Neustar takes control of two new gTLDs

Neustar has started taking over former dot-brand new gTLDs belonging to its former clients.
It recently took control of .compare and .select, which previously belonged to Australian insurance company iSelect.
Neustar had been the back-end registry provider for both TLDs.
As previously blogged, iSelect abandoned its primary dot-brand, .iselect, in June.
That was despite that fact that it was actually in use, with domains such as home.iselect, news.iselect and careers.iselect all resolving to web sites.
Now, the generic dot-brands .compare and .select have been assigned to the blandly named Registry Services LLC, a new Neustar subsidiary.
They’re not the first examples of dictionary words functioning as dot-brands being repurposed as generics.
Notably, XYZ.com took over .monster from Monster.com and ShortDot bought .bond from Bond University.
Neustar has not yet announced its plans for its two new acquisitions.

Google has big, innovative plans for .new

Google is set to launch .new next year with a innovative value proposition that changes how domain names are used.
The company plans to slowly release .new domains to a carefully controlled customer base, starting in the first quarter 2020.
In a Registry Service Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN last week, the company said:

Google Registry plans to launch the .new TLD with a usage-based restriction in its domain registration policy that requires that all domain names be used for action generation or online content creation

The phrase “action generation or online contention creation” is key here, repeated across multiple Google documents.
What it means is that registrants will have to commit to use their .new domains in much the same way as Google itself is using its own batch of proof-of-concept names.
If you type doc.new into your browser address bar today, you’ll be taken to a fresh word processing document hosted on Google Docs, assuming you’re logged in to Google.
The same goes for domains such as spreadsheet.new, slides.new and a few others.
Looking at the .new zone file, it appears Google has plans to expand the concept beyond Office-style online applications into areas such as email, bug-reporting, support-ticketing, forms, reminders, and web site creation.
These services appear to be live but currently restricted to authorized users.
When Google opens up the .new space to third-party registrants, it’s easy to imagine domains such as tweet.new taking users directly to a Twitter composition page or blog.new immediately opening up a new post on something like WordPress or Medium.
Right now, Google is declining to comment on the specifics of its launch plan, but we can infer some details from its activity in the ICANN world.
I get the impression that the company does not want to be overly prescriptive in how .new domains are used, as long as they adhere to the “action generation or online contention creation” mantra.
Stephanie Duchesneau, Google program manager, told attendees at an ICANN summit this May that .new will be a space “where anyone is able to register, but the domain name has to be used in a certain way”.
While that may eventually be the case, at first Google plans to operated a Limited Registration Period under ICANN rules, during which only hand-vetted registrants will be able to grab domains.
Its recent RSEP request (pdf) asks ICANN permission to deploy an authentication system based on RFC 8495 to handle the LRP roll-out.
To the best of my understanding, RFC 8495 is a newish extension to EPP designed to deal with domain allocation, rather than usage, so it does not appear to be the means by which Google will enforce its policies.
The RSEP says it is Google’s plan to “seed” the gTLD with a bunch of third-party .new domains that adhere to the usage concept it has laid out.
This is due to happen some time in Q1 next year, but Google has not yet filed its TLD startup information with ICANN, so the exact dates are not known.
Under ICANN rules, as far as I can tell an LRP can run more or less indefinitely, so it’s not entirely clear when .new will become available to the general registrant.

Radix releases huge amount of premium domain data

Radix made $1,360,865 from premium domain names in its portfolio of new gTLDs in the first half of the year, according to the company’s latest report.
The company said that $522,365 of that came from new registrations — there were 619 in total — with the balance of $838,500 coming from renewals.
Radix is one of the registries that charges a premium fee every year over the life of the registration.
Because of this, its first-year renewal rates for premiums are not fantastic — just 54% of names registered in the first half of 2018 were renewed a year later.
But older premiums renewed at a more-than-respectable 78%, comparable to peak-.com, according to the Radix report.
.store and .online accounted for about half of renewal revenue.
.online and .tech accounted for more than half of new registration revenue.
GoDaddy sold 41.6% of all the names moved in the half.
For Radix, a premium domain is anything priced at $100 or above. That’s lower than some gTLDs’ base non-premium fee.
It sold three names at $10,000 during the period.

Cryptocurrency firms to be banned from .bank

The registry for the already heavily restricted .bank and .insurance gTLDs wants to change its policies to make it clear that cryptocurrency firms are not welcome.
fTLD Registry Services has opened up a public comment period on proposed changes to its eligibility policies for the two TLDs which would drop the “service provider” category of registrant.
It would also clarify that eligible entities have to be “retail” banks regulated by a proper government authority.
The elimination of “service providers” is an effort to clarify that .bank is for banks and not peer-to-peer or cryptocurrency payment providers.
Heather Diaz, senior director of compliance and policy at fTLD, told us that the service provider category was created to allow “banking core processors” and the like to register domains. She said in an email:

More recently, as the financial services arena has evolved, particularly as it relates to fintechs offering financial products/services (e.g., P2P payment providers, cryptocurrency companies), we have found that some prospective Registrants were seeking domains to enhance their legitimacy to market to regulated entities and/or consumers.

By eliminating the category, fTLD hopes to clarify that .bank is just for regulated banks.
Registrants that already own service provider domains (it sounds like there are only one or two) would be grandfathered under the proposed policy, so nobody’s going to lose their existing domains.
The proposed changes were boiled up by fTLD’s bank-led Advisory Committee and its board of directors.
Comments are being accepted until August 24, after which the company’s board will decide whether to implement the new policies.

Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner

It appears that the struggling new gTLD .fans has changed ownership for the second time in a year.
According to ICANN’s web site, the .fans Registry Agreement was assigned to a company called ZDNS International on June 28.
Since August 2018, the contract had been in the hands of a CentralNic subsidiary called Fans TLD, having been originally operated by Asiamix Digital.
ZDNS International appears to be a newish Hong Kong subsidiary of major China-based DNS service provider ZDNS.
ZDNS provides DNS services for more than 20 TLDs, mostly Chinese-language, but as far as I can tell it is not the contracted party for any.
It’s also known for providing registry gateway services for non-Chinese registries that want to set up shop in the country.
CentralNic took over .fans last year after Asiamix failed to get the TLD’s sales to take off.
.fans had about 1,700 domains under management at the time, and it’s been pretty much flat ever since. I don’t think CentralNic has been promoting it.
Over the same period, singular competitor .fan, which Donuts acquired from Asiamix last year, has gone from 0 to almost 3,000 registrations.
If CentralNic, a public company, made a profit on the flip it does not appear to have been material enough to require disclosure to shareholders.

MMX to pay $5.1 million to get out of terrible .london deal

Minds + Machines will pay its partner on .london roughly $5.1 million in order to put the catastrophic deal to bed for good.
That’s a reduction from the $7.9 million liability it had previously estimated.
The company said last week that it will pay an unspecified partner the $5.1 million “as full and final settlement for any further liability or contractual spend” after renegotiating the contract.
In April, MMX said that the deal had cost it $13.7 million since the outset.
While MMX has never publicly fingered the contract in question, which has been a pair of concrete boots for years, its deal with .london’s London & Partners is the only one that fits the bill.
The registry secured L&P, the marketing arm of the London Mayor’s office, as a client during the mayoral reign of Boris Johnson, the man set to be anointed the UK’s next prime minister this week.
It agreed to make millions of dollars in guaranteed payments over the duration of the contract, because it expected to sell a shedload of .london domains.
That never happened. The gTLD peaked at 86,000 names in March 2018 and was down to 54,000 a year later, evidently a fraction of what MMX had planned for.
The renegotiated deal — I believe at least the second time the deal has been amended — is “in principle” for now, with formal approval expected soon.
In its trading statement last week, MMX also said that the first half of the year ended with a 19% increase in regs, ending June at about 1.82 million.
It said it has “stabilised” declining billings in its acquired ICM Registry portfolio of porn-themed TLDs at $2.8 million, and that it has a “clear pathway” to growth from the four zones.
It’s hoping “further new initiatives” — likely a reference to a new trademark-blocking service — will help out in the current half.
MMX also said that it’s spending $1 million of its cash reserves on a stock buyback.

After five-year wait, .madrid domains coming this month

Madrid will become the newest city to get its own gTLD later this month.
The Spanish capital will start accepting sunrise and landrush applications in concurrent priority periods that run from July 16 to October 3.
October 2 marks the five-year anniversary of .madrid being delegated. It’s taken the city a long time to figure out its launch plan.
General availability is due to begin October 10.
The sunrise period includes an option for European trademark owners that are not registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse to obtain names, but with deference to matching TMCH mark holders.
A couple hundred names of local public services have already been tentatively allocated under a pre-sunrise priority period.
.madrid does have local “nexus” eligibility requirements, but it does not appear that you actually need to be located in Madrid, or even in Spain, to obtain a domain.
By my reckoning, the launches of .madrid and .zuerich (which is currently in sunrise and slated to hit GA next April) means MMX’s .budapest is the only 2012-round city-gTLD that has yet to outline its launch plans.

.icu joins the million-domains club in one year, but spam triples

Another new gTLD has joined the exclusive list of those to enter seven figures in terms of domains under management.
.icu, managed by ShortDot, topped one million names this week, according to COO Kevin Kopas.
It’s taken about a month for DUM to increase from 900,000 names, and if zone files are any guide half of that growth seems to have happened in the last week.
.icu domains currently sell for between $1 and $2 for the first year at the cheap end of the market, where most regs are concentrated, with renewals closer to the $10 mark.
The gTLD joins the likes of .club, .xyz, .site and .online to cross the seven-figure threshold.
When we reported on the 900,000-reg mark at the end of May, we noted that .icu had a SpamHaus “badness” rating of 6.4%, meaning that 6.4% of all the emails coming from .icu addresses that SpamHaus saw were classified as spam.
That score was roughly the same as .com, so therefore pretty respectable.
But in the meantime, .icu’s badness score has almost tripled, to 17.4%, while .com’s has stayed about the same.
Picking through the Google search results and Alexa list for .icu domains, it appears that high-quality legit web sites are few and far between.
Whether that’s a fixable symptom of .icu’s rapid growth — it’s only about 13 months post-launch — or a predictor of poor long-term potential remains to be seen.

Cloudflare “bug” reveals hundreds of secret domain prices

The secret wholesale prices for hundreds of TLDs have been leaked, due to an alleged “bug” at a registrar.
The registry fees for some 259 TLDs, including those managed by Donuts, Verisign and Afilias, are currently publicly available online, after a programmer used what they called a “bug” in Cloudflare’s API to scrape together price lists without actually buying anything.
Cloudflare famously busted into the domain registrar market last September by announcing that it would sell domains at cost, thumbing its nose at other registrars by suggesting that all they’re doing is “pinging an API”.
But because most TLD registries have confidentiality clauses in their Registry-Registrar Agreements, accredited registrars are not actually allowed to reveal the wholesale prices.
That’s kind of a problem if you’re a registrar that has announced that you will never charge a markup, ever.
Cloudflare has tried to get around this by not listing its prices publicly.
Currently, it does not sell new registrations, instead only accepting inbound transfers from other registrars. Registry transaction reports reveal that it has had tens of thousands of names transferred in, but has not created a significant number of new domains.
(As an aside, it’s difficult to see how it could ever sell a new reg without first revealing its price and therefore breaking its NDAs.).
It appears that the only way to manually ascertain the wholesale prices of all of the TLDs it supports would be to buy one of each at a different registrar, then transfer them to Cloudflare, thereby revealing the “at cost” price.
This would cost over $9,500, at Cloudflare’s prices, and it’s difficult to see what the ROI would be.
However, one enterprising individual discovered via the Cloudflare API that the registrar was not actually checking whether they owned a domain before revealing its price.
They were therefore able to compile a list of Cloudflare’s prices and therefore the wholesale prices registries charge.
The list, and the script used to compile it, are both currently available on code repository Github.
The bulk of the list comprises Donuts’ vast portfolio, but most TLDs belonging to Afilias (including the ccTLD .io), XYZ.com and Radix are also on there.
It’s not possible for me to verify that all of the prices are correct, but the ones that are comparable to already public information (such as .com and .net) match, and the rest are all in the ballpark of what I’ve always assumed or have been privately told they were.
The data was last refreshed in April, so without updates its shelf life is likely limited. Donuts, for example, is introducing price increases across most of its portfolio this year.

What happens in Vegas… gets released in .vegas

Dot Vegas is releasing 2,266 previously reserved .vegas domain names, most of which accord to a decidedly sleazy theme.
Based on my eyeball scan of the list, I’d say easily half of the names being released are related to pornography, prostitution, gambling, drugs, and venereal diseases.
A large number are also family-friendly terms related to travel, tourism and general commercial services.
On the release list are domains including taxi.vegas, rentals.vegas, motels.vegas, lucky.vegas and magic.vegas,
Registrars may be interested to know that domains such as register.vegas, name.vegas and names.vegas are also on the list.
Undisclosed premium prices will be charged for 283 of the names, with the rest hitting the market at the regular .vegas price, which at the top two registrars (GoDaddy and 101domain, each with about 38% market share) is about $70-$80 retail for renewals.
The registry said that the release is happening as part of “an ongoing effort to increase awareness and usage of .vegas domain names”.
.vegas has yet to top 22,000 domains under management and has been on the decline, volume-wise, since last July.
Because they’ve never been available before, the new domains will have to run through the ICANN-mandated Trademark Claims period first, enabling trademark owners to snap up their brand-matches first.
I did spot a few obvious brands — such as Playboy and ChatRoulette — on the list.
Dot Vegas expects this claims period to run from August 1, with the general availability November 1.
The X-rated part of list is actually surprising educational. I thought I knew all the words, but apparently not. Without leaving the T’s, who knew “tribbing”, “teabagging” and “thai beads” were things?
I feel so naive.