New gTLD buzz is back again as ICA hosts “second round” webinar

It’s beginning to feel a little like 2011 again.

The Internet Commerce Association today said it will host a Zoom webinar next month to pitch the looming second new gTLD round to prospective applicants.

Moderated by Christa Taylor, the panel features domain industry jacks-of-all-trades Jeff Neuman and Jothan Frakes, and consultant Phil Buckingham. All four know what they’re talking about.

The ICA said the session will cover “an examination of material changes, expected timing and operations within the broader ecosystem will help participants determining whether to pursue a new gTLD for their new entrepreneurial venture, global brand or growing business”.

Expect a lot more of these types of meetings over the next couple of years. The 2012 gold-rush may have disappointed many, but there’s still money to be made in selling shovels, especially to brands.

And the next round is still a ways off.

While policy changes have been approved by the Generic Names Supporting Organization, they need to be approved by the ICANN board of directors before the serious implementation work begins.

The policy won’t be put before the board until ICANN org has completed its Operational Design Phase work, which CEO Göran Marby recently said will take “longer than six months”.

Then there’ll be at least one revision of the Applicant Guidebook open for public comment, as well as the creation of new systems and a global outreach campaign lasting several months before the application window opens.

I’d say we’re looking at an absolute minimum of 18 months between the start of the ODP and the opening of the next application window, and I’m being incredibly generous to ICANN in that estimation.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about these things early. The ICA webinar will be at 1800 UTC August 4. You can read more and register for free here.

MMX gets nod to sell 22 gTLDs to GoDaddy

New gTLD registry MMX expects to shortly offload most of its portfolio of strings to GoDaddy Registry after receiving ICANN approvals.

The company said today that its transfer requests for four of its gTLD contracts have received full ICANN approval.

Another 18 have received conditional ICANN approval, and MMX believes it has met these unspecified conditions.

Another five of its stable that are not fully owned and operated still require the nod from its partners.

MMX said in April that it planned to sell its entire portfolio to GoDaddy, after which it is expected the company will be wound down.

The company did not break down which transfer have received full approval, conditional approval, or are still waiting for approval.

It gTLDs are: .cooking, .fishing, .horse, .miami, .rodeo, .vodka, .beer, .luxe, .surf, .nrw, .work, .budapest, .casa, .abogado, .wedding, .yoga, .fashion, .garden, .fit, .vip, .dds, .xxx, .porn, .adult, .sex, .boston, .london and .bayern.

Amazon has started using hard-won .amazon

Amazon has started using its controversial dot-brand gTLD, .amazon.

Six domains — ads.amazon, alexa.amazon, echo.amazon, kindle.amazon, prime.amazon and primevideo.amazon — appear to have come online in the last month or so and all resolve.

Proponents of the dot-brand concept may be mildly disappointed to note that they’re all currently just redirects to the regular amazon.com site. There’s no .amazon branding in the URL bar.

The redirects do not appear to be geo-targeted. Even in the UK, I get punted to the US site.

Still, it’s a rare example of a gTLD in Amazon’s portfolio that’s actually being used. Others, such as .book, have been in the root for many years but have yet to launch.

You’ll recall that Amazon applied for .amazon in 2012 but it was not until last year that it was finally delegated.

The company encountered serious push-back from the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, representing the South American nations in the Amazonia region.

Amazon has offered each nation and ACTO itself the opportunity to register names for their own use in .amazon, but none have yet taken up the offer.

ICANN DOESN’T money-grub in new gTLD contract shocker

ICANN may have a reputation for trying to slice itself a bigger slice of the pie whenever it renegotiates a new gTLD contract, but that doesn’t appear to be the case this week.

The .aero registry, which has been running for 20 years, looks set to continue to get its gTLD on the cheap, paying ICANN just a fifth of what newer registry operators pay.

But it has standardized on many other terms of the 2012-round Registry Agreement, meaning Uniform Rapid Suspension, zone file access via the CZDS, EBERO failover, and the registry code of conduct are all coming to .aero soon.

.aero is a “sponsored” TLD restricted to the aerospace industry, approved in 2000 as one of ICANN’s first “test-bed” gTLD round. The registry is Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques, a trade body.

Under the terms of its new contract, which is open for public comment, SITA will pay ICANN a fixed fee of $500 a year if it has under 5,000 names or $5,000 a year if it has more.

Registries receiving their delegations since 2012 pay $25,000 per year in quarterly installments.

.aero currently has about 12,000 names under management, so SITA will carry on paying $5,000 a year. Like other gTLDs, transaction fees kick in at 50,000 names, which at its historical growth rate should happen at some point in the 2090s.

The public comment period closes August 16, about a month before the current .aero contract expires. If history is any guide, any public comments filed will be duly noted and ignored.

Pride Month not transformative for .gay

June may be celebrated as Pride Month in some parts of the world, but the occasion hasn’t had a huge impact on registrations in the .gay gTLD, which launched late last year.

Zone files show 11,323 active .gay domains yesterday, up by 723 compared to June 1. That’s up only slightly on the 700 domain growth seen in May.

Registry spokesperson Logan Lynn said that “we do Pride 365 days a year”, adding:

Additionally, we have been running Pride promos and doing some storytelling about .gay’s first year with registrar partners like GoDaddy, Namesilo, Hover, Name.com, and Blacknight. .gay is a growing platform and has had a fantastic year, especially with tech-forward community members, such as gaymers and LGBTQ and allied developers. It would be reductive to expect a June-specific spike for our brand. We are not just a once-a-year product, but instead a platform for progress and real change for, and with, LGBTQ communities.

He added that the company, Top Level Design, is getting ready to announce some “.gay celebrity influencers” in the near future.

Pride Month is often acknowledged by the US government as a period to celebrate equality and commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. It is celebrated, if not officially recognized, in other countries.

Next new gTLD round should be less English, says ICANN boss

The next round of new gTLDs should be less focused on the English-speaking world, ICANN CEO Göran Marby said yesterday.

Talking to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee in a bilateral session at ICANN 71 yesterday, Marby said he believed the 2012 round — the last time anyone was able to apply for a new gTLD — was too English-centric.

We have so few identifiers on the internet, [which] I think is a problem. Most of them are in relation to the English language or translations of English words…

I think and I truly believe that the next round should be giving the ability for people to have identifiers on the internet that’s actually in correlation with their own local contexts, their own scripts, their own keyboards, their own narratives, so they can create their pwn communities on the internet…

We have to rethink a lot of things we have done previously, because last time we did a round it was very much about the English language and I don’t think that’s fair for the rest of the world.

He pointed out the need for universal acceptance — the technical and educational challenge of making sure all software and online services support non-Latin internationalized domain names.

While it’s true that the 2012 round of applications turned out very much English-heavy, it was not by design.

Broadening the gTLD space out to non-Latin scripts and non-English languages was one of the benefits frequently cited (often, I thought, to guilt-trip the naysayers) before opponents of new gTLDs — including governments — in the run-up to the 2012 round.

ICANN was tasked in 2011/12 with reaching out to potential applications in under-served areas of the world, but it’s generally considered to have done a pretty shoddy job of it.

In the 2012 round, 116 of the 1,930 total applications were for IDNs, and 97 of those at some point made it into the DNS root. There have been a further 61 IDN ccTLDs that came in through the IDN ccTLD Fast Track process.

IDN applicants were given special privileges in the 2012 round, such as prioritization in the lottery that selected the processing order for applications. The first delegated new gTLD was in Arabic.

The IDN gTLDs have had a mixed performance volume-wise, with the top 10 strings, which are mostly Chinese, having between 14,500 and 164,000 domains under management.

Only one has passed the 50,000-domain threshold where it has to start paying ICANN transaction fees.

The numbers are not thoroughly terrible by new gTLD standards, but they don’t make the case for huge demand, either.

Domain regs dip for second quarter in a row and it’s all China’s fault

There were 363.5 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the end of March, down by 2.8 million names compared to the end of 2020, Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief shows.

But the losses can be attributed mostly to China, which saw plummeting .cn regs in the ccTLD world and big declines across gTLDs popular with Chinese speculators.

In .cn, regs were down a whopping four million at 20.7 million in the quarter. China has historically been subject to steep fluctuations due to local government regulations.

Overall, ccTLD registrations were down 2.4 million at 156.5 million, but that seems to be all down to China.

All the other ccTLDs in the DNIB top 10 were either flat or up slightly on Q4. The frequent wild-card .tk did not have an impact on this quarter’s numbers, staying flat.

Verisign does not break down new gTLD registrations, but zone file and transaction report data shows that the likes of .icu and .wang, which typically sell first-year regs very cheaply, were hit by material junk drops in Q1.

ShortDot’s .icu zone file shrank by 2.5 million names between January 1 and March 30. It’s still in decline in Q2, but the trajectory isn’t nearly as steep. It had 814,000 zone file names at the end of Q1.

Zodiac’s .wang was at 525,000 at the end of 2020 but had dropped to 86,000 by March 30.

.top also lost around half a million names in the first quarter.

The vast majority of regs in .icu, .top and .wang come through Chinese registrars, which often sell for under a dollar for the first year.

The DNIB reports that .com performed well as usual, up from 151.8 million reported in the Q4 report to 154.6 million, but Verisign bedfellow .net was once again flat at 13.4 million.

.web ruling hands Afilias a chance, Verisign a problem, and ICANN its own ass on a plate

ICANN has lost yet another Independent Review Process case, and been handed a huge legal bill, after being found to have violated its own rules on transparency and fairness.

The decision in Afilias v ICANN has failed to definitively resolve the issue of whether the auction of the .web gTLD in 2016, won by a shell applicant called Nu Dot Co backed by $135 million of Verisign’s money, was legit.

ICANN’s now urging NDC, Afilias and other members of the .web contention set to resolve their beefs privately, which could lead to big-money pay-days for the losing auction bidders at Verisign’s expense.

For ICANN board and staff, the unanimous, three-person IRP panel decision is pretty damning, with the ruling saying the org “violated its commitment to make decisions by applying documented policies objectively and fairly”.

It finds that ICANN’s board shirked its duty to consider the propriety of the Verisign/NDC bid, allowing ICANN staff to get perilously close to signing a registry contract with an applicant that they knew may well have been in violation of the new gTLD program rules.

Despite being named the prevailing party, it’s not even close to a full win for Afilias.

The company had wanted the IRP panel to void the NDC/Verisign winning bid and award .web to itself, the second-highest bidder. But the panel did not do that, referring the decision instead back to ICANN.

As the loser, ICANN has been hit with a $1,198,493 bill to cover the cost of the case, which includes Afilias’ share of $479,458, along with another $450,000 to cover Afilas’ legal fees connected to an earlier emergency IRP request that ICANN “abusively” forced Afilias into.

The case came about due to a dispute about the .web auction, which was run by ICANN in July 2016.

Six of the seven .web applicants had been keen for the contention set to be settled privately, in an auction that would have seen the winning bid distributed evenly among the losing bidders.

But NDC, an application vehicle not known to be particularly well-funded, held out for a “last resort” auction, in which the winning bid would be deposited directly into ICANN’s coffers.

This raised suspicions that NDC had a secret sugar daddy, likely Verisign, that was covertly bankrolling its bid.

It was not known until after NDC won, with a $135 million bid, that these suspicions were correct. NDC and Verisign had a “Domain Acquisition Agreement” or DAA that would see NDC transfer its .web contract to Verisign in exchange for the money needed to win the auction (and presumably other considerations, though almost all references to the terms of the DAA have been redacted by ICANN throughout the IRP).

Afilias and fellow .web applicant Donuts both approached ICANN before and after the auction, complaining that the NDC/Verisign bid was bogus, in violation of program rules requiring applicants to notify ICANN if there’s any change of control of their applications, including agreements to transfer the gTLD post-contracting.

ICANN has never decided at the board level whether these claims have merit, the IRP panel found.

The board did hold a secret, off-the-books discussion about the complaints at its retreat November 3, 2016, and concluded, without any type of formal vote, that it should just keep its mouth shut, because Afilias and Donuts had already set the ball rolling on the accountability mechanisms that would ultimately lead to the IRP.

More than half the board was in attendance at this meeting, and discussions were led by ICANN’s top two lawyers, but the fact that it had even taken place was not disclosed until June last year, well over three and a half years after the fact.

Despite the fact that the board had made a conscious, if informal, choice not to decide whether the NDC/Verisign bid was legit, ICANN staff nevertheless went ahead and started contracting with NDC in June 2018, taking the .web contention set off its “on-hold” status.

Talks progressed to the point where, on June 14, ICANN had sent the .web contract to NDC, which immediately returned a signed copy, and all that remained was for ICANN to counter-sign the document for it to become binding.

ICANN VP Christine Willett approved the countersigning, but four days later Afilias initiated the Cooperative Engagement Process accountability mechanism, the contract was ripped up, and the contention set was placed back on hold.

“Thus, clearly, a registry agreement with NDC for .WEB could have been executed by ICANN’s Staff and come into force without the Board having pronounced on the propriety of the DAA under the Guidebook and Auction Rules,” the IRP panel wrote.

This disconnect between the board and the legal staff is at the core of the panel’s criticism of ICANN.

The board had decided that Afilias’ claim that NDC had violated new gTLD program rules was worthy of consideration and had informally agreed to defer making a decision, but the staff had nevertheless gone ahead with contracting with a potentially bogus applicant, the panel found.

In the opinion of the Panel, there is an inherent contradiction between proceeding with the delegation of .WEB to NDC, as the Respondent [ICANN] was prepared to do in June 2018, and recognizing that issues raised in connection with NDC’s arrangements with Verisign are serious, deserving of the Respondent’s consideration, and remain to be addressed by the Respondent and its Board, as was determined by the Board in November 2016. A necessary implication of the Respondent’s decision to proceed with the delegation of .WEB to NDC in June 2018 was some implicit finding that NDC was not in breach of the New gTLD Program Rules and, by way of consequence, the implicit rejection of the Claimant’s [Afilias’] allegations of non-compliance with the Guidebook and Auction Rules. This is difficult to reconcile with the submission that “ICANN has taken no position onw hether NDC violated the Guidebook”.

The upshot of the panel’s ruling is to throw the issue back to ICANN, requiring the board to decide once and for all whether Verisign’s auction gambit was kosher.

If you’ll excuse the crude metaphor, ICANN’s board has been told to shit or get off the pot:

The evidence in the present case shows that the Respondent, to this day, while acknowledging that the questions raised as to the propriety of NDC’s and Verisign’s conduct are legitimate, serious, and deserving of its careful attention, has nevertheless failed to address them. Moreover, the Respondent has adopted contradictory positions, including in these proceedings, that at least in appearance undermine the impartiality of its processes.

…

[The panel r]ecommends that the Respondent stay any and all action or decision that would further the delegation of the .WEB gTLD until such time as the Respondent’s Board has considered the opinion of the Panel in this Final Decision, and, in particular (a) considered and pronounced upon the question of whether the DAA complied with the New gTLD Program Rules following the Claimant’s complaints that it violated the Guidebook and Auction Rules and, as the case may be, (b) determined whether by reason of any violation of the Guidebook and Auction Rules, NDC’s application for .WEB should be rejected and its bids at the auction disqualified;

At the same time as the decision was published last night — shortly after midnight UTC and therefore helpfully too late to make it into today’s edition of ICANN’s godawful new email subscriptions feature — ICANN issued a statement on the outcome.

“In its Final Declaration, the IRP panel ruled that the ICANN Board, and not an IRP panel, should decide which applicant should become the registry operator for .WEB,” CEO Göran Marby said.

“The ICANN Board will consider the Final Declaration as soon as feasible, within the timeframe prescribed in the Bylaws, and remains hopeful that the relevant .WEB applicants will continue to seek alternatives to resolve the dispute between them raised during the IRP,” the statement concludes.

That should be of concern to Verisign, as any non-ICANN resolution of the .web battle is inevitably going to involve Verisign money flowing to its competitors.

But my first instinct strikes me that this a is a low-probability outcome.

It seems to me much more likely at first glance that ICANN will rule the NDC/Verisign ploy legitimate and proceed to contracting again.

For it to declare that using a front organization to bid for a gTLD is against the rules would raise questions about other applications that employed more or less the same tactic, such as Automattic’s successful bid, via an intermediary, for .blog, and possibly the 100-ish applications Donuts and Rightside cooperated on.

The ICANN bylaws say the board has to consider the IRP’s findings at its next meeting, for which there’s currently no published date, where feasible.

I should note that, while Donuts acquired Afilias last December, the deal did not include its .web application, which is why both the panel’s decision and this article refer to “Afilias” throughout.

Verisign hopeful after decision reached in .web gTLD case

The fate of .web has been decided, over 20 years after it was first applied for, and Verisign thinks it might emerge triumphant.

The company said last night that the ICANN Independent Review Panel handling the case of Afilias v ICANN reached a decision May 20 and delivered it to Verisign the following day.

Verisign says the panel “dismissed Afilias’ claims for relief seeking to invalidate the .web auction and to award the .web TLD to Afilias, concluding that such issues were beyond its jurisdiction.”

Sounds good for Verisign so far. Afilias wanted its $135 million bid for .web, submitted via an intermediary called Nu Dot Co, thrown out due to claims that ICANN violated its own bylaws by not sufficiently vetting the bidder.

But Verisign goes on to say “the panel’s ruling recommends that ICANN’s Board of Directors consider the objections made about the .web auction and then make a decision on the delegation of .web”.

It adds that the panel found that ICANN violated its fairness and transparency commitments:

With respect to ICANN, the ruling finds that certain actions and/or inaction by ICANN in response to Afilias’ objections violated aspects of ICANN’s bylaws related to transparency and fairness. These findings are particular to ICANN’s actions and not conduct by Verisign. Verisign anticipates that ICANN’s Board will review the panel’s ruling and proceed consistent with the panel’s recommendation to consider the objections and make a decision on the delegation of .web.

Based on Verisign’s statements, it seems that ICANN lost, but Afilias didn’t win.

The revelation was buried in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on an unrelated financial matter last night. Hat tip to @jintlaw for spotting and tweeting about it.

It’s the most eagerly anticipated IRP ruling since 2011’s .xxx case, but in stark contrast to Rod “let’s draft this tweet” Beckstrom-era ICANN, where the decision was posted in a matter of hours, the 2021 org has not yet posted the panel’s findings or made a public statement acknowledging the ruling.

Verisign says it intends to “vigorously pursue” .web, but “can provide no assurance” as to which way the ICANN board of directors will swing.

As .spa launches, former partner pisses in the champagne

The world’s newest gTLD is due to hit its landrush launch phase tomorrow, but a disgruntled former business partner is warning that it plans to get all the registrations cancelled.

DotPH, the ccTLD registry for the Philippines, reckons it is owed half of the equity in .spa under a 2012 agreement, and has been warning registrars that to sell .spa domains would be to breach three injunctions it has secured through a Hong Kong court.

The latest such injunction (pdf), dated April 23, in part prevents the registry, Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council:

(whether directly or indirectly and whether by itself or via its agents or service providers (viz. registrars and registry backend) (“Agents/Service Providers”), employees and/or associated corporate entities whatsoever) be restrained from entering into any agreements for the sale, lease or other use or disposal of any .spa sub-domains (“Launch Agreements”) and/or causing, procuring or giving consent to the Agents/Service Providers to enter into any Launch Agreements

The injunctions are being interpreted differently by DotPH and ASWPC.

DotPH told participating registrars — there are at least 36 of them, according to the ASWPC web site — in a May 12 letter (pdf) from its lawyers:

ASWPC must stop selling .spa domains – by itself, or by or through its agents including Registrars… ASWPC cannot allow or permit any of its Registrars to sell any .spa domains.

It goes on to say:

Our clients will seek orders to cancel all registrations accepted by the .Spa Registry in breach of the Court order. You should alert any existing registrants, and any intending registrants of the Court order, and of the likelihood that any .spa domains registered are likely to be cancelled – unless they have a contract dating before 19 April 2021 requiring ASWPC, or you, to register their domains.

ASWPC’s interpretation appears to differ, in that it does not believe registrars are bound by the injunction, due to the chain of contracts between registry and registrant.

DotPH says that the Hong Kong High Court is next due to consider the case in August.

The .spa landrush phase is due to run from 1600 UTC May 26 until October 1. It’s ostensibly a community-based gTLD, but has eligibility policies that make it open to essentially anyone.