Cars gTLD launch clears $1 million in EAP

There was a small turn-out for the premium launch of .cars, .car and .auto gTLDs, but the registry says it cleared over $1 million in revenue.
The three gTLDs are run by Cars Registry, a venture between Uniregistry and XYZ.com.
They all finished their pricey Early Access Periods yesterday and are due to enter general availability today.
The EAP started January 12 with prices of $45,000 per domain. In GA, they won’t cost you less than $2,000.
While zone files show almost no new domains appearing between January 12 and today — three or four per domain at most — Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said EAP was a “success”.
“More than 100 dealers and brands took advantage of sunrise and EAP,” he said.
It appears there are a few dozen domains not appearing in zone files yet.
The three gTLDs combined have brought in over $1 million during EAP, Schilling said.

.security names priced at $3,000, .theatre at $750

XYZ.com may be best known for its budget .xyz gTLD, but its portfolio is increasingly leaning toward the super-premium end of the industry price range.
The company entered Early Access Period with its .security, .protection and .theatre gTLDs today, and they ain’t cheap.
.security and .protection are expected to carry retail prices of $3,000 a year, when they hit general availability a week from now.
Today, they’re $65,000 apiece, with the price reducing to $35,000, $15,000, $8,750 and $5,000 over the coming days.
Meanwhile, .theatre starts at $64,000, going down to $32,000, $14,000, $7,000 and $4,000 before finally settling at the GA RRP of $750.
All three gTLDs were acquired by XYZ.com from other applicants.
That was also the case for .cars, .car and .auto, which XYZ runs in a joint venture with Uniregistry, where retail prices are roughly $2,500.
In terms of competition, .security and .protection are probably up against .trust, while .theatre may well find itself in competition with .tickets, which has made inroads in Broadway.

.boston was a “distraction”, says gTLD seller

The Boston Globe newspaper decided to offload the gTLD after its new owners decided it was a “distraction”.
That’s according to a report yesterday in the newspaper itself.
Last week, it was announced that Minds + Machines, which already runs a handful of geo-gTLDs, is acquiring the .boston contract for an undisclosed sum.
Today, the Globe reports that its owners thought .boston would be “a distraction from the Globe’s central business of providing information through its print and online outlets”.
“The .boston domain business was inherited by the current management team and is not perceived as core to the mission of supporting the highest quality journalism in the region,” it quotes the Globe’s VP of marketing as saying.
The newspaper was acquired by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry in 2013, a year after the .boston application was filed, according to the report.
The acquisition, which sees M+M buy 99% the Globe subsidiary in control of the gTLD registry agreement, is subject to ICANN approving the contract reassignment.

Uniregistry beats Donuts to .shopping, but .shop still in play

Uniregistry has emerged as the successful registry-to-be of .shopping from the convoluted .shop/.shopping new gTLD contention set.
Donuts, the only competing applicant for the string, withdrew its application late last week.
As we previously reported, the .shop/.shopping contention sets were joined at the hip due to a bizarre string similarity challenge, making the scheduled auction very complex.
But Donuts and Uniregistry seem to have come to a private arrangement about .shopping, outside of the ICANN auction process, making .shop a straightforward nine-way fight.
Donuts tells me the auction, in which it is participating, is still scheduled for January 27.

Afilias $10 million court win slashed by judge

A US judge has dramatically reduced a $10 million ruling Afilias won against Architelos in a trade secrets case.
Architelos, which a jury decided had misappropriated trade secrets from Afilias in order to build its patented NameSentry domain security service, may even be thrown a lifeline enabling it to continue business.
A little over a week ago, the judge ordered (pdf) that the $10 million judgment originally imposed by the jury should be reduced to $2 million.
That won’t be finalized, however, until she’s ruled on an outstanding injunction demanded by Afilias.
The judge said in court that the original jury award had been based on inflated Architelos revenue projections.
The company has made only around $300,000 from NameSentry subscriptions since launch, and its sales pipeline dried up following the jury’s verdict in August.
The service enables TLD registries to track and remediate domain abuse. It was built in part by former Afilias employees.
Afilias has a similar in-house system, not available on the open market, used by clients of its registry back-end business.
Even a reduced $2 million judgment is a bit too rich for Architelos, which is desperately trying to avoid bankruptcy, according to court documents.
But the judge seems to be considering an injunction that would enable Architelos to continue to exist.
It may even be permitted to sell NameSentry, as long as it gives almost a third of the product’s revenue to Afilias for up to five years or until the $2 million is paid off.
The injunction might also grant joint ownership of the disputed patents to the two companies, allowing them to jointly profit from the technology.
This has all yet to be finalized, however, and Afilias can always appeal whatever injunction the judge comes up with.
It emerged in court earlier this month that Architelos offered to give full ownership of its patent, along with NameSentry itself, to Afilias in order to settle the suit, but that Afilias refused.
Afilias is also suing Architelos over the same matters in Canada, but that case is progressing much more slowly.

.top gTLD tops a million as China goes domain nuts

China-based new gTLD .top has become only the second new gTLD to pass the one-million-domain milestone.
The gTLD, managed by Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co, had 1,000,469 domains in its zone file on Saturday, an increase of 5,808 on the day.
The zone has grown by 453,833 domains in the last 90 days, according to DI PRO stats.
It’s growing just slightly faster, in percentage terms, than new gTLD volume leader XYZ.com’s .xyz.
The rapid growth can no doubt be attributed largely to price, feeding the current Chinese appetite for domain investment.
Its most successful registrar, West.cn (Chengdu West Dimension Digital Technology Co), is currently selling .top names prominently for CNY 4 for the first year. That’s just $0.60.
The registry says that registrants come from 231 countries and regions. On its web site, it highlights France’s Gandi.net and Gibraltar’s budget registrar AlpNames as key international partners.
However, the latest registry reports show that over 90% of its sales are coming from China-based registrars.
Despite .top being a Latin-script TLD, European and North America registrars seem to account for a very small number of registrations.
It’s not even carried by the likes of GoDaddy and eNom.
The third-place 2012-round new gTLD is currently .wang, another Chinese registry, which yesterday had 628,125 names in its zone file.
Number four is .win, which despite being run by Gilbraltar-based Famous Four Media is utterly dominated by sales via Chinese registrars.
At number five is .club, with 552,065 names and a much more international distribution of registrars.

M+M acquires .boston from Boston Globe

Minds + Machines has added .boston to its stable of geo-gTLDs, buying the contract from the publisher of the Boston Globe newspaper.
The company said today that it has acquired 99% of Boston TLD Management, a new company into which the Globe plans to sign over its .boston ICANN contract.
The deal is contingent on ICANN approving the contract reassignment.
The ink is still moist on the .boston Registry Agreement, which was signed December 10.
The gTLD is officially in pre-delegation testing right now.
But the acquisition also means M+M will take over back-end duties for .boston. Originally, the Globe had intended to use OpenRegistry.
The gTLD was officially a “geographic” string under ICANN rules, and needed support from the local government in Boston.
.boston would become M+M’s fifth geographic gTLD — sixth if you include .london.
The company said it plans to launch the TLD later this year.

.sucks “gagging” registrar critics?

.sucks may be all about freedom of speech, but some registrars reckon the registry is trying to ban them from criticizing the new gTLD in public.
Vox Populi is proposing a change to its standard registrar contract that some say is an attempt to gag them.
A version of the Registry-Registrar Agreement dated December 18, seen by DI, contains the new section 2.1:

The purpose of this Agreement is to permit and promote the registration of domain names in the Vox Populi TLDs and to allow Registrar to offer the registration of the Vox Populi TLDs in partnership with Vox Populi. Neither party shall take action to frustrate or impair the purpose of this Agreement.

It’s broad and somewhat vague, but some registrars are reading it like a gagging order.
While many retail registrars are no doubt happy to sell .sucks domains as part of their catalogs, there is of course a subset of the registrar market that focuses on brand protection.
Brand protection registrars have been quite vocal in their criticism of .sucks.
MarkMonitor, for example, last year wrote about how it would refuse to make a profit on .sucks names, and was not keen on promoting the TLD to its clients.
Asked about the new RRA language, Vox Pop CEO John Berard told DI that it was merely an attempt to clarify the agreement but provided no additional detail.
Registrars are also angry about a second substantial change to the contract, which would allow the registry to unilaterally make binding changes to the deal at will.
The new text in section 8.4 reads:

Vox Populi shall have the right, at any time and from time to time, to amend any or all terms and conditions of this Agreement. Any such amendment shall be binding and effective 15 days after Vox Populi gives notice of such amendment to the Registrar by email.

That’s the kind of thing that ICANN sometimes gets away with, but some registrars are saying that such a change would let Vox Pop do whatever the hell it likes and would therefore be legally unenforceable.

Priced to sell: $46m of two-letter .xxx names

ICM Registry has added over 1,200 two-character .xxx names to its catalog of priced premiums.
With prices ranging from $100,000 to $37,500, the newly offered domains carry a total ticket price of over $46 million.
The only six-figure name on the list is vr.xxx. ICM said in a press release today it has already sold vr.porn and vr.sex for $100,000 apiece.
There are seven names with adult connotations (such as 69.xxx and bj.xxx) priced at $75,000, eight more at $50,000 and two at $40,000.
The rest of the list of 1,227 names are being offered at $37,500, which is roughly 10 times the prices on the equivalent .porn, .sex and .adult domains.
While ICM noted the interest in domain investing from China recently, it does not appear to have valued its numeric-only domains (such as 88.xxx) any more highly than less attractive-looking combinations (such as 0o.xxx).
Judging by the list published on ICM’s web site, it has already sold well over 300 two-character domains in its newest three gTLDs.
Had those sold at the buy-now prices it would have raised over $1.1 million in revenue.
But ICM since September has been offering an option to register premium names for premium annual fees that are lower than the one-off price. A $37,500 domain costs $3,000 a year to register, under this model.
The total value of ICM’s premium list, including all the longer domains, is roughly $115 million.

Baidu, China’s Google, gets its dot-brand gTLD

Chinese web giant Baidu had its dot-brand gTLD, .baidu, go live in the DNS root zone today.
With the extraordinary amount of focus on China in the domain industry currently, this could be one of the dot-brands to watch in 2016.
There are no active domain names in .baidu just yet, but we will likely see nic.baidu put to some use or another over the coming days.
Unusually for a dot-brand gTLD, Baidu’s contract with ICANN does not contain specifications 9 or 13, which allow dot-brands to operate differently to regular gTLDs.
This suggests an open registration policy under which any registrar can sell .baidu domains to any registrant.
However, Baidu’s original gTLD application spells out quite a different plan, focused primarily on trademark protection. It says:

All available second-level strings of .BAIDU (e.g. example .BAIDU) will be initially allocated only to limited number of eligible registrants and for internal corporate business purposes. BAIDU plans to adopt this approach and expects to maintain it for 3 years from the launch of the “.BAIDU” registry service. Such approach will be regularly evaluated and adjusted if appropriate and necessary. Depending a various internal and external factors, including market demand and user expectation, BAIDU may consider a phased roll-out approach for a broader commercial marketplace but will do so after the conclusion of the initial 3-year period.

I wouldn’t expect .baidu to launch properly any time soon.
Not only is the company probably going to want to get its dot-brand contractual protections in place, it’s also showed no huge enthusiasm for making its way through the new gTLD delegation process so far.
It signed its ICANN contract January 8 last year, meaning this week was pretty much the latest date it could permissibly go into the root.
Like most dot-brands, it’s been dragging its feet, in other words.
Baidu is the leading web property in China, dwarfing even Google in terms of search market share locally.