.bank doing surprisingly well in sunrise

The forthcoming .bank gTLD has received over 500 applications for domains during its sunrise period, according to the registry.
fTLD Registry Services tweeted the stat earlier this week.

.BANK surpasses 500 Sunrise applications and this period ends on June 17 (see http://t.co/qkb8lwNInB), #.BANK

— fTLD Registry (@fTLD_Registry) June 9, 2015

Its sunrise period doesn’t even end until June 17. Sunrise periods tend to be back-weighted, so the number could get a lot higher.
Five hundred may not sound like a lot — and applications do not always convert to registrations — but in the context of new gTLDs it’s very high.
Discounting .porn and .adult, both of which racked up thousands of names across their various sunrise phases, the previous high for a sunrise was .london, with just over 800 names registered.
It’s not unusual for a sunrise to get under 100 names. A year ago, I calculated that the average was 144.
The 500+ .bank number is especially surprising as it’s going to be a very tightly controlled gTLD where the chance of cybersquatting is going to be virtually nil.
All .bank registrants will be manually vetted to ensure they really are banks, substantially mitigating the need for defensive registrations.
Could this be an indication that .bank will actually get used?

.wine no longer blocked after EU drops complaint

Donuts and ICANN are currently in the process of signing new gTLD agreements for .wine and .vin, after the European Union and wine sellers dropped objections.
As of today, both gTLDs are “In Contracting” rather than “On Hold”, according to ICANN’s web site.
ICANN revealed earlier this week that the European Union and various wine trade associations have both dropped their Cooperative Engagement Process complaints.
CEP is less formal precursor to a much more expensive and lawyer-hungry Independent Review Process complaint.
With the CEPs out of the way, Donuts is now free to sign its contracts.
Donuts won the auction for .wine back in November, but its application was frozen due to ongoing arguments about the protection of “geographic indicators” representing wine-making regions.
Governments, particularly in Europe and Latin America, had protested that .wine and .vin should not be allowed to launch until areas such as Rioja and Champagne were given special privileges.
Last October, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade told the French government that it was negotiating with applicants to get these protections included in the contracts.
Either Donuts has agreed to such protections, or the EU and wine-makers have gotten bored of complaining.
My feeling is the former is probably more likely, which may be controversial in itself.
There is no international agreement on GI protection — the US and Australia opposed the EU’s position on .wine — so this may be seen as a case of ICANN creating new rights where none previously existed.

TLD Operator Community no longer a “community”

The TLD Operator Community, which launched last Friday, has hastily rebranded itself after confusion about its proposed role.
It’s now the TLD Operator Webinar. It has switched its URL from a .community domain to a .help domain.
Almost immediately after the initiative was announced, I started hearing gossip about a split with the Domain Name Association.
There was a slight crossover between the DNA’s mission and what had been announced about the erstwhile “Community”.
On Friday, I was told by ARI Registry Services, which is coordinating the webinar:

a new community for all new Top-Level Domain (TLD) applicants has been created to provide a forum for operators to achieve meaningful commercial success. The TLD Operator Community will differentiate itself from other new TLD think-tanks by focusing entirely on the commercial activation of new TLDs for the benefit of the entire community.

But according to ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis, this was a poor description of the initiative.
He said in a DI comment that it was rather “one off effort by our consultancy team to get everyone together for a chat.”
“My team have incorrectly characterized it as ‘forming a community group’,” he wrote. “I assure you, the last thing we need is another community group.”
ARI was intimately involved in the launch of the DNA and Kinderis continues to be its chair.
The Webinar will happen June 30 (or July 1, depending on your time zone) and feature speakers from Donuts, Vox Populi, dotBerlin and others.
Barclays, which was due to participate in the webinar, is no longer listed as a speaker.

The Hunger Games is first to use a .movie domain

Donuts has signed up an impressive anchor tenant for its upcoming .movie gTLD in the form of The Hunger Games series of movies.
thehungergames.movie is one of just a handful of domains in .movie, which is currently pre-sunrise, indicating that it’s a deal Donuts has negotiated directly with the film distributors.
The Hunger Games is a series of inexplicably successful science fiction adventure films, starring Jennifer Lawrence, popular with teenagers.
The first movie in the series fetched a whopping $691 million in box office receipts.
A trailer for the fourth and final movie in the series was released today, and it’s the first to carry a .movie domain.

You’ll notice that the Facebook and Twitter addresses and suggested hashtags take precedence over the domain, but that’s understandable given the target demographic.
For Donuts, it’s just about the best anchor tenant it could have hoped for — a mass-market popcorn movie aimed directly at the people who will be buying their own domains in a few years.
People in the movie business will no doubt notice also, which in the short term could be more important. Sunrise starts next week.
Here’s the trailer.

.xyz starts to plummet — NetSol freebies to blame?

XYZ.com has been seeing its .xyz zone file shrink rapidly over the last five days, likely as a result of free domains pushed out to Network Solutions customers starting to expire.
DI PRO stats show that .xyz has shrunk by 49,658 domains this week — today at 888,413 names compared to a June 4 peak of 942,927.
It was June 4 last year when the industry become aware that NetSol was automatically pushing .xyz names into the accounts of its existing customers without their explicit consent.
Renewal rates usually do not become clear for 45 days after expiration, due to grace periods, but domains can delete earlier.
On June 9, 2014, one year ago today, .xyz had 87,073 domains in its zone file. It’s difficult to see where a loss of almost 50,000 names this week could come from if not the NetSol freebies deleting.
It is believed that the NetSol giveaway contributed about 350,000 names to .xyz’s zone over the period of its offer.
NetSol has been bundling .xyz renewals — which along with the free year of email and privacy comes to a whopping $57 — when it asks its customers to renewal their matching .com/.net/.org domains.
.xyz likely hasn’t seen the worst of its total shrinkage yet.
When eNom pushed free .info domains into its customers’ accounts about 10 years ago the renewal rate on those names was virtually zero.

New gTLD trade group launches

A group of new gTLD registries have got together to form the TLD Operator Community, a new “think tank” devoted to the commercial aspects of running new TLDs.
According to its web site:

The TLD Operator Community is designed to provide all new TLD applicants with an opportunity to share their experiences, learn from each other and focus on the commercial realities of operating a TLD – away from the confines of ICANN, policy or technical discussions.

The group appears to be coordinated right now by ARI Registry Services.
The distinction between the TLD Operator Community and the Domain Name Association appears to be that the DNA has more of a focus on outreach and education beyond the industry.
The new group will hold an introductory webinar June 30 (or July 1, depending on your time zone) featuring speakers from Donuts, Vox Populi, dotBerlin, Barclays and others.

ICM beats own annual projections with .porn on day one

ICM Registry says it managed to comfortably beat its own expectations for annual sales within the first eight hours of .porn and .adult going into general availability yesterday.
CEO Stuart Lawley said that there were 10,038 .porn domains and 8,277 .adult domains in its registry at the end of yesterday.
The company’s new gTLD applications with ICANN had predicted 10,000 .porn domains and 3,000 .adult domains at the end of the first year of availability, he said.
“We are therefore delighted to have exceeded those numbers on day one of GA,” he said. “We are particularly pleased with the high numbers from .adult.”
The majority of the names were registered either during the sunrise periods (ICM had two per TLD) or the recently ended “domain matching” program, which gave .xxx owners first dibs on matching .porn and .adult names.
A month ago, the company said .porn received 3,995 registrations while .adult had 3,902 at the end of the sunrises.
Earlier this week, after domain matching ended, Lawley said that .porn had almost 7,500 names while .adult had almost 7,000.
ICM will launch .sex in September.

ICANN’s new gTLD survey gives new gTLD awareness numbers

ICANN has released the results of a huge survey focusing on awareness and trust in gTLDs new and old.
The headline number is 46% — that’s the how many of the 6,144 international survey respondents said they were aware of new gTLDs.
The respondents were asked this question:

As you may or may not know, new domain name extensions are becoming available all the time. These new extensions are called new gTLDs.
Which of the following new gTLDs, if any, have you heard of? Please select all that apply.

They were presented with a list comprising .email, .photography, .link, .guru, .realtor, .club and .xyz. These were the biggest seven Latin-script new gTLDs when the survey was developed in January.
Tellingly, .email and .link stole the show, with 28% and 24% awareness respectively. The other five options ranged from 13% for .club to 5% for .xyz.
I think the numbers were influenced by some respondents not quite understanding the question. People are familiar with email and with links as internet concepts, which may have swayed the results.
Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, acknowledged this potential problem in ICANN’s announcement last night, saying:

The survey found that domains with an implied purpose and functional associations, such as .EMAIL, were most often recalled by Internet users. While some of the drivers may be linked to familiarity and general association versus awareness of the extension, we believe it’s a signal that people are receptive to the names.

It’s also notable that, almost 15 years after launch, .biz and .info only have 50% awareness, according to the survey. For .mobi. .pro, .tel and .asia, all released between 2004 and 2008, the awareness was at 37%.
It’s not impossible that new 2012 round — which has generated thousands of headlines — has raised more awareness of new gTLDs.
The survey found that 38% of internet users who were aware of new gTLDs have visited a .email web site in the last year. The number was 28% for .link.
The survey also found that 52% of respondents would consider using a new gTLD if they were setting up a web site in the next six months. The number ranged from 40% for .email to 22% for .xyz.
Among the plethora of other findings, the survey discovered that only 92% of internet users have heard of .com.
Go figure.
The entire survey, carried out by Nielsen, can be found here.
UPDATE: This article was substantially revised a few hours after publication to remove references to the numbers being “nonsense”. This was due to my misreading of the survey questionnaire. My apologies for the confusion.

Two more legacy gTLDs agree to use URS

The registries behind .pro and .cat have agreed to new ICANN contracts with changes that, among other things, would bring the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy to the two gTLDs.
Both gTLD Registry Agreements expire this year. Proposed replacement contracts, based heavily on the base New gTLD Registry Agreement, have been published by ICANN for public comment.
They’re the second and third pre-2012 gTLDs to agree to use URS, which gives trademark owners a simpler, cheaper way to have infringing domains yanked.
Two weeks ago, .travel agreed to the same changes, which drew criticisms from the organization that represents big domain investors.
Phil Corwin of the Internet Commerce Association is worried that ICANN is trying to make URS a de facto consensus policy and thereby bring it to .com, which is still where most domainers have most of their assets.
Following DI’s report about .travel, Corwin wrote last week:

this proposed Registry Agreement (RA) contains a provision through which staff is trying to preempt community discussion and decide a major policy issue through a contract with a private party. And that very big issue is whether Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) should be a consensus policy applicable to all gTLDs, including incumbents like .Com and .Net.
…
ICANN needs to hear from the global Internet community, in significant volume, that imposing the URS on an incumbent gTLD is unacceptable because it would mean that ICANN staff, not the community, is determining that URS should be a consensus policy and thereby undermining the entire bottom-up policy process. Domain suspensions are serious business – in fact they were at the heart of the SOPA proposal that inspired millions of emails to the US Congress in opposition.

The concern about .com may be a bit over-stated.
Verisign’s current .com contract is presumptively renewed November 2018 provided that it adopts terms similar to those in place at the five next-largest gTLDs.
Given that .net is the second-largest gTLD, and that .net does not have URS, we’d have to either see .net’s volume plummet or at least five new gTLDs break through the 15 million domains mark in the next three years, both of which seem extraordinarily unlikely, for .com to be forced to adopt URS.
However, if URS has become an industry standard by then, political pressure could be brought to bear regardless.
Other changes to .pro and .cat contracts include a change in ICANN fees.
While .pro appears to have been on the standard new gTLD fee scheme since 2012, .cat is currently paying ICANN $1 per transaction.
Under the new contract, .cat would pay $0.25 per transaction instead, but its annual fixed fee would increase from $10,000 to $25,000.

.sucks extends controversial sunrise, delays GA

Vox Populi has extended the pricey .sucks sunrise period for three weeks, saying trademark owners need more time to participate.
Sunrise was due to end this week, with general availability kicking off today.
But Vox Pop has extended the period to June 19, with GA starting two days later.
In an email blast to fellow attendees of the INTA 2015 intellectual property conference, the registry said it has “discovered that far too many intellectual property lawyers and company executives were unaware of the registry or the availability of its names.”
Other brands were unaware of the Trademark Clearinghouse, the email said.
“Additionally, we have seen an influx of applications in the final days and hours of our TMCH Sunrise Period,” Vox Pop said.
“We are concerned about the extent of awareness and rush, and so have decided that the responsible move is to add a bit more time to the equation by extending the TMCH Sunrise period,” it said.
The change in timings have been announced on the registry’s web site.
While it’s possible to read the move cynically — a way for Vox Pop to claw more cash from rights holders — it’s not particularly unusual.
It is not unheard of for launching TLDs to extend their sunrise periods in order to deal with late demand.
Anecdotally, trademark owners tend to delay sunrise purchasing decisions until towards the end of sunrise windows, creating the impression of growing demand and adding pressure to processing cycles.
The .sucks sunrise has come under fire for its pricing — a $1,999 registry fee that is being marked up by registrars by everything from $20 to many hundreds of dollars.