Sunrise accounts for under 1% of new gTLD regs

New gTLD registries can expect just 125 sunrise registrations on average, according to statistics just released by ICANN.
The new data, current as of May 2015, also shows that there have been just 44,077 sunrise registrations in total, over 417 new gTLDs.
That’s less than 1% of the total number of new gTLD domain registrations to that date.
The numbers were published in a revised version of ICANN’s Revised Report on Rights Protections Mechanisms, a discussion paper on mechanisms such as sunrise, Trademark Claims and URS.
It also contains the first authoritative breakdown of sunrise regs by TLD, though it’s limited to the 20 largest.

Many of these numbers match closely what DI has previously reported, but .porn and .adult are substantially lower because ICM Registry only revealed consolidated numbers that took account of its unique non-TMCH sunrise periods.
None of the ICANN figures include .sucks, which hit sunrise after the numbers were compiled in May.

ICANN throws lifeline to flopping new gTLDs

New gTLD registries with lower than expected sales will now be able to reduce the amount of their “failure bond”.
ICANN has introduced a new Continued Operations Instrument Amendment Service, which will enable registries to raise or lower the amount of their COI depending on how business is going.
A COI is a letter of credit or cash in escrow that registries must secure in order to fund three years of emergency operations in the event that their businesses fail.
The amount of the COI is calculated from sales projection and ranges from $18,000 (for under 10,000 names) to $300,000 (over 250,000 names).
Let’s face it, at the moment the amendment service must surely be targeted largely at companies that over-estimated their future sales and secured a COI much larger than they needed.
If they’ve escrowed cash, the new service will allow some of that money to be freed up to spend on more useful activities.
ICANN said that if it determines that a registry has under-projected its sales, it will be able to refer it to the new service in order for the COI to be increased.
Currently, only four new gTLDs have over 250,000 names under management, judging by zone files.

Who wants ICANN’s $60m gTLD windfall?

ICANN has opened a formal public comment period to move forward discussions on how it should spend the almost $60 million it has so far received in new gTLD auction proceeds.
It’s not yet looking for concrete suggestions on how to spend the money — this is a pre-consultation consultation — it’s only looking for comments on the principles that should be considered when discussions take place.
ICANN has so far raised $58.8 million from “last resort” new gTLD auctions. With 27 contention sets remaining, that number could go up if one or more applicants refuse to participate in private auctions.
The GNSO Council has been moving to create a Cross-Community Working Group to discuss how the money should be spent, but clashed briefly with the ICANN board, which has said it will make the ultimate decision, earlier this year.
The new paper (get it here) basically asks questions along the lines of: who should decide where the money goes? How should conflicts of interest be handled? How much third-party expert opinion should be solicited? How much say should the board have? How much outreach should there be?
Underpinning it all is the implicit problem that the longer, more detailed and more convoluted the process, the less money there will be to actually distribute at the end.
Knowing the ICANN community’s propensity for convolution, I wouldn’t be surprised if it managed to spunk the whole lot on expert advice, working group travel, lawsuits and coffee.
(Okay, I would actually be surprised, but you get my point).
The paper also includes links to about 20 spending suggestions that have been made in various public fora over the last couple of years.
Some ideas include: giving it back to the applicants, funding open source DNS software, reducing the new gTLD application fee, marketing new gTLDs to registrants, and donating it to charity.
It does not appear to be true that ICANN slipped in one of its own management’s suggestions in an attempt to funnel off new gTLD money into the unpopular NetMundial initiative, as has been alleged elsewhere today. The NetMundial suggestion referred to in the paper actually came from Danny Aerts of Swedish ccTLD manager IIS.

Architelos: shadiest new gTLD is only 10% shady

Disputing the recent Blue Coat report into “shady” new gTLDs, domain security firm Architelos says that the shadiest namespace is just under 10% shady.
That’s a far cry from Blue Coat’s claim earlier this week that nine new gTLDs are 95% to 100% abusive.
Architelos shared with DI a few data points from its NameSentry service today.
NameSentry uses a metric the company calls NQI, for Namespace Quality Index, to rank TLDs by their abuse levels. NQI is basically a normalized count of abusive domains per million registered names.
According to Architelos CEO Alexa Raad, the new gTLD with the highest NQI at the end of June was .work.
Today’s NameSentry data shows that .work has a tad under 6,900 abusive domains — almost all domains found in spam, garnished with just one suspected malware site — which works out to just under 10% of the total number of domains in its zone file.
That number is pretty high — one in 10 is not a figure you want haunting your registry — but it’s a far cry from the 98.2% that Blue Coat published earlier this week.
Looking at the numbers for .science, which has over 324,000 names in its zone and 15,671 dodgy domains in NameSentry, you get a shadiness factor of 4.8%. Again, that’s a light year away from the 99.35% number published by Blue Coat.
Raad also shared data showing that hundreds of .work and .science domains are delisted from abuse feeds every day, suggesting that the registries are engaged in long games of whack-a-mole with spammers.
Blue Coat based its numbers on a sampling of 75 million attempted domain visits by its customers — whether or not they were valid domains.
Architelos, on the other hand, takes raw data feeds from numerous sources (such as SpamHaus and SURBL) and validates that the domains do actually appear in the TLD’s zone. There’s no requirement for the domain to have been visited by a customer.
In my view, that makes the NameSentry numbers a more realistic measurement of how dirty some of these new gTLDs are.

Two .cpa applicants lose CPE

Two applicants that applied for the gTLD .cpa as a “Community” have lost their Community Priority Evaluations.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants scored 11 points out of 16, CPA Australia scored 12.
While relatively high scores for CPE, they both failed to pass the 14-point winning threshold.
The string, which stands for “certified public accountant”, is contested by a total of six applicants, which will now have to fight it out at auction.
Both applicants failed to score any of the four available points on the “nexus” criteria, which require the applicant-defined community to closely match the community described by the string.
In both cases, the CPE panel noted that the applicant wanted to restrict .cpa to members of their organizations, which only represents a subset of CPAs in the world.
The decisions can be found here.
Only two CPEs now remain unresolved — the reevaluation of DotGay’s .gay, and DotMusic’s .music. The status of .med and .kids is currently unknown.

Blue Coat explains .zip screw-up

Security vendor Blue Coat apparently doesn’t check whether domains are actually domains before it advises customers to block them.
The company yesterday published a blog post that sought to explain why it denounced Google’s unlaunched .zip gTLD as “100% shady” even though the only .zip domain in existence leads to google.com.
Unrepentant, Blue Coat continued to insist that businesses should consider blocking .zip domains, while acknowledging there aren’t any.
It said that its censorware treats anything entered into a browser’s address bar as a URL, so it has been treating file names that end in .zip — the common format for compressed archive files — as if they are .zip domain names. The blog states:

when one of those URLs shows up out on the public Internet, as a real Web request, we in turn treat it as a URL. Funny-looking URLs that don’t resolve tend to get treated as Suspicious — after all, we don’t see any counter-balancing legitimate traffic there.
Further, if a legal domain name gets enough shady-looking traffic — with no counter-evidence of legitimate Web traffic — it’s possible for one of our AI systems to conclude that the behavior isn’t changing, and that it deserves a Suspicious rating in the database. So it gets one.

In other words, Blue Coat has been categorizing Zip file names that somehow find their way into a browser address bar as .zip domain names.
That may sound like a software bug that Blue Coat needs to fix, but it’s still telling people to block Google’s gTLD anyway, writing:

In conclusion, none of the .zip “domains” we see in our traffic logs are requests to registered sites. Nevertheless, we recommend that people block these requests, until valid .zip domains start showing up.

That’s a slight change of position from its original “Businesses should consider blocking traffic that leads to the riskiest TLDs”, but it still strikes me as irresponsible.
The company has still not disclosed the real numbers behind any of the percentages in its report, so we still have no idea whether it was fair to label, for example, Famous Four’s .review as “100% shady”.

.cam given the nod as Rightside wins confusion appeal

Rightside’s application for .cam will be un-rejected after the company beat Verisign in an appeal against a 2013 String Confusion Objection decision.
That’s right, .cam is officially no longer too confusingly similar to .com.
In a just-published August 26 decision (pdf) a three-person International Centre for Dispute Resolution panel overruled the original SCO panelist’s decision.
The new panel wrote:

Based on the average, reasonable Internet’s user’s experience, and the importance of search engines, in the [Final Review Panel]’s view, confusion, if any, between .COM and .CAM is highly likely to be fleeting. While a fleeting association may create some “possibility of confusion” or evoke an “association in the sense that the string brings another string to mind,” both such reactions are insufficient under the ICANN SCO standard to support a finding that confusion is probable.

It’s not quite as clear-cut a ruling as the .shop versus .通販 ruling last week, relying on the appeals panel essentially just disagreeing with some of the finer points of the original panel’s interpretation of the evidence.
Relating to one piece of evidence, the appeals panel found that the original panelist “improperly shifted the burden of proof” to Rightside to show that .cam was intended for camera-related uses.
Rightside was one of two applicants given the opportunity to appeal its SCO decision by ICANN last year, largely because two other .cam applicants managed to pass their Verisign objections with flying colors, creating obvious inconsistency.
Taryn Naidu, Rightside’s CEO, said in a statement:

We always felt strongly that the first panel’s decision was seriously flawed. How can .CAM in one application be different from the .CAM in another application when evaluated on the basis of string similarity? The fact is, it can’t.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Verisign did not get the chance to appeal the two SCOs it lost, given that the panelist in both cases was the same guy using the same thought processes.
The question now is: is the appeals panel correct?
I suppose we’ll find out after .cam goes on sale and unscrupulous domainers attempt to sell .cam names for inflated prices, hoping their would-be buyers don’t notice the difference.
The other two .cam applicants are AC Webconnecting and Famous Four Media. All three will now go to auction.

Another new gTLD goes to a closed generic applicant

Dish DBS has won the contention set for the .data gTLD, even though its proposed business model has been banned by ICANN.
Competing applicants Donuts and Minds + Machines have both withdrawn their competing applications.
It’s the second string this week to go to a “closed generic” applicant, that wants to keep all the domains in the TLD to itself even though it’s not a dot-brand.
Earlier this week, the company behind the Food Network TV show won .food.
Most companies that applied for closed generics changed their minds after the Governmental Advisory Committee issued advice against the model, but Dish was one of the ones that stuck to its original plans.
In June, ICANN ruled that .data, .food and a few others could either withdraw their bids, drop their exclusivity plans, or have their applications frozen until the next new gTLD round.
As withdrawal now seems to be off the cards, it seem that .data will not see the light of day for some time to come.

Third ICM windfall due as .sex hits sunrise

If we’ve learned one thing about new gTLD sunrise periods, it’s that adult-oriented TLDs sell quite well.
ICM Registry started its third such period yesterday, as .sex went into its “TMCH Sunrise” phase.
Until October 1, any company with a trademark in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to buy a matching .sex domain on a first-come, first-served basis.
From October 5 to October 30, anyone with a .xxx domain name or current .xxx “Sunrise B” block will be able to buy the matching .sex during the Domain Matching phase.
Anyone who buys a .xxx before October 1 will be able to participate in this second sunrise.
ICM reported in May that .porn received 3,995 sunrise registrations while .adult sold 3,902 — both via a combination of TMCH Sunrise sales and blocks.
At ICM’s prices, that’s enough to comfortably cover its ICANN application fees.
Every other new gTLD with the exception of .sucks has sold fewer than 1,000 sunrise names.
General availability for .sex starts November 4.

.food could be heading for limbo after closed generic applicant wins auction

The future of the .food gTLD is up in the air after single-registrant applicant Lifestyle Domain Holdings won its contention set.
The applicant, a subsidiary of Scripps Networks, is the sole remaining .food applicant after withdrawals from Donuts and Dot Food LLC.
It’s also a recalcitrant “closed generic” applicant, which continues to insist it has the right to exclude all third-party registrants from the .food namespace.
The company seems to have won .food at auction, even though ICANN recently slapped a ban on closed generics in the current application round.
Scripps will not be able to launch .food any time soon, unless it changes its planned registration policies.
The company may have essentially just paid to have .food placed on hold until the next new gTLD round.
Scripps runs a cable TV station in the US called Food Network, which it says is famous. It also runs Food.com, which it describes as “the third largest food site on the web”.
The current version of its application states:

Applicant intends to function in such a way that all domain name registrations in the TLD shall be registered to and maintained by Applicant and Applicant will not sell, distribute or transfer control of domain name registrations to any party that is not an Affiliate of Applicant

When ICANN asked applicants if they would like to revise their closed generic applications to allow third-party registrants, due to adverse Governmental Advisory Committee advice, Scripps was one of half a dozen applicants to decline.
Audaciously, the company told ICANN that an open registration policy for .food would hurt its brand:

To open the top level domain means that anyone could register a domain for a small annual amount of money and exploit, confuse and infringe upon the brand equity and goodwill of the famous FOOD, FOOD NETWORK and FOOD.COM brands established by Scripps with more than twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

Yes, Scripps thinks that when people think of “food”, they automatically think of the “third largest food web site” or a cable TV network that gets a 0.21% audience share in the UK.
A nonsense position, in other words.
So will Scripps get to run .food as a closed dot-brand? Probably not.
In June, ICANN ruled that the remaining closed generics applications (.food, .hotels, .grocery, .dvr, .data, and .phone) had the choice of either withdrawing, dropping their exclusivity plans, or carrying their applications over to the next gTLD application round.
Having just paid its competing applicants to go away, one assumes that Scripps’ withdrawal is off the cards.