Nominet to run .blog’s back-end

Nominet is to run the back-end registry systems for .blog, the company announced this evening.
We reported earlier today that .blog has a surprise new owner — Knock Knock, Whois There, which belongs to Automattic, owner of WordPress.com — and it seems the change of ownership comes with a change of back-end.
Primer Nivel, the company that applied for .blog and just transferred the ICANN contract to Automattic, had named Malaysian also-ran Qinetics as its original back-end.
“Nominet will provide the registry services, as well as technical support to the registrar channel,” Nominet said tonight. The deal includes EPP and DNS.
Nominet’s press release confirms that registrants will not need a WordPress.com account to buy a .blog domain name.
It’s the second big back-end deal for Nominet in recent weeks. The company recently revealed it will be taking over technical services for all 28 of Minds + Machines new gTLDs.
Automattic/KKWT is predicting 250,000 .blog registrations in 2016, and general availability is not expected until the fourth quarter.

Radix joins the Hollywood content police

Radix has become the second major gTLD registry to announce a content policing deal with the movie industry.
It today said it has signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America similar to the one Donuts announced in February.
Like Donuts, Radix will treat the MPAA as a “trusted notifier” for the purposes of taking down “large-scale pirate websites”.
Radix said the deal “imposes strict standards for such referrals, including that they be accompanied by evidence of clear and pervasive copyright infringement, and a representation that the MPAA has first attempted to contact the registrar and hosting provider for resolution.”
Donuts described its notifier program in this document (pdf). Radix said its arrangement is “similar”.
The Donuts-MPAA deal proved somewhat controversial.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation invoked the slippery slope argument, saying of it:

The danger in agreements like this is that they could become a blanket policy that Internet users cannot avoid. If what’s past is prologue, expect to see MPAA and other groups of powerful media companies touting the Donuts agreement as a new norm, and using it to push ICANN and governments towards making all domain name registries disable access to an entire website on a mere accusation of infringement.

The EFF said these kinds of deals could ultimately lead to legal freedom of speech being curtailed online.
We’re not quite there yet — right now we have two gTLD registries (albeit covering over 200 gTLDs) and one trusted notifier — but I expect more similar deals in future, branching out into different industries such as music and pharamaceuticals.
The deals stem in part from the Domain Name Association’s Healthy Domains Initiative, which aims to avoid ICANN/government regulation by creating voluntary best practices for the industry.
The advantage of a voluntary arrangement is that there’s no risk of a terminal sanction — such as losing your registry contract — if you fail to live up to its terms.
Radix’s portfolio includes .website, .space, .online and .tech. It’s also a .music and .web applicant.

WordPress reveals IT bought .blog for $19 million

WordPress.com owner Automattic has outed itself as the bankroll behind the winner of the .blog auction and the new owner of the forthcoming new gTLD.
Founder Matt Mullenweg also revealed that the company paid around $19 million for the domain at private auction in February 2015, about $1 million more than the amount DI estimated at the time.
Until now, the winning .blog applicant, which fought off competition from eight competitors including Google, M+M, Radix and Donuts, was only known as Primer Nivel.
Primer Nivel is a Panamanian company previously described to DI as an investment vehicle with links to Colombian registrar My.co.
To the best of my knowledge, Automattic’s involvement with the bid has never even been hinted at, but Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said in a blog post last night that it has been involved since well before the auction took place.

It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20M).

An earlier version of the blog post put the price at “about $19m”, as captured by Google.

ICANN approved the reassignment of the .blog contract from Primer Nivel to Knock Knock WHOIS There on April 29.
In the original Primer Nivel application, only My.co CEO Gerardo Aristizabal and VP of business development Carlos Neira were listed as shareholders of 15% or more of the company in its answer to question 11 of the application form.
ICANN processed a change request to the question 11 answer in March 2014, but did not publish the result of the change. It may merely have been a change of personal contact information.
One has to wonder whether, had WordPress’ involvement in Primer Nivel been public, the .blog auction could have fetched even more.
One might imagine that Google, which competes with WordPress with its Blogger service, would have viewed .blog as more threatening in a rival’s hands.
But Primer Nivel and now Automattic/KKWT appear to have no intention to make .blog a WordPress-exclusive gTLD. The original application stated that it would be open to all, and ICANN has since banned so-called “closed generics”.
The registry has already opened a web site at kkwt.domains, which is currently pitching the product to accredited registrars.
It says it plans to go to general availability and “activate” 250,000 .blog domains before the end of the year.
Automattic obtained an ICANN registrar accreditation back in October 2010 but to date has not sold a single domain via that accreditation.
It offers WordPress.com hosting customers domain registrations, but I believe it does so as a GoDaddy reseller.
.blog is currently in “transition to delegation” and it’s probably only a matter of days before it is delegated to the internet.
Mullenweg blogged that the sunrise period is expected to start in August, with and October landrush.
Pricing is expected to be in line with current industry standards, including premium tiers.
The gTLD has always been one of my favorites, and having WordPress backing it will almost certainly make it more successful than if the registry were an independent third party, possibly raising the profile of new gTLDs as a whole.

World’s first vanity gTLD goes live

Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li has become the first person to own a top-level domain matching his name.
The new gTLD .richardli went live on the internet today.
The registry is Pacific Century Asset Management (HK) Limited, a subsidiary of PCCW, the Hong Kong telecomms and internet giant of which Li is chair.
Forbes estimated Li’s personal wealth in 2015 at $4.7 billion, making him the 360th richest guy in the world.
The gTLD is a pure brand-protection play, according to the 2012 application, which states:

An important goal of the TLD is the safeguard of the intellectual property right of our Chairman’s name Richard Li.
…
The establishment of the .richardli TLD on the Internet safeguards our brand’s intellectual property right (in this case, our Chairman’s name Richard Li). PCCW has invested substantially in the online areas and will continue to do so.

There are no domains currently resolving in .richardli, though we should expect nic.richardli to start resolving in the coming days.
I believe .richardli was the only applied-for new gTLD that exactly matches a specific individual’s personal name.
A handful of gTLDs representing PCCW’s brands in Latin and Chinese scripts also went live today.

Rightside to modernize eNom, predicts $75m new gTLD revs

Rightside used its first quarter earnings call yesterday to address, albeit indirectly, some of the criticisms recently leveled at it by activist investors and competitors.
CEO Taryn Naidu revealed for the first time how the company sees the new gTLD market playing out in the longer term.
He said than in three to five years, Rightside expects annual revenue from its registry business to come it at $50 million to $75 million.
That’s a hell of a lot more than it makes today.
In the first quarter, registry revenue was $2.6 million, compared to $1.6 million a year ago. Annualized, that’s a shade over $10 million.
On the back of an envelope, Rightside seems to need roughly 50% growth per year over five years to hit the low end of its target.
Naidu told analysts that one factor built into this projection is that third-party registrars will start to sell just as many new gTLD domains as Rightside’s registrars do.
Currently, Rightside sees 15% to 20% new gTLD, but with others it’s 3% to 5%, he said.
Naidu said he expects margins to be 20% at the EBITDA level.
The revelation of these targets may go some way to address investor concerns that Rightside is putting too much effort into its new gTLD business at the expense of its cash-generating registrars.
J Carlo Cannell of Cannell Capital expressed these views and others in March, and was supported by fellow investor Frank Schilling, CEO of Uniregistry.
Naidu last night also addressed concerns about eNom, which Cannell had called a “time capsule” due to its aging user experience.
He admitted that eNom is “encumbered by some older technology” but said it was being fixed.
“Later this quarter we will be rolling out the first phase of our development efforts, which include a dramatically revamped user interface, a new suite of software development tools and a new developer hub to help our partners learn, develop and test faster,” he said.
The registrar business brought in $44 million in the quarter, up from $41.9 million. Aftermarket revenue was $9.3 million compared to $7.3 million.
Overall, revenue was up 9% at $55.1 million, with a net loss of $5.1 million. That compared to income of $1.9 million a year ago.
Naidu also seemed to obliquely address the criticism that a lot of Rightside’s new gTLDs are shit — .democrat, .dance, .army, .navy, and .airforce have been singled out by Cannell and others — by talking about how the company doesn’t necessarily put the same amount of effort into marketing its whole stable.
Some gTLDs will be marketed more heavily later, he said, comparing it to a real estate owner holding on to parcels of land for later development.
Naidu also talked up Rightside’s prospects in China, where apparently .pub is doing quite well because registrants think it means “public” rather than “drinking establishment”.

.flir becomes the 1,300th TLD

There are now 1,300 top-level domains live on the internet.
The milestone was hit today when the dot-brand .flir was delegated to FLIR Systems, a $1.5 billion-a-year thermal imaging systems manufacturer.
Its nic.flir domain is now live and currently redirects to existing sites in other TLDs.
According to the DI database, there are 292 ccTLDs, of which 45 are internationalized domain names.
There are 1,008 gTLDs of which 84 are IDNs; 985 were applied for in the 2012 new gTLD application round.
Of the gTLDs, 347 are dot-brands (defined as where the registry has signed Spec 9 and/or Spec 13 of the new gTLD Registry Agreement).

ZACR wades into .africa lawsuit, tells judge he screwed up

ZA Central Registry has told the judge in DotConnectAfrica’s lawsuit against ICANN that the preliminary injunction he granted DCA recently was based on a misunderstanding.
The injunction, granted a month ago, prevents ICANN delegating the .africa gTLD to ZACR until the lawsuit reaches a conclusion.
But, in papers filed Friday, ZACR points out that the judge screwed up in his reasoning. Judge Gary Klausner’s ruling was “predicated upon a key factual error”, ZACR says.
The error is the same one I wrote about last month — the judge thinks DCA originally passed the Geographic Names Review of its Initial Evaluation for .africa, and that ICANN later failed it anyway.
In fact, DCA never passed the GNR, and the document the judge cites in his ruling is actually ZACR’s Initial Evaluation report.
The GNR is the bit of the evaluation where both .africa applicants had to prove they had support from 60% of African governments and no more than one African governmental objection.
ZACR said in one of its Friday filings (pdf):

The record is undisputed that DCA’s application had not passed the geographic names evaluation process. And it could not because DCA did not have the requisite support of 60% or more of the African Union governments. Further, DCA’s application had been the subject of 17 “Early Warning” submissions by African Union governments. Correcting for this factual error, the record is clear that DCA has no likelihood of success in this litigation.

ZACR also says Klausner erred by saying .africa could only be delegated once, saying that TLDs can be redelegated to different operators after their initial delegation.
It’s filed a motion asking the judge to “reconsider and vacate” his preliminary injunction ruling.
ZACR is now named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which originally only named ICANN and unidentified parties.
ICANN has dropped its motion to dismiss the case and last week filed its answer (pdf) to DCA’s complaint, in which it denies any wrongdoing.
ICANN appears to be happy to let the judge’s mistake slide, or at least to allow ZACR to burden the risk of potentially pissing him off by highlighting his error.

Donuts wins .doctor

Donuts has emerged the victor of the .doctor gTLD contention set.
Competing applicants Radix and The Medical Registry both withdrew their applications last week.
The string wasn’t due to head to its ICANN last-resort auction until May 25, indicating that the contention set was settled privately.
.doctor has been the subject of some controversy.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee had insisted that .doctor should be reserved purely for licensed medical doctors.
Donuts had complained that this would rule out use by any of the myriad other types of doctor, as well as registrants using “doctor” in a fanciful sense (like “rug doctor” or “PC doctor”).
ICANN initially accepted the GAC advice, but changed its mind this February, declining to impose such restrictive language on .doctor’s contractual Public Interest Commitments.
So it seems that .doctor will be generally unrestricted.
Donuts will have to sign up to the standard “Category 1” PICs, which require the registry to work with relevant regulatory bodies, however.

African brands wiped off the map as ICANN flips the kill switch on 10 gTLDs

Ten dot-brand gTLDs may never see the light of day, after ICANN sent termination notices to the applicants.
The move means that the number of African-owned dot-brand gTLDs to go live in the current round will be precisely zero.
The 10 affected gTLDs are .naspers, .supersport, .mzansimagic, .mnet, .kyknet, .africamagic, .multichoice, .dstv and .gotv, which were applied for by four South African companies, and .payu, which came from a Dutch firm.
In each case, the applicant had signed a Registry Agreement with ICANN in early 2015, but had failed to actually go live in the DNS within the required 12-month window.
All had deadlines in February or March but failed to meet even extended deadlines.
The condemned gTLDs make up more than half of the total applications originating in Africa.
Of the original 17 African applications, only ZACR’s .joburg, .capetown and .durban city gTLDs have actually been delegated.
Another application, the generic .ummah from Ummah Digital of Gambia, was withdrawn in 2013.
The League of Arab States’ .arab and عرب. are both currently in pre-delegation testing, having signed ICANN contracts in November.
The remaining two applications are both for .africa, which is currently stuck in litigation.
We’re looking at a maximum of six African-owned gTLDs, of a possible 16, going live in the 2012 round.
ICANN was criticized back in 2012 for not doing enough to raise awareness of the new gTLD program, criticisms that have been raised again recently as the community starts to seriously look at how things can be improved for the next round.
UPDATE: This article originally stated that .ummah was a dot-brand application. It was not. The text has been corrected accordingly.

Donuts makes weird investment in startup

Donuts has made a surprising investment in a company that makes geolocation technologies.
The new gTLD registry operator announced yesterday that it has something called Donuts Labs, through which it will make “strategic investments” in “similar” companies.
Its first investment is in California tech startup GeoFrenzy, which operates in the emerging “geofences” space.
A geofence is a virtual perimeter around a defined geographic location.
Basically, GeoFrenzy has divided the world up into square-centimeter chunks and stores data about who owns these chunks in a registry database.
Using the GPS service you’ll find in all modern mobile devices, apps using the technology can figure out when you walk into or out of a registered, fenced-off area, triggering some behavior.
Such services are believed to have applications ranging from logistics to advertising. One example on the GeoFrenzy web site says that its database and software could be used to keep drones out of restricted airspace.
The terms of the deal with were not disclosed, but it’s surprising news for a couple of reasons.
First, Donuts appears to have cash to throw around on pet side-projects at a time when one would assume, as an early-stage company itself, it would be more focused on growing its fledgling new gTLD business.
Second, the press release makes out that there are technology synergies between the companies.
GeoFrenzy CEO Sean Eilers is quoted as saying: “Their expertise in managing a highly scalable registry and their experience with innovative DNS technologies makes Donuts an ideal fit as an investor and strategic partner.”
But to the best of my knowledge Donuts doesn’t have any experience managing a highly scalable registry. It outsources all of that kind of thing to Rightside, doesn’t it?
Donuts says it will be making more, similar investments in future.