Big dose of reality for gTLD-hungry dot-brand applicants

Anyone tuning into yesterday’s Brand Registry Group session at ICANN 72 expecting good news about new gTLDs was in for a reality check, with a generally gloomy outlook on display.

BRG members expressed frustration that ICANN continues to drag its feet on the next application round, failing to provide anywhere near the degree of certainty applicants in large organizations need.

Meanwhile, a former ICANN director clashed with GoDaddy’s chief new gTLD evangelist on whether the 2012 round could be considered a success and whether there really is a lot of demand for the next round.

The BRG has arguably been the most vocal group in the community when it comes for calling for ICANN to stop messing around and approve the next round already, so members are naturally not enthused about the recent approval of an Operational Design Phase, a new layer of bureaucracy expected to add at least 13 months to the next-round runway.

Deborah Atta-Fynn, a VP at current and prospective future dot-brand owner JP Morgan Chase, expressed frustration with ICANN’s inability to put a date on the next round, or even confirm it will be approved, saying that it’s tough to get departmental buy-in for a project with undefined timing and which may never even happen.

Would-be dot-brands “need that clarity, and they need that definitive timeline” she said.

“In the same way that ICANN has to ramp up, we need to ramp up,” she said. “We have to get internal stakeholders from legal and marketing and whatever other groups may be involved to buy into it. They need to see the value, they need to see the use cases.”

“That open-endedness of the timeline makes it very difficult for us to get that stakeholder buy-in that we need. It makes it difficult for us to do any definitive planning,” she said.

Nigel Hickson, now the UK’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative and a civil servant but a senior ICANN staffer at the time of the 2012 round, concurred with the need for firmer timeline.

“It’s very difficult to tell ministers that something is going to happen, and then it doesn’t happen for a couple of years, because basically they lose interest,” he said. “Having some predictability in this process is very important.”

But probably the most compelling interventions during yesterday’s session came from former ICANN director Mike Silber, a new gTLD skeptic who abstained from the 2011 vote approving the program, and new gTLD evangelist Tony Kirsch, now with GoDaddy Registry after years with Neustar.

Silber had some stern words for ICANN of 2011, and for the two CEOs preceding Goran Marby, and indicated that he was an admirer of the policy work done by the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures working group (SubPro) and a supporter of a thorough ODP.

Silber started by taking a pop at former ICANN directors and staffers who he said pushed the program through “for their own personal benefit or ego boost or whatever”, then left the Org to let others “clean up the mess they created by rushing”. He didn’t name them, but I can think of at least three people he might have been talking about, including ICANN’s then-chair and then-CEO.

“This time it doesn’t look like a rush,” he said.

He went on to say that he expects the next application round to be a different animal to 2012, with less speculation and a more realistic approach to what new gTLDs can achieve.

“If you look at the number of applications and look at the number of TLDs actually launched and the number of TLDs that have actually been successful, I think that he hype that existed in 2012 is not there any longer,” he said.

“I think people are going to look long and hard before submitting an application,” Silber said. “These weird and wonderful applications for these weird and wonderful TLDs, by people who thought they would make a fortune, are vaporware.”

“I think applicants now are more serious, and I think there’s going to be a lot less speculation,” he said.

This hype-reduction takes the pressure of ICANN to quickly approve the next round, he said.

Counterpoint was provided by GoDaddy’s Kirsch, a long-time cheerleader for new gTLDs and in particular dot-brands. He’s not a fan of the ODP and the delay it represents.

Kirsch said that new gTLD advocates are reflecting the fact that there’s demand for both top-level and second-level domains out there.

“If there is no customer base, if there is no demand, then there is no revenue base,” he said.

He pointed to data showing that, while there are only 26 million new gTLD domains registered today, there have been 136 million registered over the lifetime of the 2012 round to date (about seven years).

While agreeing that the next round might see less wild top-level speculation, and that the industry has “matured”, Kirsch suggested there might actually be more applications for generic dictionary TLDs next time, but with a better understanding of the marketing commitment needed to make them succeed.

“I’m working with people right now who are doing that with a far greater business plan underneath it, and an understanding that if they don’t have that they won’t succeed with a generic term in the new world,” he said.

Silber dismissed the 136 million number as “indicative of speculation”, which Kirsch did not try very hard to dispute, and expressed skepticism about the level of demand at the top level.

“I find it quite amusing that people say there’s real demand, but then they need a target date to actually drive demand and it makes me worry that maybe the demand’s not quite as real as they think it is,” he said.

Atta-Fynn, Kirsch and session chair Martin Sutton challenged this.

“I think that the the idea that we need to target date to drive demand is incorrect,” Kirsch said. “I think we need a target date to convert interest into demand.”

“It is incumbent on ICANN to make sure that it provides a robust and visible plan for applicants to buy into this, because I think everyone’s watching and we’ve had enough time. It’s time to turn this into a into a real program that that benefits all internet users around the world,” he said.

Facebook rebrand: did one new gTLD or domainer just hit the jackpot?

Facebook is reportedly just days away from unveiling a major corporate rebranding, which will raise only one question in the minds of DI readers: what domain is it going to use?

Citing an unnamed source, The Verge is scooping that a name change is coming in the next week or so “to reflect its focus on building the metaverse”.

The article suggests that we’re looking at a new parent company, with a new umbrella brand, for services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, along the same lines as Google’s reorganization under the Alphabet monicker a few years back.

You’ll recall that Alphabet famously chose abc.xyz as its domain, giving a huge early boost to marketing efforts at XYZ.com’s .xyz registry.

Could a different TLD registry get a similar leg-up from a new Facebook identity?

If the company has chosen a dictionary word for its brand, we’re looking at either something in a new gTLD, or a .com that would likely have to have been purchased from a domain investor.

If the domain has been bought on the secondary market, it almost certainly would have been acquired via a pseudonymous proxy, to avoid price gouging and to keep the name a secret.

Other options are that Facebook has come up with some fanciful neologism and bought the domain at reg price, or has selected a brand from a domain already in its portfolio.

The Verge expects a revelation by the company’s Connect conference October 28, but says it could come sooner.

.basketball domain emerges under GoDaddy with fewer hoops

The .basketball gTLD has finally had its coming-out party, with the registry announcing general availability this week.

Fédération Internationale de Basketball has outsourced management of the gTLD to sports marketing agency Roar Domains, doing business here as Roar.Basketball, which in turn is using GoDaddy Registry for the technical registry functions.

The domain has been in a seemingly interminable series of qualified launch programs, community priority registration phases and sunrise periods for the last four years, but FIBA said yesterday .basketball is now open to all-comers.

Technically, it’s been in general availability for a few months, but the broader marketing effort only began this week.

Right now, it’s being marketed via Roar’s site at be.basketball, where the base registration price is $50 a year. Premiums are available at higher prices.

Roar appears to be using Australian registrar Bombora Technologies, which GoDaddy acquired as part of its Neustar deal last year, as its primary — possibly exclusive — registrar.

Roar’s FAQ states that be.basketball “is the only site where you can register and manage a .basketball domain name”.

Other registrars are accredited, and almost 20 have a handful of presumed sunrise regs, but currently Bombora holds 80% of the 600 domains currently under management.

Weirdly, GoDaddy itself does not appear to currently sell .basketball names through its primary storefront.

Roar/FIBA originally had MMX as its partner, with CentralNic as its back-end, but that changed earlier this year when GoDaddy acquired most of MMX’s assets, including the .basketball relationship.

10 Years Ago… new gTLDs, ICANN pay, DNS abuse and ethics

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ve been in a reflective mood recently, and it’s a slow news day, so I thought now might be a good time to launch a new, irregular feature — a trawl back through the DI archives to see what we were all talking about a decade ago this month.

In many respects, the conversations haven’t changed all that much in the last 10 years. Some are being repeated almost verbatim today. Others seem almost laughably naive with hindsight.

New TLDs

We were just a few months away from the opening of the first big new gTLD application window, but in October 2011 many of the rules of the program were, remarkably, still up in the air.

ICANN still hadn’t decided how much an application would cost. It had yet to decide how it would subsidize poorer applicants.

No Trademark Clearinghouse supplier had yet been found, and there was still some confusion about how the application process would work, and how it would be communicated to potential applicants.

The industry was awash with speculation, as it had been for the whole year, about who might apply for a gTLD. In October, there were stories about potential applications from New South Wales, Orange, Corsica, and BITS.

Afilias was offering $5,000 for new gTLD ideas.

But perhaps the strangest idea was a pitch from CentralNic to the super-rich. For $500,000, it would apply for your family name as a new gTLD. This came to nothing in the 2012 round, but CentralNic’s site is still live.

While new gTLDs were still in the future, October 2011 saw the ongoing sunrise period for the previous round’s .xxx, auctions following the recent launch of .co, and the creation of two new ccTLDs.

Abuse

October 2011 was marked by the registrar community reluctantly agreeing to enter talks with ICANN to renegotiate their standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement, which would ultimately lead to the current 2013 RAA.

The move came as the Governmental Advisory Committee was on the warpath on behalf of its law enforcement allies, demanding more action from the industry on DNS abuse and threatening legislation if it didn’t happen.

Imagine that.

Meanwhile, Verisign asked ICANN for more powers to take down abusive domains, which faced immediate pushback from registrars and others, before the request was retracted mere days later.

The Revolving Door

There was a lot of talk during and around ICANN 42 about conflicts of interest, particular with regards the emergence of a so-called “revolving door” between ICANN’s top brass and the domain industry.

It had been just a few months since chair Peter Dengate Thrush had, on the eve of his retirement from the board, pushed through final approval of the new gTLD program and promptly took a top job at portfolio applicant Minds + Machines.

It looked rotten, and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom, who had himself announced he was quitting just months earlier, had made its his personal mission to reduce at least the perception of conflicts of interest at the Org.

He ruled out being replaced by a fellow director, threw money at consultants, and said the next CEO should be an industry outsider.

It was probably all pointless.

As it turned out, the guy who replaced Beckstrom, Fadi Chehade, put in a few years in the corner office before prematurely quitting for private equity, where he now runs the company that owns Donuts, itself run by Chehade’s ICANN number two, Akram Atallah.

The amount of revolving door action at less-senior levels has been so frequent since 2011 that I don’t even keep track of it any more.

ICANN Pay

ICANN gave its top execs big pay raises. Along with death and taxes, this is a universal constant.

DotConnectAfrica slammed for two-faced strategy as it loses .africa appeal

Unsuccessful gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica has been handed what may prove to be the final nail in the coffin for its failed .africa bid.

A California appeals court has upheld ICANN’s lower-court victory over DCA in its entirety, ruling that the .africa applicant had a two-faced legal strategy that saw it first argue that it did not have a right to sue, but then suing anyway.

After having its .africa application rejected by ICANN due to lack of African government support in 2012, the following year DCA filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN.

One of its key arguments in that case was that it, along with every other new gTLD applicant, had been forced to sign a legal waiver, preventing them from taking ICANN to court.

When it was handed a partial victory in the IRP, sufficient to embarrass ICANN but not enough to have .africa reassigned, DCA was one of a few parties who ignored the legal waiver and sued anyway, in 2016.

Now, the California appeals court has confirmed a lower court ruling that this violated the rule of “judicial estoppel”, which prevents a party switching between two diametrically opposing arguments to suit their strategy at any given time.

“DotConnect took two contrary positions. It told the arbitrators on the Independent Review Panel it could not sue in court. DotConnect then sued in court,” the three judges wrote.

They added that the “text of that litigation waiver was unequivocal, unconditional, and unlimited.”

The ruling describes the .africa case in pretty much the same way as I have for the last decade — DCA didn’t have government support when it applied for the gTLD and ICANN was well within its rights to throw out the application under the program’s rules.

ICANN was handed a thoroughly comprehensive victory, in other words, and awarded costs.

Is this the end of the .africa case? Given DCA boss Sophia Bekele’s apparent fondness for the sunk cost fallacy, who knows?

While all these legal shenanigans have been ongoing, .africa has been delegated to and launched by ZA Central Registry, which had the support of the African Union following an RFP that DCA refused to participate in.

There are about 30,000 .africa domains under management today, which is not terrible for a new gTLD.

The 30-page appeals court ruling (pdf) was made September 20 and ICANN published it this week.

James Bond domains listed for sale by .bond registry

ShortDot has made James Bond related domain names in the gTLD .bond available for sale or lease, as the movie franchise’s latest outing smashes box office records.

Both james.bond and 007.bond are currently listed for sale for $25,000 each at Dan.com, with a lease-to-own option of $2,084 a month. The .bond registry is listed as the seller. They will renew at the standard rate.

The offers were announced shortly before the weekend opening of No Time To Die made a reported $120 million internationally in cinema ticket sales, beating pandemic-related box office records.

Both “James Bond” and “007” are trademarks of movie producer EON Productions, so it seems buyers might be assuming some UDRP risk. I asked ShortDot about this last week but did not receive a response.

In a press release, the company made hay about the fact that that “James” is a super-common given name and “007” is a three-digit numeric, which are both sought-after categories of domains.

These are the kinds of assertions you’d expect in a UDRP defense.

.bond was originally a dot-brand for Bond University in Australia, but it was sold to ShortDot in 2019 after laying dormant for years.

Regular .bond domains retail for about $70 a year. There are over 4,000 currently registered.

Donuts’ drop-catching service not anti-competitive, ICANN says

Donuts’ proposed DropZone service, which could see the registry start charging drop-catchers additional fees, is not anti-competitive, according to ICANN.

The service “does not raise any competition concerns”, ICANN VP Russ Weinstein said in a letter to registrar TurnCommerce, the company behind DropCatch.com.

He was responding to TurnCommerce’s concern that DropZone would allow Donuts to charge unlimited extra fees to register expiring names, while giving an advantage to its in-house registrars.

But Weinstein wrote (pdf):

The information received in the Dropzone RSEP request was thoroughly evaluated pursuant to our process, which included consideration of the matters raised in your letter. ICANN org determined that the Dropzone service as submitted by Donuts Inc. on behalf of [Donuts subsidiaries] Binky Moon, LLC and Dog Beach, LLC does not raise any competition concerns requiring ICANN org to refer either RSEP to a relevant competition authority.

DropZone would see Donuts handle its dropping names on a parallel registry system that registrars would have to obtain separate access to. Its Registry Service Evaluation Process request raises the prospect of new fees for such access.

Hold on to your stats! ShortDot gets two gTLDs approved in China

ShortDot, which makes a business repurposing unwanted gTLDs for the budget end of the market, said today it has had two more horses in its stable approved for use in China.

The company said that .bond and .cyou have been given the necessary nods by Chinese authorities.

What this could mean, if history is any guide, is a sharp increase in sales for the two extensions, possibly to the extent that they materially affect overall domain industry volume stats for the next few years.

ShortDot seems to think so, saying in a press release: “Given the massive success of .icu in China, it is quite clear that .bond and .cyou will follow suit to become largely successful.”

.icu currently has about 600,000 names under management, more than half of which are registered via Chinese registrars. Its numbers are on their way down.

At its peak 18 months ago it had more than 10 times as many, about 6.6 million, due to its low pricing and popularity among Chinese speculators.

The sudden rise and wholly predictable precipitous fall of .icu has been messing with overall new gTLD industry stats for the last couple of years. No volume analysis is complete without a .icu-related asterisk.

It’s by no means assured that the same will be true of .cyou and .bond of course.

.cyou, which was originally a dot-brand matching the ticker symbol of a Chinese company, had 118,000 names under management at the end of May and 136,000 in its zone file yesterday.

Names in .cyou can be had for $2 at Namecheap and NameSilo, its top two registrars, which together hold over 70% of the market.

.bond, originally an Australian university’s dot-brand, has fewer than 5,000 names at the last count and retails for about $55 retail at the low end.

Afilias appeals .web ruling, Verisign responds with “rigging” claims

Afilias has filed an unusual and unprecedented appeal against the May ruling that found ICANN broke its bylaws by awarding the .web gTLD to a Verisign affiliate.

The company is arguing that the Independent Review Process panel that decided the .web case shirked its duties, by not actually resolving the major disputes placed before it.

Verisign, in response, has accused Afilias of asking for a “do-over”, which it said is against the rules, and published information it said showed the company had tried to “rig” the .web auction.

The IRP followed the 2015 ICANN last-resort auction, which saw Verisign secretly fund a shell applicant called Nu Dot Co to win with a $135 million bid, on the basis .web would later be transferred to its custody.

Afilias was the runner-up, and argued that ICANN should have voided the NDC bid because Verisign’s involvement was not disclosed.

But the IRP panel merely found that ICANN had breached its bylaws by failing to have the courage to actually rule on the legitimacy of Verisign’s tactics, and threw it back to ICANN to make a decision.

ICANN has yet to make that decision. Instead, Afilias has filed an appeal (pdf) with the in the form of an “application for an additional decision and interpretation”.

IRP cases are handled by the International Center for Dispute Resolution, and Afilias is invoking the ICDR Arbitration Rules that allow a claimant to request an “interpretation” or “additional award” from the original decision:

By failing to resolve all of the claims and issues Afilias presented to the Panel for decision, the Panel has not only failed to satisfy its mandate; it has also undermined the very Purposes of the IRP (as set out in Section 4.3(a) of the Bylaws)—especially, but not exclusively, by its decision to refer Afilias# claim arising from Nu Dot Co’s (“NDC”) violation of the New gTLD Program Rules back to the ICANN Board and Staff to “pronounce” upon “in the first instance.”

The lengthy request is, I believe, an unprecedented attempt at an appeal of an IRP ruling. It’s also heavy on the legal arguments and does not really shed much light on the facts of the case.

The gist of it is that Afilias wants the panel to rule that ICANN breached its bylaws, new gTLD program rules and international law by failing to disqualify NDC and awarding .web to Afilias instead.

Verisign, in response, said in a blog post that Afilas’ application is “not permitted by the arbitration rules – which expressly prohibit such requests for ‘do overs.'”

It also published a letter (pdf) from NDC to ICANN in which it argues that Afilias tried to engage in a “collusive scheme” to “rig” the .web auction.

The letter contains many pages of private correspondence — emails and phone text messages — in which rival .web applicants, before Verisign’s involvement had been confirmed, fruitlessly attempted to persuade NDC to join them in a private auction in which the winning bid would have been shared among the losers rather than all going to ICANN.

While this kind of private settlement was envisaged, and indeed encouraged, by new gTLD program rules, Verisign reckons its smoking gun is messages sent by Afilias during the so-called “blackout period” before the last-resort auction, during which communications between applicants were forbidden.

As far as I can tell, all or almost all of the documents provided by NDC to ICANN had already been submitted to the public record during the IRP.

Note — the “Afilias” referred to throughout this post is the portion of the company, now known as Altanovo Domains, left behind after most of its operating businesses were acquired by Donuts late last year.

ICANN won’t vote on new gTLDs for another year

Those of you champing at the bit for an opportunity to apply for some more new gTLDs have a longer wait ahead of you than you might have hoped, following a vote of the ICANN board of directors last week.

The board has asked ICANN staff to kick off the latest — but not last — stage of the long-running runway to the next application window, but it will take around 10 months and cost millions.

On September 12, the board gave CEO Göran Marby $9 million from the 2012 round’s war chest and told him to kick off the so-called Operational Design Phase of the New Generic Top-Level Domain Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process (SubPro).

What this means is that ICANN will take the community-created policy recommendations approved by the GNSO Council in January and try to figure how they specifically could be implemented, before the board decides whether they should be implemented.

The ODP will “assess the potential risks, anticipated costs, resource requirements, timelines, and other matters related to implementation” the board resolution states.

For example, while the SubPro final report calls for an outreach campaign prior to opening the application window, the ODP scoping document (pdf) asks what materials would be needed to be produced and how much they would cost.

The scoping paper comprises dozens and dozens of questions like this, over 15 pages. I started counting them but got bored.

ICANN chair Maarten Botterman said the ODP will provide the board “with relevant materials to facilitate the Board’s determination whether the recommendations are in the best interest of the ICANN community or ICANN”.

While the resolution says the ODP should be completed “within 10 months”, that clock starts ticking when the Marby “initiates” the process, and that does not appear to have happened.

Given that, and ICANN’s habitual tardiness, I’d guess we’re looking at closer to a year before the Org has a document ready to put before the board for consideration.

With all the other stuff that needs to happen following the board’s approval, we’re probably talking about a 2024 application window. That would be 12 years after the last round and 11 years later than the next round was originally promised.