URS arrives in three legacy gTLDs

The legacy gTLDs .cat, .pro and .travel will all be subject to the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy from now on.
Earlier this week, ICANN approved the new Registry Agreements, which are based on the new gTLD RA and include URS, for all three.
URS is an anti-cybersquatting policy similar to UDRP. It’s faster and cheaper than UDRP but has a higher burden of proof and only allows domains to be suspended rather than transferred.
The inclusion of the policy in pre-2012 gTLDs caused a small scandal when it was revealed a few months ago.
Critics, particularly the Internet Commerce Association, said that URS (unlike UDRP) is not a Consensus Policy and therefore should not be forced on registries.
ICANN responded that adding URS to the new contracts came about in bilateral negotiations with the registries.
The board said in its new resolutions this week:

the Board’s approval of the Renewal Registry Agreement is not a move to make the URS mandatory for any legacy TLDs, and it would be inappropriate to do so. In the case of .CAT, inclusion of the URS was developed as part of the proposal in bilateral negotiations between the Registry Operator and ICANN.

The concern for ICA and others is that URS may one day be forced into the .com RA, putting domainer portfolios at increased risk.

Viking victor in .cruise gTLD auction

Viking River Cruises has emerged as the winner of the .cruise new gTLD contention set.
It seems to have beaten Cruise Lines International Association, which has withdrawn the only competing application, in an auction.
Both applicants originally proposed a single-registrant model, in which only the registry could own domains, but changed their plans after ICANN adopted Governmental Advisory Committee advice against so-called “closed generic” gTLDs.
There was controversy in July when CLIA claimed Viking had waited too long to change its proposed registration policies.
The group accused Viking of deliberately delaying the contention set.
ICANN, however, rejected its argument, saying applicants can submit change requests at any time.
Viking’s updated application seems to envisage something along the lines of .travel, where registration is limited to credentialed industry members, defined as:

Applicant and its Affiliates, agents, network providers and others involved in the delivery of cruise-related services, including without limitation: companies that hold a license from a governmental or regulatory body to offer cruise services, companies that provide services or equipment to cruise providers, as well as consultants, resellers, engineers, etc., working with the cruise industry.

Viking is already the registry for its dot-brand, .viking.

Pritz quitz DNA

Domain Name Association boss Kurt Pritz has resigned after two years on the job.
Neustar’s Adrian Kinderis, chair of the domain industry trade group, made the announcement in an email to members yesterday.
No immediate replacement for Pritz has been named, but Kinderis said the DNA’s board wasn’t worried:

Fellow members may have concerns about the current and future management of the DNA and its many activities. Please be advised that the board and I have no serious concerns. The DNA partners with Virtual and Allegravita, two full-service external consultancies that manage all areas of operational excellence and communications. These two organizations have the full trust and support of the board, and the various DNA member committees that I’m proud to see are generating substantial and practical work product on a weekly basis.

Pritz joined the DNA in November 2013, having previously spent years in senior roles, including chief strategy officer, at ICANN.
Under his watch, the DNA has done things like adopting a webinar series for new gTLD registries and launching a site highlighting examples of new gTLD domains advertised “in the wild”, as well as carrying various advocacy work.

Africa hands coffin nails to DotConnectAfrica evaluators

The African Union and a United Nations commission have formally told ICANN that they don’t support DotConnectAfrica’s bid for .africa.
When it comes to showing governmental support, a necessity under ICANN’s rules for a geographic gTLD applications, the UN Economic Commission for Africa was DCA’s only prayer.
Company CEO Sophia Bekele had managed to get somebody at UNECA to write a letter supporting .africa back in 2008, and DCA has continued to pretend that the letter was relevant even after the entire continent came out in support of rival applicant ZA Central Registry.
During its Independent Review Process appeal, DCA begged the IRP panel to declare that the 2008 letter showed it had the support of the 60% of African governments that it requires to be approved by ICANN.
The panel naturally declined to take this view.
Now UNECA has said in a letter to the African Union Commission (pdf) dated July 20, which has since been forwarded to ICANN:

ECA as United Nations entity is neither a government nor a public authority and therefore is not qualified to issue a letter of support for a prospective applicant in support of their application. In addition, ECA does not have a mandate represent the views or convey the support or otherwise of African governments in matters relating to application for delegation of the gTLD.
…
It is ECA’s position that the August 2008 letter to Ms Bekele cannot be properly considered as a “letter of support or endorsement” with the context of ICANN’s requirements and cannot be used as such.

The AUC itself has also now confirmed for the umpteenth time, in a September 29 letter (pdf), that it doesn’t support the DCA bid either. It said:

Any reliance by DCA in its application… proclaiming support or endorsement by the AUC, must be dismissed. The AUC does not support the DCA application and, if any such support was initially provided, it has subsequently been withdrawn with the full knowledge of DCA even prior to the commencement of ICANN’s new gTLD application process.

The AUC went on to say that if DCA is claiming support from any individual African government, such claims should be treated “with the utmost caution and sensitivity”.
That’s because a few years ago African Union member states all signed up to a declaration handing authority over .africa to the AUC.
The AUC ran an open process to find a registry operator. DCA consciously decided to not participate, proclaiming the process corrupt, and ZACR won.
The new letters are relevant because DCA is currently being evaluated for the second time by ICANN’s independent Geographic Names Panel, which has to decide whether DCA has the support of 60% of African governments.
ZACR passed its GNP review largely due to a letter of support from the AUC.
If DCA does not have the same level of support, its application will fail for the second time.
The 2008 UNECA letter was the only thing DCA had left showing any kind of support from any governmental authority.
Now that’s gone, does this mean the DCA application is dead?
No. DCA has a track record of operating irrationally and throwing good money after bad. There’s every chance that when it fails the Geographic Names Review it will simply file another Request for Reconsideration and then another IRP, delaying the delegation of .africa for another year or so.

Uniregistry will stick with risky .hiv model for now

Uniregistry has agreed to take over the new gTLD .hiv from original registry dotHIV, and said it has no plans to immediately change the business model.
“We are going to maintain the status quo, at least at the start,” said Uniregistry general counsel Bret Fausett. “We will give it a year or so on our platform and then evaluate it.”
dotHIV launched last year with what I then described as “one of the strangest and riskiest business models of any new gTLD to date.”
It’s a not-for-profit TLD with an optional “Click-Counter” service that makes microdonations, pulled from reg fees, to HIV/AIDS charities whenever somebody visits a .hiv web site.
The idea hasn’t really caught on.
When dotHIV put its ICANN contract up for auction in April it had only 345 fee-paying registrations and total revenue was $83,000.
The auction, which made it plain that the buyer would not be allowed to make a profit, failed to meet the $200,000 reserve.
Uniregistry said in a press release that while it is a for-profit company, it will continue to run .hiv as a “social enterprise”.
Fausett said the gTLD’s numbers could go up once it’s on Uniregistry’s platform.
“We think this will get a natural bump when it moves to our registrar channel,” he said. “We have over 175 registrars on our platform, which is 4x the current .HIV distribution channel.”

ICANN lists the ways the new gTLD program sucked

ICANN has published an analysis of the many ways in which the first round of the new gTLD program wasted everyone’s time and money.
The 200-page “New gTLD Program Implementation Review” is essentially a long list of ways the program could have been better, along with dozens of recommendations for possible future changes.
It’s for the most part a fairly dry read, and it is probably not as comprehensive as it could be, but it will be required reading for anyone working on policy concerning, or thinking of applying during, the second application round.
It concludes, for example, that maybe there should be a right to appeal inconsistent objection rulings.
It ponders aloud whether the Community Priority Evaluation should be scrapped or revised.
It wonders whether dot-brands, or other categories of gTLD, should get their own version of the standard Registry Agreement.
There’s also some discussion about the possibility of making the evaluation stage more efficient by grouping applications by applicant or back-end service provider, which would streamline the process but complicate the prioritization queues.
I count 48 “lessons learned” in the document, but as a concise summary covering over three years of the program, it’s necessarily somewhat light on detail.
On my first read, a few omissions jumped out at me.
There’s no discussion at all of the cybersquatting component of the background screening process, for example. Nor is there any mention of Geographic Name Review shortcomings highlighted by the recent .africa Independent Review Process case.
Also, in my view the document goes way too easy on the Governmental Advisory Committee.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure almost everyone who reads it will notice something lacking.
That’s why it’s now open for public comment.
The document is expected to be used as part of the review leading into the second application round, which somehow seems more distant with each passing day.

M+M lays off dozens in focus on S&M, promises profit next year

Minds + Machines has outlined its plan to refocus its business on sales and marketing, which has already resulted in a couple dozen job losses, as the latest stage of its profit runway.
The new gTLD company also outlined plans to return about half of its cash reserves — mostly obtained by losing new gTLD auctions — to its shareholders.
For the first half of the year, the London-listed company reported an EBITDA loss of $1.2 million, compared to income of $5.7 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up to $3.6 million from $113,000 in the comparable 2014 period.
The company said it is “committed to achieving its stated goal of crossing over into profitability in 2016” and blamed high operating costs for the loss, but said it has been restructuring to help it return to profit.
M+M said its headcount has been reduced from 58 to 44, but that it has added ten jobs in sales and marketing, which seems to indicate at least 24 people recently lost their jobs.
The bottom line was also affected by the fact that most of the company’s cashflow to date has been generated by auction losses, and there were more of those last year than this.
The company hit three of its six “key performance indicator” targets — domains under management market share, premium sales growth and standard sales growth — but fell short of the other three.
Average revenue per name for premiums was $184 versus a $200-$225 target, and average revenue per standard name was down from $28 to $10, largely due to a deep discount promotion for .work domains. Higher prices for soon-to-launch .law could increase the average, M+M said.
The company also announced that it will spent £15 million ($23.1 million) of its cash reserves on a share buyback.
That’s almost half of the $48.3 million is has in the bank. This time last year, M+M’s share price peaked at 12p; it’s currently at 8.55p.
The price saw a spike in May, shortly before then-chairman Fred Krueger was asked to resign by the board. Krueger has since sold off the majority of his substantial shareholding, despite explicitly saying that he would not.

Apple using apple.news as (yawn) redirect service

Apple has become the latest famous brand to deploy a new gTLD domain in the wild.
The domain apple.news has been observed this week being used as a URL redirection service by its Apple News app.
It seems that when somebody shares a link to a news site via social media, using Apple News, the app automatically shares an apple.news redirect link instead.
The domains apple.news and www.apple.news do not resolve to web sites (for me at least) but Google has already indexed over a thousand apple.news URLs. Clicking on these links transparently punts the surfer to the original news source.
UPDATE: Thanks to Gavin Brown for pointing out in the comments that apple.news does resolve if you specify “https://” rather than “http://” in the URL. The secured domain bounces visitors to apple.com/news.
It puts me in mind of .co’s original flagship anchor tenant, Twitter, which obtained t.co five years ago and continues to use it as its core URL redirection service.
It’s impossible to tell what impact t.co had on the success of .co — the domain was in use from .co’s launch — but it surely had some impact.
.news, a Rightside TLD, had just over 24,400 domains in its zone file yesterday. We’ll have to see whether Apple’s move has an impact on sales.
Taryn Naidu, Rightside’s CEO, said in a press release:

This is just the start, but Apple.NEWS is the most significant use of a new top-level domain (TLD) yet, and I am very excited at the promise and potential that this development signals. Whether they’re used as a complementary domain, content-sharing links (bit.ly, but with branding) or a simple re-direct, new domain extensions have a real and important place in every company’s overarching brand strategy today.

There’s no denying that having popular software automatically generating links for your gTLD is a great way to raise awareness.
But is this as significant as Apple actually launching a web site at apple.news, or switching from .com to .apple, and encouraging people with marketing and branding to actually type those domains into their browsers? I’m skeptical.

New gTLDs growing faster than .com, latest Verisign data shows

New gTLDs grew faster than .com in the last 12 months.
That seems to be one of the conclusions that can be drawn from Verisign’s Q2 Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published (pdf) yesterday, if you dig into the numbers a little.
The headline number is that the number of all domains across all TLDs was 296 million, up sequentially by 2.2 million domains. That’s annual growth of 16.4 million domains, Verisign said.
I thought it might be interesting to see where that growth came from, so I plugged the numbers from Verisign’s last five DNIB reports into a spreadsheet, reproduced in this table.
[table id=35 /]
From these numbers, we can calculate the quarterly sequential growth, measured in domains, for the whole DNS, for .com, for new gTLDs and for ccTLDs.
That table looks like this:
[table id=37 /]
It appears from this table that .com grew by more domains than new gTLDs over the last year — 4.8 million versus 4.36 million — but the numbers are a bit misleading due to the way Verisign sources its data.
For most ccTLDs, Verisign has always used the third-party research outfit ZookNic, which has its own way of estimating registration volumes.
For new gTLDs, Verisign uses the zone files as published daily by ICANN — the same source DI and others use to measure volume.
However, for .com Verisign uses its own in-house data source. It is, after all, the .com registry.
The numbers for .com you find in the DNIB reports are exactly the same as the numbers Verisign gives financial analysts and investors when it reports its quarterly earnings.
And the company changed the way it reports those numbers in Q1 this year.
See that unusually high addition of 2.2 million names in .com in Q1 in the above table? That reflects the addition of very nearly 750,000 hidden .com names in March this year.
At that time, Verisign started counting domains that are on “hold” statuses, largely due to new ICANN policies on unverified Whois information.
The last two DNIB reports have sourced .com numbers with this disclosure:

The domain name base is the active zone plus the number of domain names that are registered but not configured for use in the respective Top-Level Domain zone file plus the number of domain names that are in a client or server hold status.

The actual Q1 growth number for .com should in the 1.4 million to 1.5 million range, which would bring .com’s total growth over the last four quarters down to roughly 4.1 million names.
An apples-to-apples comparison of extant zone-file domain growth would show new gTLDs beating .com, in other words.
But is this a fair measure of demand?
No. It’s fairer to say that .com still outsells its competition by a long way.
New gTLDs had yet to experience any significant churn by Q2 this year, as most had been on the market for under a year, so the growth numbers are more or less untempered by the renewal cycle.
While Verisign’s .com growth is net, for new gTLDs it’s almost all gross.
Verisign says in the latest DNIB has it had 8.7 million new registrations across .com and .net in the second quarter, which would be roughly eight times as many as new gTLDs — all several hundred of them combined — managed to move.

.sexy may be blocked in Iran

Some networks in Iran appear to be systematically blocking Uniregistry’s .sexy gTLD.
That’s one of the conclusions of a slightly odd experiment commissioned by ICANN.
The newly published An Analysis of New gTLD Universal Acceptance was conducted by APNIC Labs. The idea was to figure out whether there are any issues with new gTLDs on the internet’s DNS infrastructure.
It concluded that there is not — new gTLDs work just fine on the internet’s plumbing.
However, the survey — which comprised over 100 million DNS resolution attempts — showed “One country, Iran, shows some evidence of a piecemeal block of Web names within the .sexy gTLD.”
The sample size for Iranian attempts to access .sexy was just 30 attempts. In most cases, users were able to resolve the names with DNS, but HTTP responses appeared to be blocked.
The survey did not test .porn or .adult names, but it might be safe to assume similar behavior in those gTLDs.
APNIC also concluded that Israel’s .il ccTLD, included in the report as a known example of TLD blocking at the national level, is indeed blocked in Iran and Syria.
The study also found that there may be issues with Adobe’s Flash software, when used in Internet Explorer, when it comes to resolving internationalized domain names.
That conclusion seems to have been reached largely because the test’s methodology saw a Flash advertisement discretely fetching URLs in the background of web pages using Google Ads.
When the experimenters used HTML 5 to run their scripts instead, there was no problem resolving the names.
The study did not look at some of the perhaps more pressing UA issues, such as the ability for registrants and others to use new gTLD domain names in web applications.