First new gTLD deleted from the net

.doosan today became the first new gTLD to be removed from the domain name system.
It’s no longer showing up in the DNS root zone file, and IANA’s record lists it as “retired”.
.doosan was a dot-brand managed by Korean conglomerate Doosan Group. The company never did anything with it before deciding to kill the TLD off last September.
A month ago, ICANN used the pending deletion to test its Emergency Back-End Registry Operator safety net.
If memory serves, it’s the only gTLD to be ever be removed from the root zone, excluding test internationalized TLDs previously operated by ICANN.
ccTLDs are removed somewhat regularly, when international borders are redrawn.

Van Couvering ousted from M+M, replaced by PR guy with channel focus

Antony Van Couvering has been fired as CEO of Minds + Machines and replaced by someone who was until very recently the company’s agency PR guy.
Neither Van Couvering, the company, nor incoming CEO Toby Hall, have disclosed the reason for his ouster.
But I suspect the “differences and disagreements” that Van Couvering alluded to in his CircleID piece this morning may refer to M+M’s go-to-market strategy.
Hall told DI this morning that his focus as the company’s new leader is going to be on the registrar channel.
“It’s all about engaging with the outside world and recognizing we’re a business-to-business play,” Hall said. “It’s a fundamental shift in perspective.”
The strategy “has to be stacked in a way that makes our business partners make revenue”, he said.
“We’re not a consumer registrar,” he said.
M+M is a vertically integrated domain name company, acting as both registry and registrar.
Registrar sources tell us that Van Couvering wasn’t keen on working with third-party retailers, preferring to focus on its in-house registrar.
It seems that’s going to change under Hall.
M+M said in a press release (jarringly, emailed to reporters this morning as usual by Hall himself):

Mr Van Couvering was removed from office with immediate effect by means of a unanimous resolution of directors passed at a meeting of directors held on 19 February 2016.
The Group is currently making the transition from asset gatherer to monetisation of its leading portfolio of top-level domains; the Board believes a change of leadership will assist in this process.

Hall was appointed chief marketing officer last month.
Since the early 1990s, he’s been head of the London-based PR slash investor relations outfit GTH Communications, which focuses on small-cap businesses. M+M was a GTH client almost since it was founded, Hall said.
He said he’s going to be stepping back from GTH to focus on M+M.
Van Couvering founded Minds + Machines in 2008. It was soon acquired by the company that would be known as Top Level Domain Holdings, which later changed its name to Minds + Machines.
TLDH founder Fred Krueger got canned by the M+M board last year too.
Today, Van Couvering wrote:

It’s a story told a thousand times: founder of a company ousted by investors. It’s a story so common you can find it any day of the week as a minor headline in a tech blog. Not much of a story at all really, until it happened to me…
It sucked.

dotgay has a third crack at .gay appeal

dotgay LLC has filed another appeal with ICANN, hoping to get its community-based .gay application back in the race.
It submitted a third Request for Reconsideration (pdf) this week, arguing on a technicality that its bid should have another Community Priority Evaluation.
The company has already lost two CPEs based on the Economist Intelligence Unit CPE panel’s belief that its definition of “gay” is too broad because it includes straight people.
It’s also lost two RfRs, which are adjudicated by ICANN’s Board Governance Committee.
The newest RfR addresses not the core “not gay enough” issue, but a procedural error at the EIU it believes it has identified.
According to the filing, dotgay is in possession of emails from an EIU employee who was responsible for verifying some of the dozens of support letters it had received from dotgay’s backers (generally equal rights campaign groups).
The company argues, citing the BGC’s own words, that this employee was not one of the official CPE “evaluators”, which means the EIU broke its own rules of procedure:

considering the fact that the CPE Process Document – which is considered by the BGC to be “consistent with” and “strictly adheres to the Guidebook’s criteria and requirements”, it is clear that the verification of the letters should have been performed by an independent evaluator… and not by someone “responsible for communicating with the authors of support and opposition letters regarding verification in the ordinary course of his work for the EIU”.

It wants the CPE to be conducted again, saying “it is obvious that the outcome of a process is often, if not always, determined by the fact whether the correct process has been followed”.
It’s difficult to see how the outcome of a third CPE, should one be undertaken, could be any different to the first two. Who verifies the support letters doesn’t seem to speak to the reason dotgay hasn’t scored enough points on its other two attempts.
But the alternative for the company is an expensive auction with the other .gay applicants.
Another CPE would at least buy it time to pile more political pressure on ICANN and the EIU.

DCA fails .africa evaluation

DotConnectAfrice application for the .africa gTLD has, as expected, failed its ICANN evaluation for want of government support.
The official decision (pdf) was handed down overnight.
According to the Extended Evaluation panel, DCA’s “required documentation of support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria”.
In other words, DCA did not have a shred of support for its controversial application.
For gTLDs representing multinational regions, support or non-objection is required from 60% of the governments in that region.
In addition, there cannot be more than one objection from a government in that region.
Not only did DCA not have any support, it also had over a dozen governmental objections.
The company had relied on support letters from the African Union Commission and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, both of which have been retracted.
The AU and most African governments support rival, successful applicant ZACR.
ZACR signed its .africa registry contract with ICANN in March 2014, but its bid has been kept in limbo while DCA has exploited ICANN appeals processes to delay delegation.
Most recently, DCA sued ICANN, despite signing away its right to sue when it applied.
DCA was originally rejected due to Governmental Advisory Committee advice, before it had completed evaluation.
But the company won an Independent Review Process ruling stating that ICANN erred by accepting the advice with no explanation, compelling ICANN to put the DCA application back into evaluation.
After a six-month review, the Geographic Names Panel has now concluded that, duh, nobody supports DCA’s bid.
ICANN has now changed the status of DCA’s application from “Not Approved” to “Will Not Proceed”.
Oddly, and possibly incorrectly, this status cites the GAC advice as the reason for the failure, rather than the fact that DCA failed its evaluation.
Per ICANN practice, no application is truly dead until the applicant withdraws.

.cloud passes 20,000 names on day one

The newly launched gTLD .cloud passed 20,000 domains under management one day after entering general availability.
About 25 hours after the 1500 UTC launch yesterday, 20,347 domains had been registered, according to head of registry operations Francesco Cetraro.
He said 17,991 of those names were registered in GA.
The gTLD is priced around the $20 to $25 mark at the popular registrars I checked.
Over 20,000 names is a pretty decent start, putting the the Aruba-owned TLD within the top 100 new gTLDs by volume.
Volume-wise, it’s already in the same ball-park as the likes of .global, .sexy and .uno, which have each been around for well over a year.
Including dot-brands, there are now close to 900 new gTLDs, only about half of which have more than 100 names.

.top adds a quarter million names in a day

The new gTLD .top set a new record for one-day growth, adding almost a quarter million domains on Monday.
The February 16 .top zone file shows 1,343,665 domains, up 238,616 on the day, according to DI stats.
That’s the majority of the 287,950-name growth the whole new gTLD universe experienced that day.
It’s the second example of a single TLD growing by six figures in a day, following .xyz’s 131,000-name growth on February 6.
It seems that the majority of the names were registered via West.cn, a Chinese registrar that sells the names for CNY 4 ($0.60).
It seems we’re looking at a buying spree by a limited number of Chinese investors.
.top is run by Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology and marketed primarily in Chinese.
It’s currently the second largest new gTLD by zone size, after .xyz.

Rightside moves into China too

Rightside has become the latest gTLD registry to open up in China.
The company said today it has created a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise, basically a local subsidiary, in the country.
This is the same beachhead in China taken by Minds + Machines and Famous Four Media recently.
Draconian Chinese government regulations on domain registries and registrars require formal accreditation before domain names can be used by Chinese citizens.
Opening up a local office or working with a local proxy appear to be requirements to obtain this accreditation.
Rightside points out that 45% of new gTLD domain names — 5.4 million — are registered in China. Its own portfolio has seen 90,000 of these.

DotMusic fails the “not gay enough” community test

DotMusic’s Community Priority Evaluation for the .music gTLD has failed, after the CPE panel decided the company was just trying to exploit ICANN rules to get its hands on a valuable string.
In a decision (pdf) published last night, the company score 10 of the available 16 points, four points shy of a passing score. The panel wrote:

The Panel determined that this application refers to a proposed community construed to obtain a sought-after generic word as a gTLD. As previously stated, the community as defined in the application does not have awareness and recognition among its members. Failing this kind of “cohesion,” the community defined by the application does not meet the [Applicant Guidebook’s] standards for a community.

The CPE fell apart at the first hurdle, with the panel awarding 0 out of 4 points on the “community establishment”.
It essentially ruled that the “music community” does not exist, despite frequent statements to the contrary from DotMusic and its legion of supporters.
DotMusic appears to have been condemned for the same reason as dotgay, the failed .gay community applicant.
While DotMusic and dotgay lost points on different criteria, their undoing in both cases was attempting to define a community that their respective panels judged overly broad.
DotMusic’s application included a list of 40 or more North American Industry Classification System categories of industry that it said were within its music community.
However, where it said “music lawyers” or “music accountants”, it referred to the NAICS codes for just “lawyers” and “accountants”, the panel noted.
This seems to have been responsible to a large extent for it losing its points on the “community establishment” criteria.
The CPE panel could said that while its proposed community members exhibited a “commonality of interest” there was no evidence of “cohesion” among them.
Further, no one preexisting organization could be said to cover the interests of the over-broad community as defined. The panel wrote:

There should, therefore, be at least one entity that encompasses and organizes individuals and organizations in all of the more than 40 member categories included by the application. Based on information provided in the application materials and the Panel’s research, there is no entity that organizes the community defined in the application in all the breadth of categories explicitly defined.

A knock-on effect of this was that DotMusic also dropped a point on the “community endorsement” criteria, despite having hundreds of letters of support from members of the music industry.
It dropped a further point because the string “music” only “identifies” but does not “match” its proposed community.
DotMusic will perhaps not take comfort from the fact that its losing score of 10 comprehensively beat rival community applicant Far Further by seven points.
With both community applications ruled invalid, .music should now head to auction, where there are eight applicants in total.
But .music is a bit of a passion project for DotMusic CEO Constantine Roussos — one of the few applicants who publicly announced his intention to apply long before it was possible to do so — so I think an appeal through the ICANN process is inevitable.
While DotMusic has support from powerful music industry figures, I don’t think that support extends to the kind of financial backing that will let it win a seven-to-eight-figure auction.
Don’t expect to see .music in your registrar storefront any time soon.

Donuts makes Hollywood content policing deal

Donuts has made a deal with the American movie industry that will make it easier to take down piracy domains.
The Motion Picture Association of America has been given a “Trusted Notifier” status, and the two companies have agreed upon a domain take-down framework.
The agreement targets “large-scale pirate websites”, Donuts said.
It’s the first such deal Donuts has made, executive VP Jon Nevett told DI, but it’s likely to be extended into other industries, possibility including music, pharmaceuticals and child abuse prevention.
“This could be a model for not just content-related issues,” he said.
Nevett did not want to get into much detail about the specifics of the take-down process by discussing the definition of “large scale” or timing, but he did say that the MPAA has an obligation to do manual research into each domain it wants suspending.
After it receives a report from the MPAA, Donuts will reach out to the registrar and registrant to ask for an explanation of the alleged piracy.
A decision to suspend the domain or leave it alone would be made “solely in our discretion”, Nevett said.
Donuts already has this in its acceptable use policy, which reads in part:

Donuts reserves the right, at its sole discretion and at any time and without limitation, to deny, suspend, cancel, redirect, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold, or similar status as it determines necessary for any of the following reasons:
…
domain name use is abusive or violates this AUP, or a third party’s rights or acceptable use policies, including but not limited to the infringement of any copyright or trademark;

While Donuts is the registry for .movie and .theater, the MPAA agreement applies to all of its almost 200 gTLDs.
The announcement comes the day before the Domain Name Association meets to discuss its Healthy Domains Initiative.
Nevett said that DNA members will meet tomorrow with law enforcement, IP owners, and abuse prevention and security folk to seek input on the question “What are tenets of healthy domain ecosystem?”
That input will be discussed at a subsequent DNA meeting, likely to coincide with the ICANN meeting in Marrakech this April.
The eventual goal is to come up with a set of voluntary best practices for registries and registrars.
Nevett stressed that the MPAA deal, and whatever the DNA comes up with, are voluntary agreements made outside the auspices of ICANN’s contracts.
Despite this, the “Trusted Notifier” concept does put me in mind of section 3.18 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, where governmental or affiliated entities are given special powers to have dodgy domains investigated and suspended.

New gTLDs top 12 million domains

The new gTLD universe passed 12 million domains for the first time today, according to zone files.
Today, we counted 12,001,346 domains across all the 2012-round gTLD zones, up by just under 60,000 names on the day.
Over 50,000 of the new names were split fairly evenly between .xyz and .club, which seem to be the beneficiaries of a domainer surge that’s been going on for the last four days.
As of today, .club has overtaken .wang to be the third-largest zone, with 638,565 names.
It’s taken less than one month for the new gTLDs to add their latest million names.
Our total zone file count topped 11 million on January 12.
.xyz alone has added over 380,000 names since then; .club another 90,000. Most of that growth has come in the last seven days.
Second-placed budget Chinese-run gTLD .top has added over 95,000 names in the last 30 days.
Zone files don’t take account of domains that are registered but don’t have name servers, so the actual number of registered names will be slightly higher.