Seven more Donuts gTLDs delegated

Donuts had seven new gTLDs added to the DNS root zone today.
The strings are: .diamonds, .tips, .photography, .directory, .kitchen, .enterprises and .today.
The nic.tld domains in each are already resolving, redirecting users to Donuts’ official site at donuts.co.
There are now 31 live new gTLDs, 26 of which belong to Donuts subsidiaries.

TLDH reveals new gTLD launch strategy

Top Level Domain Holdings will announce its go-to-market strategy — including .tv-style premium names pricing and its launch as a registrar — at an event at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires this evening.
The company, which is involved in 60 new gTLD applications as applicant and 75 as a back-end provider, is also revealing a novel pre-registration clearinghouse that will be open to almost all applicants.
First off, it’s launching Minds + Machines Registrar, an affiliated registrar through which it will sell domain names in its own and third-party TLDs.
Instead of a regular name suggestion tool, it’s got a browsable directory of available names, something that I don’t recall seeing at a registrar before.
Searching “murphy.casa”, I was offered lots of other available domains in the “English Surnames” category, for example.
Until TLDH actually has some live gTLDs, the site will be used to take paid-for pre-registrations, or “Priority Reservations” using a new service that TLDH is calling the Online Priority Enhanced Names database, which painfully forces the acronym “OPEN”.
Pre-registrations in .casa, .horse and .cooking will cost €29.95 ($40), the same as the expected regular annual reg fee. It’s first-come first-served — no auctions — and the fee covers the first year of registration.
If the name they pay for is claimed by a trademark holder during the mandatory Sunrise period, or is on the gTLD’s collisions block-list, registrants get a full refund, TLDH CEO Antony Van Couvering said.
He added that any applicant for a new gTLD that is uncontested and has an open registration policy will be able to plug their gTLDs into the OPEN system.
PeopleBrowsr is already on the system with its uncontested .ceo and .best gTLDs, priced at $99.95.
No other registrars are signed up yet but Van Couvering reckons it might be attractive to registrars that have already taken large amounts of no-fee expressions of interest.
TLDH plans to charge registries and registrars a €1 processing fee (each, so TLDH gets €2) for each pre-registration that is sold through the system.
For “premium” names, the company has decided to adopt the old .tv model of charging high annual fees instead of a high initial fee followed by the standard renewal rate.
Van Couvering said a domain that might have been priced at $100,000 to buy outright might instead be sold for $10,000 a year.
“Because we want to encourage usage, we don’t want to charge a huge upfront fee,” he said. “We’d really like to make premium names available to people who will actually use them.”
Looking at the aforementioned English Surnames category on the new M+M site, I see that jackson.casa will cost somebody €5,179.95 a year, whereas nicholson.casa will cost the basic €29.95.
Two other new gTLDs, .menu and .build, have already revealed variable pricing strategies, albeit slightly different.

.wow has more collisions than any other new gTLD

Amazon, Google or Demand Media are going to have to block over 200,000 strings in .wow, which all three have applied for, due to the risk of name collisions.
That’s tens of thousands of names greater than any other applied-for gTLD string.
Here’s the top 20 gTLDs, ranked by the number of collisions:
[table id=21 /]
The average new gTLD string has 7,346 potential collisions, according to our preliminary analysis of the lists ICANN published for 1,318 strings this morning.
As blogged earlier, 9.8 million unique domain names are to be blocked in total.
Seventeen gTLDs seem to have been provided with empty lists, so will not have to block any domains in order to proceed to delegation with ICANN.

ICANN blocks almost 10 million new gTLD domains

ICANN has asked new gTLD registry operators to block a total of 9.8 million domain names, due to the perceived risk of damage from name collisions.
To put it another way, Verisign has managed to take close to 10 million domain names off the market.
ICANN today delivered second-level domain block-lists for 1,327 new gTLDs. Combined, the number of unique blocked domains is just over 9.8 million, according to DI’s preliminary analysis.
Some of the lists relate to gTLDs that will not be approved because they’re in mutually exclusive contention sets with other strings (for example, .unicorn and .unicom).
Twenty-five unfortunate gTLD applicants did not receive lists, because ICANN said they do not qualify for the block-list-based “Alternate Path to Delegation”.
We’re currently crunching the numbers and will have more information later today, with a bit of luck.

Demystifying DITL Data [Guest Post]

With all the talk recently about DNS Namespace Collisions, the heretofore relatively obscure Day In The Life (“DITL”) datasets maintained by the DNS-OARC have been getting a lot of attention.
While these datasets are well known to researchers, I’d like to take the opportunity to provide some background and talk a little about how these datasets are being used to research the DNS Namespace Collision issue.
The Domain Name System Operations Analysis and Research Center (“DNS-OARC”) began working with the root server operators to collect data in 2006. The effort was coined “Day In The Life of the Internet (DITL).”
Root server participation in the DITL collection is voluntary and the number of contributing operators has steadily increased; in 2010, all of the 13 root server letters participated. DITL data collection occurs on an annual basis and covers approximately 50 contiguous hours.
DNS-OARC’s DITL datasets are attractive for researching the DNS Namespace Collision issue because:

• DITL contains data from multiple root operators;
• The robust annual sampling methodology (with samples dating back to 2006) allows trending; and
• It’s available to all DNS-OARC Members.

More information on the DITL collection is available on DNS-OARC’s site at https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/data/ditl.
Terabytes and terabytes of data
The data consists of the raw network “packets” destined for each root server. Contained within the network packets are the DNS queries. The raw data consists of many terabytes of compressed network capture files and processing the raw data is very time-consuming and resource-intensive.
[table id=20 /]
While several researchers have looked at DITL datasets over the years, the current collisions-oriented research started with Roy Hooper of Demand Media. Roy created a process to iterate through this data and convert it into intermediate forms that are much more usable for researching the proposed new TLDs.
We started with his process and continued working with it; our code is available on GitHub for others to review.
Finding needles in DITL haystacks
The first problem faced by researchers interested in new TLDs is isolating the relatively few queries of interest among many terabytes of traffic that are not of interest.
Each root operator contributes several hundred – or several thousand – files full of captured packets in time-sequential order. These packets contain every DNS query reaching the root that requests information about DNS names falling within delegated and undelegated TLDs.
The first step is to search these packets for DNS queries involving the TLDs of interest. The result is one file per TLD containing all queries from all roots involving that TLD. If the input packet is considered a “horizontal” slice of root DNS traffic, then this intermediary work product is a “vertical” slice per TLD.
These intermediary files are much more manageable, ranging from just a few records to 3 GB. To support additional investigation and debugging, the intermediary files that JAS produces are fully “traceable” such that a record in the intermediary file can be traced back to the source raw network packet.
The DITL data contain quite a bit of noise, primarily DNS traffic that was not actually destined for the root. Our process filters the data by destination IP address so that the only remaining data is that which was originally destined for the root name servers.
JAS has made these intermediary per-TLD files available to DNS-OARC members for further analysis.
Then what?
The intermediary files are comparatively small and easy to parse, opening the door to more elaborate research. For example, JAS has written various “second passes” that classify queries, separate queries that use valid syntax at the second level from those that don’t, detect “randomness,” fit regular expressions to the queries, and more.
We have also checked to confirm that second level queries that look like Punycode IDNs (start with ‘xn--‘) are valid Punycode. It is interesting to note the tremendous volume of erroneous, technically invalid, and/or nonsensical DNS queries that make it to the root.
Also of interest is that the datasets are dominated by query strings that appear random and/or machine-generated.
Google’s Chrome browser generates three random 10-character queries upon startup in an effort to detect network properties. Those “Chrome 10” queries together with a relatively small number of other common patterns comprise a significant proportion of the entire dataset.
Research is being done in order to better understand the source of these machine-generated queries.
More technical details and information on running the process is available on the DNS-OARC web site.
—
This is a guest post written by Kevin White, VP Technology, JAS Global Advisors LLC. JAS is currently authoring a “Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework” for the new gTLD program under contract with ICANN.

Only two new gTLD bids in Initial Evaluation

Initial Evaluation on the first round of new gTLD applications is almost done, with only two bids now remaining in that stage of the program.
ICANN last night published the delayed IE results for PricewaterhouseCooper’s .pwc and the Better Business Bureau’s .bbb, both of which were passes.
The only two applications remaining in IE are Kosher Marketing Assets’ .kosher and Google’s .search.
The latter is believed to be hung up on technical changes it has made to its bid, to remove the plan to make .search a “dotless” gTLD, which ICANN has banned on stability grounds.
Eight applications are currently in Extended Evaluation, having failed to achieve passing scores during IE.

Why Hansen quit .nyc for .co.com

Ken Hansen has surprised many by resigning from Neustar, where he was general manager of the slam-dunk .nyc new gTLD initiative, to become CEO of .co.com, a new pseudo-TLD registry.
The announcement raises a couple of big questions.
First, why is .co.com being launched as a registry?
The name belongs to domain investor Paul Goldstone. He put it up for sale in March 2012, with broker DomainAdvisors speculating aloud that it would fetch a price in the millions.
We wondered at the time whether CentralNic, whose bread and butter back then (before its interests in new gTLDs became clear) was two-letter country-codes in .com, would swoop to buy it.
We also wondered whether .CO Internet would make an offer, in order to eliminate competition and reduce existing and potential confusion with its own ccTLD, .co.
If either company made an offer, it does not seem to have been accepted.
Goldstone is instead going to try to build a registry around the name, with Hansen as CEO and himself as president. DomainAdvisors founder Gregg McNair is chairman of the new venture.
Second, why on earth would Hansen, who has been leading business development for Neustar’s own .nyc — the forthcoming new gTLD for the city of New York — join an unproven .com subdomain provider?
He tells us that his confidence in .nyc’s prospects has not waned, but that he is one of the owners of the new company.
He said in an email:

Sometimes following the crowd is not the best thing to do in business. New gTLDs have always been about choice from my perspective. I still believe in new gTLDs in general, but there is still a VERY significant market for short recognizable domains ending in .com. We will meet that demand. Not to mention, we can move quickly without waiting on ICANN.

Gaining visibility for a subdomain product can be tricky at the best of times, but with hundred of new generic TLDs coming to market… Hansen, Goldstone and McNair really do have a challenge on their hands.
The new company intends to run sunrise, landrush and “premium” names phases for its launch, which is expected to kick off in the first quarter next year. No word yet on whether it will follow the CentralNic model and also voluntarily incorporate ICANN policies on UDRP, Whois and so forth.

.sexy and 10 more gTLDs now in the root

The third batch of new gTLDs have gone live.
Uniregistry’s .sexy and .tattoo are currently in the DNS root zone, the first two of its portfolio to become active.
The TLDs .bike, .construction, .contractors, .estate, .gallery, .graphics, .land, .plumbing, and .technology from Donuts have also gone live today.
Donuts already had 10 new gTLDs in the root from the first two batches.
There are now 24 live new gTLDs.
The first second-level domains to become available will be nic.tld in each, per the ICANN contract they’ve all signed.
You’ll notice that they’re all ASCII strings, despite the fact that IDNs get priority treatment in the new gTLD program.

Name collisions expert JAS to guest blog on DI

JAS Global Advisors, the consultancy hired by ICANN to provide the final analysis on the risks posed by name collisions in new gTLDs, is to exclusively guest-blog its work here on DI.
ICANN picked JAS to provide a “Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework” earlier this week.
Its job is to basically figure out how new gTLD registries — some of which have been told to block many thousands of potential collisions from their zones — can identify and mitigate the risks, if any, posed by these names.
The framework will help registries reduce the size of their block-lists, in other words.
JAS expects to provide a short series of guest posts over the next few months, explaining the state of the project as it progresses. Reader comments will be read, I’m assured.
JAS CEO Jeff Schmidt said: “The macro intent is to shorten the feedback cycle so folks can see where we are incrementally and comment along the way.”
I’m hoping that the guest posts will provide DI readers with insight into the issue that is as disinterested as DI’s usual coverage, but better informed on the nitty-gritty of the affected technologies.
JAS is a regular consultant for ICANN. It was one of the independent evaluators for the new gTLD program itself.
I’m told that JAS doesn’t have financial relationships with either any new gTLD applicants, which generally think the collision risks have been overstated, or with Verisign, which say they could cause real damage.
JAS isn’t getting paid for the posts; nor is DI getting paid to carry them.
The first post in the series will appear soon, probably Friday.

Will ICANN be forced to reject Islamic gTLDs?

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has condemned applications for .islam and .halal gTLDs filed by a Turkish company, despite the applicant recently fighting off an OIC-backed objection.
Claiming to represent the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, the OIC expressed in a November 4 letter to ICANN and its Governmental Advisory Committee:

official opposition of the Member States of the OIC towards probable authorization by the GAC allowing use of these new gTLDs .Islam and .Halal by any entity not representing the collective voice of the Muslim people.

The letter seems to have been sent in response to the GAC’s current stalemate on these two TLDs, which were applied for, uncontested, by Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System.
At the ICANN meeting in Beijing six months ago, the GAC was unable to reach a consensus to object to .islam and .halal, instead merely noting:

Some GAC members have raised sensitivities on the applications that relate to Islamic terms, specifically .islam and .halal. The GAC members concerned have noted that the applications for .islam and .halal lack community involvement and support. It is the view of these GAC members that these applications should not proceed.

As a non-consensus objection, there’s no presumption that the ICANN board of directors should reject the applications.
And it seems that the New gTLD Program Committee, which carries board powers, has been deliberately ignoring the controversy pending the resolution of two formal Community Objections.
The objections were filed by the United Arab Emirates’ Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, the UAE’s ccTLD registry operator, with backing (it claimed) from the OIC.
But the TRA lost both objections, partly because the wishy-washy government-speak OIC letter it submitted in evidence failed to convince International Chamber of Commerce adjudicator Bernardo Cremades that it really did have that OIC support.
Whether the OIC really does object to Asia Green’s bids now seems beyond dispute.
In fact, the organization says it intends to pass a formal resolution containing its position on Islamic gTLDs during its Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in early December.
ICANN chair Steve Crocker has now asked the GAC to provide further guidance before it decides whether to accept or reject the two bids.
Given that a single governmental hold-out in the GAC would be enough to kill any chance of consensus, the OIC may be right to presuppose that the GAC will not fully object.
That would leave ICANN in the tricky position, for the first time in this application round, of having to decide the fate of a gTLD without the cover of a uniform international objection.
Would it reject .islam, opening the door for other gTLDs to be killed off by minority government concerns? Or would it approve the controversial strings, potentially pissing off the Muslim world?
I expect there’s at least one NGPC member — Lebanese-born Christian ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade — who would certainly not relish having to cast a vote on such a resolution.