Chutzpah alert! DotKids wants ICANN handout to fight gTLD auction

New gTLD applicant DotKids Foundation has asked ICANN for money to help it fight for .kids in an auction against Amazon and Google.
The not-for-profit was the only new gTLD applicant back in 2012 to meet the criteria for ICANN’s Applicant Support Program, meaning its application fee was reduced by $138,000 to just $47,000.
Now, DotKids reckons ICANN has a duty to carry on financially supporting it through the “later stages of the process” — namely, an auction with two of the world’s top three most-valuable companies.
The organization even suggests that ICANN dip into its original $2 million allocation to support the program to help fund its bids.
Because .kids is slated for a “last resort” auction, an ICANN-funded winning bid would be immediately returned to ICANN, minus auction provider fees.
It’s a ludicrously, hilariously ballsy move by the applicant, which is headed by DotAsia CEO Edmon Chung.
It’s difficult to see it as anything other than a delaying tactic.
DotKids is currently scheduled to go to auction against Google’s .kid and Amazon’s .kids application on October 10.
But after ICANN denied its request for funding last month, DotKids last week filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf), which may wind up delaying the auction yet again.
According to DotKids, the original intent of the Applicant Support Program was to provide support for worthy applicants not just in terms of application fees, but throughout the application process.
It points to the recommendations of the Joint Applicant Support working group of the GNSO, which came up with the rules for the support program, as evidence of this intent.
It says ICANN needs to address the JAS recommendations it ignored in 2012 — something that could time quite some time — and put the .kids auction on hold until then.

.CLUB revenue not all that

.CLUB Domains may be one of the 5000 fastest-growing companies in the US, according to Inc magazine, but it’s returning the majority of its revenue back to its registrars.
CEO Colin Campbell revealed this week that the company returns almost 70% of its gross revenue in the form of rebates.
The revelation came in an interview with Domain Name Wire on its latest podcast.
Campbell told Andrew Allemann that in 2017 .CLUB had $9.3 million in what he called “cash flow” or “gross revenue”.
But “net cash” or “net revenue”, after rebates was just $2.8 million, meaning $6.5 million was returned to registrars via promotions.
The interview came a few days after Inc named the company 1164th in its 2018 list of fastest-growing US companies.
Inc had .CLUB’s revenue at $7.2 million, but that appears to have been calculated using the usual accounting standards of deferring revenue into future periods over the lifetime of the domain subscription.
.club has something like 1.4 million names under management.
Campbell said that the company is “adding about a million dollars of net revenue per year” and he predicted 2018 gross cash to come in at $10.5 million and net to come in at $3.7 million.
That’s a net revenue figure, remember, not a profit or net income line. Campbell said he’s more interested in growing the business rather than paying taxes on profits.
The aggressive rebating seems to have a focus in China, where it has regular deals with the likes of Alibaba (which was .club’s biggest registrar with 20% of the market at the last count) and West.cn.
While .CLUB is private, Campbell has been frank about its performance in the past.
The DNW interview follows DI’s interview with Campbell on more or less the same topic last September, and DNW’s in 2016.
It’s a good podcast, you should have a listen.

New gTLDs rebound in Q2

New gTLD registration volumes reversed a long trend of decline in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The DNIB (pdf), published late last week, shows new gTLD domains up by 1.6 million sequentially to 21.8 million at the end of June, a 7.8% increase.
That’s the first time Verisign’s numbers have shown quarterly growth for new gTLDs since December 2016, five quarters of shrinkage ago.
[table id=51 /]
The best-performing new gTLD across Q2 was .top according to my zone file records, adding about 600,000 names.
.top plays almost exclusively into the sub-$1 Chinese market and is regularly singled out as a spam-friendly zone. SpamHaus currently ranks it as almost 45% “bad”.
Overall, the domain universe saw growth of six million names, or 1.8%, finishing the quarter at 339.8 million names, according to Verisign.
Verisign’s own .com ended Q2 with 135.6 million domains, up from 133.9 million at the end of March.
That’s a sequential increase of 1.7 millions, only 100,000 more than the total net increase from the new gTLD industry.
.net is still suffering, however, flat in the period with 14.1 million names.
ccTLDs saw an increase of 3.5 million names, up 2.4%, to end June at 149.7 million, the DNIB states.
But that’s mainly as a result of free TLD .tk, which never deletes names. Stripping its growth out (Verisign and partner ZookNic evidently have access to .tk data now) total ccTLD growth would only have been 1.9 million names.

.CLUB revenue reportedly $7.2 million

.CLUB Domains had $7.2 million of revenue in 2017.
That’s according to Inc magazine, which ranked the company at 1164th in its 2018 Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing US-based companies.
Growth over three years for .CLUB, which is listed as having 17 employees, was 419%, according to the profile.
.club is one of the best-performing new gTLDs in terms of volume, with over 1.3 million domains under management, according to the company.
While it has generally steered away from deep discounting, it has in recent weeks benefited from a huge increase in sales — adding over 100,000 names to its zone file in just a few days earlier this month — as a result of a sale at the Chinese registrar Alibaba, which sold .club names for the RNB equivalent of $0.44.
That had the effect of diverting .club from a decline that looked like it would shortly have seen it dip below one million zone names for the first time in over a year.

Allstate dumps a dot-brand

American insurance giant Allstate has dumped one of its two dot-brand gTLDs.
The company, which had $38.5 billion revenue in 2017, has told ICANN it no longer wishes to run .goodhands, which is a partial match to its long-time “Are you in good hands?” advertising slogan.
Allstate still owns the contract to run .allstate, where it has a handful of domains that redirect to its primary .com site.
The company had also applied for the gTLDs .carinsurance and .autoinsurance, but withdrew both applications after the “closed generics” controversy in 2013.
.goodhands is the ninth dot-brand to self-terminate this year and the 37th since .doosan became the first back in September 2015.
Hundreds of other dot-brand gTLDs are still live, many of them in active use.

Famous Four is DEAD! New registry promises spam crackdown

Famous Four Media’s portfolio of gTLD registries is now under the control of a new company, Global Registry Services Ltd, which has promised to abandon its failed penny-domain strategy and crack down on spam.
(August 9 update: This article contains some incorrect assumptions and speculation. Please read this follow-up piece for clarifications.)
The company, which goes by the name GRS Domains, told registrars yesterday that FFM’s 16 gTLDs are now “controlled by the same parties that control Domain Venture Partners PCC Limited, and are no longer under the management of FFM.”
DVP also owned FFM, so it’s not clear how big of a deal this restructuring is from a management point of view.
My sense is that there’s not really been a substantial change, but it’s certainly more than a simple rebranding exercise.
I’ve learned that DVP was placed into administration under the Insolvency Act back in April, with management of the TLDs handed to a PricewaterhouseCoopers administrator, more or less as I speculated in June.
The TLDs affected are: .loan, .win, .men, .bid, .stream, .review, .trade, .date, .party, .download, .science, .racing, .accountant, .faith, .webcam and .cricket.
GRS told registrars:

Moving forward there are several changes being made with regard to the overall strategy of the portfolio of gTLDs, the main one being a change to a “quality over quantity” ethos and focusing on working with our Registrar Partners to sharply reduce abuse and spam registrations.

As such, all of its current pricing promotions will end August 20 and a “much more transparent and sensible pricing strategy” will come into play.
That means a wholesale reg fee of $9.98 across the board, at least until February 2019.
GRS also plans to take a lot of its lower-priced reserved “premium” names out of the premium program altogether, and to reprice “a considerable portion” of the more expensive ones.
Finally, the company, not known to attend ICANN meetings in the past, said it plans to show up at the Barcelona meeting in October to formally relaunch itself.
Famous Four has become notorious over the last few years for its deep-discounted TLDs, which have become a haven for spammers who want to register large numbers of super-cheap, throwaway domains.
As such, its gTLDs’ volumes have been huge — many racking up hundreds of thousands of names — but their renewals poor and their reputation worse.
If GRS’ new strategy is effective, we’re almost certainly going to see the industry-wide overall number of active new gTLD domains tank over the next year or so, giving more ammunition to those who think the new gTLD program was a huge waste of effort.
It could also have an impact on ICANN’s budget — no matter how cheap FFM sold its names, it still had to pay its ICANN fees on a per-domain basis. Fewer domains equals less money in ICANN’s coffers. FFM’s registries paid over $1.6 million in ICANN fees in the organization’s fiscal 2017.
While GRS is now apparently “controlled by the same parties that control Domain Venture Partners PCC Limited”, it’s not abundantly clear to me whether that’s the same people who’ve been running FFM for the last eight years.
DVP has not immediately responded to a request for comment today.
The DVP web site has not resolved in months. The new grs.domains site doesn’t name anyone, and the NIC sites for the gTLDs in the portfolio only identify a PwC bankruptcy accountant as the primary contact.
All the companies in question are based in tax haven Gibraltar, which isn’t particularly forthcoming about identifying company directors, partners or owners.
DVP’s directors were originally Adrian Hogg, Charles Melvin, Iain Roache, Douglas Smith, Peter Young, Joseph Garcia and a company called Domain Management II (itself chaired by Roache), according to an investor presentation (pdf) DI obtained back in 2013.
I believe Melvin at least, after a legal dispute with the others, is no longer involved.
And it appears that DVP is or was in fact in administration.
I noted back in June that the 16 gTLDs were now all being administered by PwC accountant Edgar Lavarello, and wondered aloud whether this meant FFM was bankrupt.
Today I obtained (read: paid an extortionate sum for) a Gibraltar court order dated April 23 putting DVP into administration under the Insolvency Act and appointing PwC as the administrator.
The application had been made by an investor called Christina Mattin and fellow investor Braganza, a private vehicle owned by a wealthy Scandinavian family, which was (at least last year) a 10% owner.
Other named investors the court heard from were the mysterious Liechtenstein-based Rennes Foundation, something called Northern Assets Investments Limited and Dutch multimillionaire Francis Claessens.
Overall, it smells a bit to me like DVP’s principals, having seen their previous venture put out of business by disgruntled investors, have snapped up its assets and are going to try to make a second go of running the business.
As for FFM? Well, it looks rather like we won’t be hearing that name again.
UPDATE: This article was updated several hours after it was originally posted to clarify that DVP was/is “in administration”.

My brain explodes trying to understand MMX’s new blockchain deal for .luxe

Minds + Machines has abandoned plans to launch .luxe as a gTLD for luxury goods and instead made a deal to sell it as an address for cryptocurrency wallets.
If you thought it was a silly move marketing .ws as meaning “web site” or .pw as “professional web”, you’re probably not going to like the backronym MMX has in mind for .luxe:
“Lets U Xchange Easily”.
Really.
Tenuous though that marketing angle may be, the concept behind the newly repurposed TLD is actually quite interesting and probably rises to the level of “innovation”.
MMX has inked a deal with Ethereum Name Service, an offshoot of Ethereum, an open-source blockchain project.
Ethereum is largely used as a cryptocurrency, like BitCoin, enabling people to transfer monetary value to each other using “wallet” applications, though it has other uses.
I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t understand how any of this blockchain stuff works.
I’ve just spent an hour on the phone with MMX CEO Toby Hall and I’m still not 100% clear how it integrates with domains and whether the .luxe value proposition is really, really cool or really, really stupid.
I’ll just tell you what I do understand.
Currently, when two Ethereum users want to transfer currency between each other, the sender needs to know the recipient’s wallet address. This is a 40-character nonsense hash that makes an IPv6 address look memorable.
It obviously would be a lot better if each user had a human-readable, memorable address, a bit like a domain name.
Ethereum developers thought so, so they created the Ethereum Name Service. ENS allowed people to use “.eth” domains, like john.eth, as a shorthand address for their wallets. I don’t know how it works, but I know .eth isn’t an official TLD in the authoritative root.
About 300,000 people acquired .eth domains via some kind of cryptographic auction process that I also don’t understand. Let’s just call it magic.
Under the deal with MMX, some 26 million Ethereum wallet owners will be able use .luxe domains, dumping their .eth names if they have them.
The names will be sold through registrars as usual, at a price Hall said will be a little bit more than .com.
Registrants will then be able to associate their domains with their 40-character wallet addresses, so they can say “Send $50 to john.luxe” and other crypto-nerds will instantly know what to do. Ethereum wallets will apparently support this at launch.
Registrars will need to do a bit of implementation work, however. Hall said there’ll be an API that allows them to associate their customers’ domains with their wallets, and to disassociate the two should the domain be transferred to somebody else.
This is not available yet, but it will be before general availability this November, he said.
What this API does is beyond my comprehension.
What I do understand is that at no point is DNS used. I thought perhaps the 40-char hash was being stored in the TXT field of a DNS record, but no, that’s not it. It’s being stored cryptographically in the blockchain. Or something. Let’s just say it’s magic, again.
The value of having a memorable address for a wallet is very clear to me, but what’s not at all clear to me is why, if DNS is not being queried at any part of the Ethereum transaction, this memorable address has to be a domain name.
You don’t need a domain name to find somebody on Twitter, or Instagram, or Grindr. You just need a user name. Why that model couldn’t apply here is beyond me.
Hall offered that people are familiar with domain names, adding that merchants could use the same .luxe domain for their web site as they use for their Ethereum wallets, which makes sense from a branding perspective.
The drawback, of course, is that you’d have to have your web site on a .luxe domain.
The launch plan for .luxe sees sunrise begin August 9, running for 60 days. Then there’ll be two weeks for .eth name holders to claim their matching .luxe names. Then an early access period. GA starts November 6.
While it should be obvious by now I don’t fully “get” what’s going on here, it strikes me as a hell of a lot more interesting way to use .luxe than its originally intended purpose as a venue for luxury goods and services.
Let’s face it, depending on pricing it would have turned out either as a haven for spammers, a barely-breaking-even also-ran, or a profitable business propped up by a couple thousand trademark owners paying five grand a year on unused defensive regs.

Donuts confirms six-figure .news buyer used a fake name

Mike Texas is in fact noted conspiracy theorist Mike Adams.
New gTLD registry Donuts confirmed with DI over the weekend that the buyer of six figures worth of “platinum” .news domain names used a fake name.
The company last week said that a company called WebSeed bought registry-reserved names including science.news, climate.news, medicine.news, health.news and pollution.news.
After a small amount of digging, I discovered that these sites were affiliated with a controversial site called Natural News, which is regularly criticized for spreading bogus, anti-science content.
I suspected that “Mike Texas”, the WebSeed CEO quoted railing against “fake news” in Donuts’ press release, was very probably a pseudonym for Natural News owner Mike Adams, who calls himself the “Health Ranger” but peddles theories often characterized as dangerous.
Yesterday, Donuts told us that, following DI’s coverage, it has managed to confirm with Texas that he is in fact Adams. The company has changed its press release accordingly.
I will note that the most compelling piece of evidence connecting Texas to Adams was a pre-GDPR Whois record.

.pharmacy TLD faces action after losing complaint over Canadian drug peddler

ICANN has hit the .pharmacy gTLD registry with a breach notice after a complaint from a Canadian web site that was refused a .pharmacy domain.
The US National Association of Boards of Pharmacy failed to operate the TLD “in a transparent manner”, contrary to the Public Interest Commitments in its registry agreement, ICANN says.
It’s only the second time, to my knowledge, that a registry has been told it has broken its contract after losing a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Process decision.
NABP runs .pharmacy as a restricted TLD that can only be used by licensed pharmacies.
A year ago, a company called Canadawide Pharmacy Ltd, which currently uses a .org domain, applied for canadawidepharmacy.pharmacy but, last December, was rejected due to claims that it was “until recently” affiliated with unlicensed cross-border drug sellers.
The sale of medications into the US, where patients are gouged mercilessly by pharmaceuticals companies, from Canada, where common drugs are sold at a fraction of the price, is controversial, with NABP previously being accused of applying for .pharmacy for protectionist reasons.
(The price of generic Viagra on Canadawide’s web site goes as low as $2.15 per dose. In the US, you’re looking at about $66 per dose for the branded version, which doesn’t even include the price of dinner.)
Earlier this year, Canadawide filed a PICDRP, accusing .pharmacy of breaching its own contractual commitment to transparency.
And it won. The PICDRP standing panel ruled 3-0 this month (pdf) that NABP lacked transparency on three counts when it rejected Canadawide’s registration.
The registry failed to provide enough evidence linking Canadawide to unlicensed affiliates, the panel ruled. It also seemed to acknowledge that the alleged affiliates were historical.
As a result of the panel’s finding, ICANN has made a public breach notice that gives NABP until August 11 to:

Provide ICANN with corrective and preventative action(s), including implementation dates and milestones, to address the PIC Reporter’s complaint, the PIC Standing Panel’s findings and ensure that NABP will operate the TLD pharmacy in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and non-discrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies

None of this seems to suggest that Canadawide will definitely get its domain. If NABP has sufficient evidence to continue to deny the application, it looks like it could come into compliance by merely being transparent about this evidence.

Donuts makes six-figure .news sale to dangerous conspiracy theorist

Donuts has sold a package of “platinum” .news domains to a network of dubious news sites peddling what many describe as dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense.
A company called WebSeed acquired science.news, food.news, health.news, medicine.news, pollution.news, cancer.news and climate.news from the registry for an undisclosed sum in the six-figure range last December, Donuts said.
It appears that the same buyer has acquired several other presumably non-platinum .news domains, including vaccines.news, nutrients.news, menshealth.news and emergencymedicine.news
The sites have already been developed, incorporating a back catalog of “news” content from other sites under the same ownership, and Donuts reckons searches for “climate news” and “science news” already return the matching domains prominently (they don’t for me, but Google can be fickle).
Unfortunately, the domains seem to have been sold to a leading purveyor of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
That’s right, climate.news now belongs to a climate change denier, vaccines.news belongs to an anti-vaxxer, and medicine.news belongs to somebody who values alternative remedies over science-based medicine.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the content on the network of .news domains comes from Natural News, the controversial site owned by “Health Ranger” Mike Adams.
Natural News has been fingered as an “empire of misinformation” and a leading contributor to the “fake news” crisis that has been blighting society for the last few years.
Check out climate.news today to be treated to Adams’ theory that climate change is nothing but a conspiracy peddled by the UN and the mainstream media.
Over on vaccines.news, you’ll find a scaremongering story about how the measles vaccine has killed more people than measles over the last decade.
(Gee, I wonder why measles isn’t killing anyone any more? Could it be that we have a fucking vaccine?).
On medicine.news, Adams himself writes of “PROOF that vaccines target blacks for depopulation”.
And at pollution.news, you’ll find any number of articles discussing the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not scientifically literate enough to debunk most of the content on these sites, but I know quackery when I see it.
Donuts’ press release goes to suspicious pains to point out that the sites’ content is “thoroughly researched” and advertising is “limited and relevant to the sites’ content”.
In fact, the advertising seems in most if not all cases to lead back to Adams’ own stores, where he sells stuff like water purifiers, dietary supplements and alternative medicines.
The Donuts press release also quotes the founder and CEO of WebSeed, one “Mike Texas”.
Now, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Mr Texas is not a real person.
But.
Whois records (remember those?) show that the original registrant of science.news was one Mike Adams of WebSeed LLC, and WebSeed.com, while under privacy for some years, was originally registered to Adams’ Taiwan-based company.
It goes without saying that Donuts, as a neutral registry, is under no obligation whatsoever to police content on the domains it sells. That would be a Bad Thing.
But I can’t help but feel that .news has the potential to take a big credibility hit due to the content of these sites.
Imagine a fox, buying up all the good .henhouse domains. It’s a bit like that.