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.

Over half the world’s biggest brands will be blocked in new gTLDs

More than half of the world’s most-famous brand names already stand to benefit from blocks in new gTLDs, due to the name collisions policy introduced by ICANN recently.
That’s the preliminary conclusion of a quick analysis of the 37 block-lists already published.
Using Interbrand’s list of the top 100 most valuable brands, we find that only 32 do not appear anywhere — either as strings or substrings — on the collisions lists we have today.
Fifty-nine brands are to be blocked as exact matches in at least one new gTLD. Five brands are blocked exactly in 10 or more.
Brand owners blocked in collision lists may not have to fork out for as many defensive registrations, but may also face complications when registries finally start whittling down their lists.
We present the full table of results below, for which the following explanations might be needed:

• Brand/String — The brands have been normalized to ASCII strings, removing punctuation not compatible with the DNS protocol and converting accented characters to their unaccented equivalents (for example, “Nescafé” becomes “Nescafe”). For DI PRO subscribers, each string links to a search on the database for that string.
• Exact Matches — The number of gTLDs (currently out of 37) in which this exact-match brand will be blocked.
• Unique Strings — The number of strings containing this brand that appear on block-lists. In some cases this may provide misleading results due to the usual overkill you get when matching substrings. For example, two-character brands such as 3M and HP get a lot of hits, the vast majority of which do not appear to relate to the brand itself, whereas every hit for Google does in fact refer to the brand.

[table id=19 /]
The numbers will of course grow rapidly as ICANN publishes more collisions lists.
If there’s sufficient interest from DI PRO subscribers in this breakdown being kept up to date on an ongoing basis, I’ll bolt it on to to the existing collisions database.

Over 87,000 new gTLD domains now blocked

The total number of domain names to be blocked due to the risk of name collisions has topped 87,000 with the latest batch of block-lists from ICANN, published yesterday.
According to our database, 87,670 domain names, representing 75,208 unique second-level strings, are to be blocked in the 37 new gTLDs that have published collisions lists.
The string “www” is on all 37 lists, followed closely by “com”, “org” and “net”.
The most commonly blocked names include large numbers of single characters and large numbers of two-character strings matching ccTLDs (which were already banned in new gTLDs anyway).
Lots of protocol-related strings, such as “http”, “ftp”, “isatap” and “wpad” can also be found in the top 100 strings.
Gambling-related strings are also hugely, and so far inexplicably, popular blocking candidates.
Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Apple are the most frequently seen brands.
The full consolidated list of blocked strings can be searched at the DI PRO name collisions database.
The gTLD with the biggest block-list so far is .kitchen, with 13,061 strings, over half as big again as the next-longest list, which is .uno’s 8,187 names.

Over 100 new gTLD contracts now signed

The pace is stepping up as ICANN starts to lift its heels in moving more new gTLDs towards delegation.
The organization signed contracts with registries covering 34 strings over the weekend, including popular favorites such as .wiki and .ninja.
The full list of gTLDs with freshly signed Registry Agreements goes like this:

.education, .institute, .training, .international, .builders, .build, .solar, .marketing, .solutions, .academy, .company, .camp, .systems, .business, .management, .center, .repair, .red, .glass, .house, .farm, .holiday, .kaufen, .ninja, .gal, .social, .moda, .blue, .ceo, .immobilien, .wiki, .florist, .公益 and .政务.

At 34 in a week, it’s an almost 50% increase on the number of new gTLD RAs ICANN has entered into, and dangerously close to the 40-per-week rate that was originally planned.
By our reckoning, there are now 115 new gTLDs with ICANN contracts.

ICANN rejects third new gTLD bid

ICANN has formally rejected .thai, only the third new gTLD application to suffer this fate.
It’s been flagged as “Not Approved”, following an objection from a consensus of the Governmental Advisory Committee led by an outcry from Thailand and Thai nationals.
Only DotConnectAfrica’s .africa and GCC’s .gcc have the same designation. Both also were killed off by GAC advice.
Better Living Management Company had applied for .thai, promising to restrict it to people and organizations with a local presence.
Thailand already has the ccTLD .th, of course, as well as the IDN equivalent, .ไทย, which means “Thailand”.
ICANN has not yet rejected any applications that lost crippling objections filed by non-governmental actors.

XYZ says auctions “comfortably within the rules”

New gTLD registry XYZ.com has responded to criticisms of its plan to auction .xyz and .college names with NameJet before they even have signed contracts with ICANN.
CEO Daniel Negari told DI that the plan to auction 40 names between now and the end of February, is “comfortably within the rules”.
The company seems to be operating at the edge of what is permissible under the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms, which state that no domains may be allocated prior to Sunrise.
But Negari said in an email interview that nothing will be “allocated” before its Sunrise periods are done:

the buyers at auction are not buying the domain names as in a normal auction. They are buying an option to force us to allocate them the domain after the Sunrise Period for the auction price assuming various contingencies are met — such as us being able to allocate the name in the future, the name being available after sunrise, the name not being blocked-out because of name collisions and so on.

He went on to say that the 40 names being put to auction are being drawn from the 100 names the recently redrafted Registry Agreement says registries are allowed to allocate to themselves “necessary for the operation or the promotion of the TLD”.
There’s also the potential problem that neither TLD has yet received its list of name collisions, which are likely to contain thousands of strings that the registry must block at launch.
As we’ve seen with the gTLDs that already have their lists, many desirable second-level strings are likely to be blocked, which could clash with names XYZ is planning to auction.
But XYZ seems to have access to the Day In The Life Of The Internet data from which these lists are compiled, and Negari said that the names it is auctioning off do not appear.
“We think these auctions are a great way to both promote our TLD as anticipated by ICANN in the RA and to bring increased innovation to the space in line with ICANN’s stated goals for the new gTLD program,” Negari said.

New gTLDs bring back tiered renewal pricing

Only one mass-market TLD used it, and it’s often considered a bad idea, but variable pricing for domain name renewals is making a comeback with the launch of new gTLDs.
What Box? and Plan Bee are the first two new gTLD registries to start selling domains with tiered renewal fees, in .menu and .build respectively, via Go Daddy.
If you pay Go Daddy $189.99 for a “Priority Rre-registration” in .build, your annual renewal fee if you secure the name will be be $149.99, instead of the $99.99 other pre-registrants will pay.
Similarly, a Priority Pre-registration in .menu will set you back $199.99 a year, forever, instead of $49.99.
I understand that the standard Go Daddy initial registration fee for these two TLDs during general availability will also be $99.99 and $49.99 respectively.
The other two new gTLDs with announced pricing, .uno and .luxury, do not appear to be charging tiered rates.
Go Daddy confirmed that the renewal pricing will be permanently higher in the .build and .menu, telling us:

The industry is starting to move toward a tiered pricing system. As such, some registries have elected to make renewals higher on domain names captured during the priority pre-registration period.

It’s actually permitted under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement.
Generally, the RA prevents registries charging variable renewal fees. If you find yourself running a successful business in a new gTLD, the registry is not allowed to gouge you for higher renewals.
There’s a provision in section 2.10 of the contract that is designed to “prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator”.
But the rule does not apply if you’re told at the point of registration that your renewal pricing will be higher.
The contract states that “Registry Operator must have uniform pricing for renewals of domain name registrations”, but grants this huge exception:

if the registrar has provided Registry Operator with documentation that demonstrates that the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant

The only major TLD to try variable pricing before now was .tv, which Verisign currently operates.
The .tv registry held back thousands of desirable strings when it launched in 2000. Instead of auctioning them, it priced these names to sell, but with renewal prices matching the initial registration fee.
If you bought a premium .tv name 10 years ago for $10,000, you’ve been paying $10,000 a year ever since.
This proved very unpopular — especially with domain investors, who continue to moan about the high carrying cost of .tv names bought years ago — and Verisign scrapped the policy on new registrations in 2010.
Some say tiered renewal pricing is the main reason .tv isn’t nearly as popular as it arguably should be.
But will it work in 2014?
Tiered renewal fees seems like an excellent way to discourage domainers from participating in your launch.
Would you be willing to pay higher renewal fees ad infinitum just for the chance for first dibs on the new gTLD domain name you want?