These two ccTLDs drove two thirds of all domain growth in Q2

The number of registered domain names in the world increased by 2.9 million in the second quarter, driven by .com and two ccTLDs.
That’s according to the latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published (pdf) overnight, and other data.
The quarter ended with 354.7 million domains. Verisign’s own .com was up 1.5 million over Q1 at 142.5 million names.
ccTLDs across the board grew by 1.9 million names sequentially to 158.7 million. Year-over-year, the increase was 10.5 million domains.
The sequential ccTLD increase can be attributed almost entirely to two TLDs: .tw and .uk. These two ccTLDs appear to account for two thirds of the overall net new domains appearing in Q2.
Taiwan grew by about 600,000 in the quarter, presumably due to an ongoing, unusual pricing-related growth spurt among Chinese domainers that I reported in June.
The UK saw an increase of roughly 1.3 million domains, ending the quarter at 13.3 million.
That’s down to the deadline for registering second-level .uk matches for third-level .co.uk domains, which passed June 25.
Nominet data shows that 2LDs increased by about 1.2 million in the period, even as 3LDs dipped. The difference between this and the Verisign data appears to be rounding.
Factoring out the .uk and .tw anomalies, we have basically flat ccTLD growth, judging by the DNIB data.
Meanwhile, the new gTLD number was 23 million. That’s flat after rounding, but Verisign said that the space was actually up by about 100,000 names.
Growth as a whole was tempered by what I call the “other” category. That comprises the pre-2012 gTLDs such as .net, .org, .info and .biz. That was down by about a half a million names.
.net continued its gradual new gTLD-related decline, down 200,000 names sequentially at 13.6 million, while .org was down by 100,000 names.
The overall growth numbers are subject to the usual DNIB-related disclaimers: Verisign (and most everyone else) doesn’t have good data for some TLDs, including large zones such as .tk and .cn.

.blog registry handover did NOT go smoothly

The transition of .blog between registry back-end providers ended up taking six times longer than originally planned, due to “a series of unforeseen issues”.
Registry Knock Knock Whois There today told registrars that the move from Nominet to CentralNic took 18 hours to complete, far longer than the two to three hours anticipated.
An “unexpected database error” was blamed at one point for the delay, but KKWT said it is still conducting a post-mortem to figure out exactly what went wrong.
During the downtime, .blog registrations, renewals, transfers and general domain management at the registry level would not have been possible.
DNS resolution was not affected, so registrants of .blog domains would have been able to use their web sites and email as usual.
The migration, which covered roughly 200,000 domains, wrapped up at around 0800 UTC this morning. It seems engineers at the two back-end providers, both based in the UK, will have been working throughout the night to fix the issues.
KKWT reported the new CentralNIC EPP back-end functioning as expected but that several days of “post-migration clean-up” are to be expected.
Eighteen hours is more than the acceptable 14 hours of monthly downtime for EPP services under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement, but below the 24 hours of weekly downtime at which emergency measures kick in.
CentralNic already handles very large TLDs, including .xyz, but I believe this is the largest incoming migration it’s handled to date.
KKWT is owned by Automattic, the same company as WordPress.com.

CIRA replaces CORE as emergency backup registry

ICANN has switched around its line up of emergency registry providers, swapping out CORE Association for CIRA.
The organization last night announced that its three newly contracted Emergency Back-End Registry Operators are Nominet, CNNIC, and CIRA.
EBEROs are failsafe registries that will take over any gTLD that has failed or is on the verge of failing outright, putting its customers domains at risk.
The EBERO is responsible for winding down these gTLDs in an orderly fashion, giving registrants the chance to migrate to a different TLD.
So far, only .wed has entered the program, when the project with the imaginative business model of making it impractical to renew domains went out of business in 2017.
Nominet now caretakes .wed under the EBERO program.
Both Nominet (.uk) and CNNIC (.cn) have been approved EBEROs since 2013, under five-year contracts with ICANN.
CORE was also approved in 2013, but appears to have lost its contract. It’s been replaced by CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registry Association.
“We are honoured to be among this select group of trusted registry operators,” Dave Chiswell, VP of product development for CIRA, said in a statement. He said CIRA only suffered eight hours of downtime when it migrated .ca to a new back-end platform recently.
A key reason for CIRA replacing CORE is very likely geography. When ICANN put out its request for proposals last year, it made a big deal about how it wanted coverage in Europe, Asia and North America — where most gTLD registries are concentrated.
CORE is based in Switzerland. CIRA is obviously based in Canada and CNNIC is Chinese.
Another side-effect of the contract renegotiations is that ICANN is now paying 30% less for the services of the three providers, according to a recent board resolution.
The three providers are contracted for five years.
Whether, and to what extent, they’ll ever actually be triggered to provide EBERO services is open to debate.
Currently, there are six gTLDs in advanced stages of ICANN compliance proceedings, putting them at risk of having their contracts revoked: .whoswho, and five Persian-themed strings.
It’s not inconceivable than one or more of these gTLDs could wind up in EBERO, but ICANN appears to be cutting the registries a lot of slack to resolve their issues.

Cybersquatting cases down a bit in the UK

The number of cybersquatting complaints filed with Nominet declined slightly in 2018, according to the registry.
Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, which is a bit like the UDRP, handled 671 cases last year, compared to 712 in 2017.
The number of domains at issue was down from 783 to 763.
The slight decline appears to be because fewer complaints were filed against .org.uk, .me.uk and plain .uk domains.
The number of .co.uk registrations challenged was flat between 2017 and 2018 at 617 domains.
Only 49% of cases resulted in the disputed domain being transferred, according to the registry’s annual report (pdf).

1.8 million UK grandfathers die after Nominet deadline hits

The deadline for registering “grandfathered” second-level domains in .uk passed this morning, leaving at many as 1.88 million names unclaimed.
From June 2014 until 0500 UTC this morning, anyone who owned a third-level domain in zones such as .co.uk or .org.uk had rights to register the matching 2LD under .uk.
Those rights have all expired now, and all the unclaimed 2LDs will be returned to the available pool next month.
Four days ago, Nominet said that there were still 1.88 million rights that had not been exercised. That’s from the over 10 million 3LDs whose registrants were initially given rights.
In March, 3.2 million names were still unclaimed. It seems about 1.4 million names have been claimed, or expired, at the eleventh hour, almost all in June.
One way of looking at it is that the owners of almost one in five .co.uk domains either decided they didn’t want the matching 2LD, or were unaware that it was available.
But about half of the original domains with rights have since dropped, so the portion of current 3LD owners now at risk of confusion with their 2LD match could actually be more like four in 10.
At the end of May, 2,439,181 .uk domains had been registered (including non-grandfathered domains) and there were 9,729,224 names registered at the third level.
The 1.8 million unclaimed names will now be the subject of a landrush.
On July 1, Nominet will start releasing the names in batches, alphabetically.
Accredited registrars will start slamming the registry — Nominet has set up a separate set of EPP infrastructure purely for this expected onslaught — with requests to register the most-valuable names.
Some registrars have been taking pre-registrations and will auction any names they successfully claim to the customers who put in pre-orders.
After a week, any names not already claimed by registrars will be released to the public, again in batches, starting from July 8.
The system has been criticized by smaller registrars, many of which believe Nominet is giving its larger registrars a much better chance at winning the good names simply because they have deeper pockets.

Smaller registrars say .uk release is biased towards the Big Boys

A group of small .uk registrars have complained to Nominet that the imminent release of three million second-level .uk domain names is biased towards their deep-pocketed rivals.
So far, 33 registrars have signed a petition, penned by Netistrar’s Andrew Bennett, against Nominet’s rules.
On July 1, the registry plans to start releasing .uk 2LDs that are currently reserved under its five-year-long grandfathering program.
These are domains that match existing third-level domains in .co.uk, .org.uk, etc.
The 3LD registrants have until 0500 UTC on June 25 to claim their 2LD matches. A week later, Nominet will start releasing them in alphabetical batches of 600,000 per day, over five days, to the available pool.
It’s going to be a little like “the drop” in gTLDs such as .com, with registrars all vying to pick up the most-valuable names as soon as they are released.
In the gTLD space, each registrar is given an equal number of connections, which is why drop-catch specialists such as SnapNames own hundreds of registrar accreditations.
Nominet’s doing it a little different, instead throttling connections based on how much credit registrars have with the registry, which the petitioners believe rigs the system towards the registrars with the most money.
According to the Nominet, registrars with £450 of credit get six connections per minute, rising to nine per minute for those with £4,500, 60 per minute for £45,000 and, at the top end, 150 per minute for registrars with £90,000 stashed in the Bank of Nominet.
Larger registrars with multiple Nominet accreditations, known as “tags” in the .uk space, will be able to stack their connections for an even greater chance at grabbing the best names.
Registrars such as GoDaddy are already taking pre-orders and will auction off the domains they catch to the highest bidder, if there are multiple pre-orders for the same names, so there’s potentially a fair bit of money to be made.
The small registrars say these credit-based rules are “disproportionately unfair” to their business models.
They point out that it doesn’t make much sense to rate-limit connections based on their proven ability to pay, given that there’s no link between how many they plan to register in the crucial first minute after the drop and how many they intend to register overall.
Nominet says on its web site that the tiers as described are provisional and will be firmed up the week of June 24.
The petitioners are also bothered that Nominet has not made any EPP code available to help the smaller guys, which have fewer engineering resources, to adjust to this temporary, time-sensitive registration system, and that the release plan was not communicated well to registrars.
They further claim that Nominet has not conducted enough outreach to .uk registrants to let them know their grandfathered rights will soon expire.
Many well-known brands have yet to claim their trademark.uk names, they claim.
Nominet has previously told DI that it planned to advertise the end of grandfathering in the press and on radio in the run-up to the release.

Neustar loses most of its Amazon back-end biz to Nominet

Amazon has switched two thirds of its large portfolio of new gTLDs over to Nominet’s back-end registry services, replacing Neustar.
Judging by changes to IANA records this week, Amazon has moved 35 gTLDs to Nominet, leaving 17 at Neustar.
A Neustar spokesperson confirmed the changes, telling DI:

in an effort to diversify their back-end support, Amazon has chosen to move some, but not all, of their TLDs to another provider. Neustar will still manage multiple Amazon TLDs after the transition and we look forward to our continued partnership.

The switch more than doubles Nominet’s number of TLDs under management. Its biggest customer to date was MMX, which pushed 20 of its TLDs to the .uk registry in a restructuring a few years ago.
The Amazon loss, and a few others recently, also mean that Neustar is by my back-of-the-envelope calculation no longer the largest back-end when measured by the number of TLDs under management.
Those bragging rights would go to Donuts, which self-manages its own rather large portfolio of 241 TLDs. Neustar would remain the largest provider in terms of service provided to third-party clients.
The Neustar-to-Nominet technical migration appears to have kicked off a couple of weeks ago and emerged Wednesday when Nominet’s Technical Contact information replaced Neustar’s in most of Amazon’s IANA records.
Customers will not have noticed, because the TLDs in question barely have any customers.
The only one of the 35 affected TLDs with any registrations at all is .moi, which has just a couple hundred domains in its zone.
The other affected TLDs, none of which have launched, are: .moi, .yamaxun, .author, .book, .buy, .call, .circle, .fast, .got, .jot, .joy, .like, .pin, .read, .room, .safe, .smile, .tushu, .wanggou, .spot, .tunes, .you, .talk, .audible, .deal, .fire, .now, .kindle, .silk, .save, .hot, .pay, .secure, .wow and .free.
The TLDs remaining with Neustar are: .bot, .zero, .ポイント, .書籍, .クラウド, .ストア, .セール, .coupon, .zappos, .ファッション, .食品, .song, .家電, .aws, .imdb, .prime, and .通販.
Six of the TLDs staying with Neustar have launched, but only one, .bot, has more than 100 registrations.
.bot is a tightly restricted, experimental space currently in a long-term “limited registration period” which is not due to end until next January. It has around 1,500 names in its zone file.
Four of Amazon’s dot-brands are staying with Neustar, which is probably the most enthusiastic cheerleader for dot-brands out there, and four are going to Nominet.
Neustar appears to be keeping all of Amazon’s internationalized domain names. Nominet currently manages no IDNs.
How important the adjustment is from a dollar perspective would rather depend on what the per-domain component of the deals were, and whether Amazon ever plans to actually make its gTLDs commercially available.
In recent weeks, XYZ.com also moved its recently acquired .baby gTLD from Neustar, where it had been an unused dot-brand, to preferred provider CentralNic, while .kred and .ceo, both under the same ownership, also switched to CentralNic.

Most .uk registrants not interested in .uk

The majority of people eligible to register .uk domains at the second level have not yet chosen to do so, according to local registry Nominet.
Numbers the company released this week show that only two million 2LD .uk names have been registered since they first became available five years ago.
That’s despite the fact that the owners of over 10 million domains registered at the third level, such as under .co.uk or .org.uk, had exclusive rights to those names.
Today, the owners of 3.2 million .uk 3LDs have yet to exercise their grandfathered rights, Nominet said.
Those rights expire 0500 UTC June 25 this year.
Nominet plans to ramp up its outreach to affected registrants with radio, print and online ads in May, the company has previously told DI.
If you’re wondering why two million plus 3.2 million does not add up to 10 million, that’s because over the last five years about half of original 10 million domains with grandfathering rights have dropped.
Many will have been re-registered (which does not transfer the rights) or have been replaced with different fresh registrations, which is why Nominet’s total 3LDs under management has only declined from 10.4 million to 9.7 million since 2014.

At eleventh hour, most .uk registrants still don’t own their .uk names

Less than a quarter of all third-level .uk registrants have taken up the opportunity to buy their matching second-level domain, just a few months before the deadline.
According to February stats from registry Nominet, 9.76 million domains were registered under the likes of .co.uk and .org.uk, but only 2.27 million domains were registered directly under .uk, which works out at about 23%.
Nominet’s controversial Direct.uk policy was introduced in June 2014, with a grandfathering clause that gave all third-level registrants five years to grab their matching .uk domain before it returns to the pool of available names.
So if you own example.co.uk, you have until June 25 this year, 110 days from now, to exercise your exclusive rights to example.uk.
Registrants of .co.uk domains have priority over registrants of matching .org.uk and .me.uk domains. Nominet’s Whois tool can be used to figure out who has first dibs on any given string.
At least two brand protection registrars warned their clients this week that they will be at risk of cybersquatting if they don’t pick up their direct matches in time. But there’s potential for confusion here, after the deadline, whether or not you own a trademark.
I expect we could see a spike in complaints under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (the .uk equivalent of UDRP) in the back half of the year.
Nominet told DI in a statement today:

The take up right now is roughly in line with what we envisaged. We knew from the outset that some of the original 10 million with rights would not renew their domain, some would decide they did not want the equivalent .UK and some would leave it to the last minute to decide or take action. The feedback from both registrants and registrars, and the registration data, bears this out.

The statement added that the registry has started “ramping up” its outreach, and that in May it will launch “an advertising and awareness campaign” that will include newspapers, radio and trade publications.

Nominet takes down 32,000 domains for IP infringement

The number of .uk domains suspended by Nominet has doubled over the last year, almost entirely due to takedown requests concerning intellectual property.
The .uk registry said this week that it suspended 32,813 domains in the 12 months to October 31, up from 16,632 in the year-ago period.
It’s the fourth year in a row that the number of suspensions has more than doubled. In 2014, it was a paltry 948.
While Nominet has trusted notifier relationships with 10 law enforcement agencies, it’s the Police Intellectual Property Crimes Unit that is responsible for almost all of the takedown requests, 32,669 this year.
No court order or judicial review is required. Nominet simply carries out unspecified “administrative checks” then suspends the domain.
Only 114 domains did not make the cut this year, Nominet said, but that’s up considerably from 32 last year.
There’s an appeals mechanism that can be used by registrants to restore their domains, for example if they’ve removed the infringing content. It was used successfully 16 times in the year, up by one on last year.
The registry also reported that no domains were suspended due to its ban on incitement-to-rape domains, down from two last year, but that staff had to manually review 2,717 new registrations containing suspect strings.