to the ICANN board, where she represents the Contracted Parties House, when her current term expires at the end of the year.
In addition to .us, Neustar runs .co, .biz and acts as back-end for dozens of other TLDs.
Despite Afilias lawsuit, Neustar names date for Indian takeaway
Neustar has named the date for the transition of the .in registry away from incumbent Afilias..
It’s due to happen February 28, according to a new web site the company has set up to publicize the handover.
The registry will be down for up to 48 hours, starting from 1830 UTC, February 17, as a result.
There will be no new adds, and registrants won’t be able to update their domains, during the downtime. DNS will not be affected, so domains should still resolve.
Neustar won the back-end contract from .in manager NIXI last year, out from under Afilias, after reportedly undercutting Afilias’ $1.10 per-domain-per-year bid with a $0.70 bid of its own.
Given the 2.2 million domains in .in, that makes the contract worth about $7.7 million over its five-year duration.
The transition appears to be going ahead despite a lawsuit filed by Afilias against the Indian government last August, which sought to block the deal.
According to Neustar, the contract was awarded, regardless, last September.
But the lawsuit seems to be still active, judging by the latest filings published on the Delhi High Court web site, which show no judgement has yet been filed.
Is auDA’s new marketing windfall working?
Australian ccTLD .au appears to be growing at a faster rate after registry auDA cut its wholesale prices and devoted millions of dollars to marketing.
While the numbers are by no means conclusive, in the three months after the new business model came into effect .au grew almost twice as much as in the comparable year-ago period.
At the end of June, auDA switch its back-end registry from Neustar to Afilias.
It cut its wholesale price by 10% and said it would invest AUD 8 million ($5.7 million) over four years into a marketing and innovation fund.
The fund offers financial incentives to registrars and resellers that promote .au domains.
Growing .au’s market share is one of the defined objectives of the program, and stats collected by DI show it might be working.
In the three months between June 28 (two days before the transition to Afilias) and September 28, the number of reported .au domains went up from 3,153,432 to 3,163,998, an increase of 10,566 domains.
In the immediately prior three months, registered domains actually declined by 1,150.
In the same period June-September period of 2017, domains were up by 5,734, about half the level of this year.
So is the new regime succeeding in growing numbers more rapidly? Maybe. It’s probably too early to tell for sure.
Any increase in DUM could be offset by declines from domain investors, if a proposed policy change about who is allowed to register domains comes into effect.
The numbers above have two caveats: 1) they’re based on the running total published more or less live on auDA’s web site, so should be considered ball-park as they may have been collected at different times during the day, and 2) it’s possible that Afilias and Neustar report numbers from their back-ends differently, which might mean comparisons of numbers reported before and after the transition are unfair.
Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration
Afilias has got its recent takeover of .au recognized by Guinness as an official world record.
The company was given the title of “Largest Migration of an Internet Top-Level Domain in a Single Transition” at an event in New York today, according to a company press release.
It relates to its migration of .au from former registry provider Neustar to its own back-end a few months ago.
Australia’s .au ccTLD had about 3.1 million names under management at the time, about 400,000 names more than the previous record — the 2003 .org transition Afilias also handled.
I understand there’s a licensing fee due to Guinness for this kind of (let’s face it) shameless-but-effective PR stunt, but no guarantee the record will actually be printed in future editions of the annual Guinness Book of World Records.
I hope the fresh salt in Neustar’s wounds isn’t stinging too badly this evening.
US scraps fucking stupid “seven dirty words” ban
Neustar and the US government have agreed to dump their longstanding ban on profanity in .us domains.
A contract change quietly published in July has now made it possible to register .us domains containing the strings “fuck”, “cunt”, “shit”, “piss”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker” and “tits”.
These are the so-called “seven dirty words” popularized by a George Carlin comedy routine and incorporated into US censorship law via the Supreme Court decision Federal Communications Commission v Pacifica Foundation in 1978.
Neustar banned the strings from .us when it originally won the registry contract from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in 2002, and kept it upon renewal.
Until recently, it was conducting post-registration reviews of new .us domains and suspending names that used the strings in sweary contexts.
However, a July contract amendment (pdf) has released Neustar from this duty, allowing registrants to register whatever the fuck they want.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the change came about after itself and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School complained to the government about the suspension of the domain fucknazis.us, which registrant Jeremy Rubin had been using to raise money to fight the extreme right in the US.
That domain was registered in late 2017, but Neustar appears to have been discussing whether to repeal the idiotic ban in various policy groups for at least three years.
When Network Solutions was the sole registrar for .com, .org and .net it too banned the seven dirty words but this practice fizzled out after ICANN introduced competition into the registrar space almost two decades ago.
Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal
Afilias has sued the Indian government to prevent it awarding the .in ccTLD back-end registry contract to fierce rival Neustar.
The news emerged in local reports over the weekend and appears to be corroborated by published court documents.
According to Moneycontrol, the National Internet Exchange of India plans to award the technical service provider contract to Neustar, after over a decade under Afilias, but Afilias wants the deal blocked.
The contract would also include some 15 current internationalized domain name ccTLDs, with another seven on the way, in addition to .in.
That’s something Afilias reckons Neustar is not technically capable of, according to reports.
Afilias’ lawsuit reportedly alleges that Neustar “has no experience or technical capability to manage and support IDNs in Indian languages and scripts and neither does it claim to have prior experience in Indian languages”.
Neustar runs plenty of IDN TLDs for its dot-brand customers, but none of them appear to be in Indian scripts.
NIXI’s February request for proposals (pdf) contains the requirement: “Support of IDN TLDs in all twenty two scheduled Indian languages and Indian scripts”.
I suppose it’s debatable what this means. Actual, hands-on, operational experience running Indian-script TLDs at scale would be a hell of a requirement to put in an RFP, essentially locking Afilias into the contract for years to come.
Only Verisign and Public Interest Registry currently run delegated gTLDs that use officially recognized Indian scripts, according to my database. And those TLDs — such as Verisign’s .कॉम (the Devanagari .com) — are basically unused.
Neither Neustar nor Afilias have responded to DI’s requests for comment today.
.in has over 2.2 million domains under management, according to NIXI.
Neustar’s Indian subsidiary undercut its rival with a $0.70 per-domain-year offer, $0.40 cheaper than Afilias’ $1.10, according to Moneycontrol.
That would make the deal worth north of $12 million over five years for Afilias and over $7.7 million for Neustar.
One can’t help but be reminded of the two companies’ battle over Australia’s .au, which Afilias sneaked out from under long-time incumbent Neustar late last year.
That handover, the largest in DNS history, was completed relatively smoothly a couple months ago.
Neustar swaps out CEO, PIR looking for new CEO
There are to be changes at the top at two of the industry’s stalwarts.
Neustar has announced that eight-year CEO Lisa Hook has stepped aside to be replaced by Charles Gottdiener, who comes from the world of private equity.
He was most recently COO and MD at Providence Equity Partners.
Hook, who became CEO in 2010, will remain on the Neustar board of directors.
Neustar, which manages .biz, .co and many dot-brand gTLDs, is now owned by private equity group Golden Gate Capital, with a minority ownership by Singapore-based investor GIC, following a $2.9 billion deal last year.
Meanwhile, Public Interest Registry has started advertising for a new CEO of its own, following the mysterious resignation of Brian Cute in May. PIR runs .org and related gTLDs.
PIR said its new boss will need “excellent organizational, strategic planning, financial management and diplomatic skills”.
If it sounds like you, you have a few days to get your application in.
auDA chair defends $9 million windfall as no-confidence vote looms
The chair of .au registry auDA has appealed to its membership for calm ahead of a vote of no confidence in himself, the CEO, and two of his fellow directors.
Chris Leptos yesterday defended the AUD 12 million ($9 million) windfall the organization has received as a result of its transition from long-term registry back-end Neustar to rival Afilias.
By opening the back-end contract to competition, and going with a bid far cheaper than the incumbent’s historical pricing, auDA saved itself a tonne of cash.
Some members reckon the money, which has been placed in a “marketing and innovation fund”, should have instead be returned to registrants via far lower prices for .au domains.
Leptos said the money was better used to promote .au rather than disappearing to the coffers of the back-end provider, writing;
What is most surprising to me is that a small number of members are criticising the new $12 million Marketing and Innovation Fund that will be used to grow the .au namespace. The fact is that auDA now has more funds, and those funds are being ploughed back into lower wholesale prices, and programs that will benefit participants in the .au namespace, rather than benefiting the private owners of the former registry operator. On any reasoned analysis, this is a good thing.
He assured disgruntled members that their concerns about this and other matters are being listened to, but noted the diversity of views among the membership.
Some members say auDA is not listening to their concerns. I can assure you that auDA is listening to its members and stakeholders at both management level and board level. The reality, however, is that auDA needs to balance the requirements of many members and stakeholders who disagree among themselves.
Leptos and two other directors are facing a vote to fire them from the board on July 27. CEO Cameron Boardman faces a no-confidence vote the same day,
The meeting was scheduled following a petition of members orchestrated at Grumpier.com.au, which managed to get signatures from over 5% of auDA’s then 320-odd members.
The Grumpies are currently trying to crowd-fund AUD 4,650 to pay for legal and other fees associated with this meeting. At time of writing, they’re about half-way there.
They’re also unhappy with auDA’s transparency, and with moves such as the currently delayed plan to sell direct second-level .au domains.
Leptos yesterday urged members to vote against the four resolutions, saying that the organization should not be “distracted” from implementing reforms recently mandated by the Australian government following a review.
auDA recently received 955 new membership applications — a four-fold increase in its member base — largely as a result of hundreds of sign-ups from staff at Afilias and the largest .au registrars. These people will not be approved in time to vote at the July 27 meeting.
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