Donuts makes six-figure .news sale to dangerous conspiracy theorist

Donuts has sold a package of “platinum” .news domains to a network of dubious news sites peddling what many describe as dangerous pseudo-scientific nonsense.
A company called WebSeed acquired science.news, food.news, health.news, medicine.news, pollution.news, cancer.news and climate.news from the registry for an undisclosed sum in the six-figure range last December, Donuts said.
It appears that the same buyer has acquired several other presumably non-platinum .news domains, including vaccines.news, nutrients.news, menshealth.news and emergencymedicine.news
The sites have already been developed, incorporating a back catalog of “news” content from other sites under the same ownership, and Donuts reckons searches for “climate news” and “science news” already return the matching domains prominently (they don’t for me, but Google can be fickle).
Unfortunately, the domains seem to have been sold to a leading purveyor of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
That’s right, climate.news now belongs to a climate change denier, vaccines.news belongs to an anti-vaxxer, and medicine.news belongs to somebody who values alternative remedies over science-based medicine.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the content on the network of .news domains comes from Natural News, the controversial site owned by “Health Ranger” Mike Adams.
Natural News has been fingered as an “empire of misinformation” and a leading contributor to the “fake news” crisis that has been blighting society for the last few years.
Check out climate.news today to be treated to Adams’ theory that climate change is nothing but a conspiracy peddled by the UN and the mainstream media.
Over on vaccines.news, you’ll find a scaremongering story about how the measles vaccine has killed more people than measles over the last decade.
(Gee, I wonder why measles isn’t killing anyone any more? Could it be that we have a fucking vaccine?).
On medicine.news, Adams himself writes of “PROOF that vaccines target blacks for depopulation”.
And at pollution.news, you’ll find any number of articles discussing the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not scientifically literate enough to debunk most of the content on these sites, but I know quackery when I see it.
Donuts’ press release goes to suspicious pains to point out that the sites’ content is “thoroughly researched” and advertising is “limited and relevant to the sites’ content”.
In fact, the advertising seems in most if not all cases to lead back to Adams’ own stores, where he sells stuff like water purifiers, dietary supplements and alternative medicines.
The Donuts press release also quotes the founder and CEO of WebSeed, one “Mike Texas”.
Now, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Mr Texas is not a real person.
But.
Whois records (remember those?) show that the original registrant of science.news was one Mike Adams of WebSeed LLC, and WebSeed.com, while under privacy for some years, was originally registered to Adams’ Taiwan-based company.
It goes without saying that Donuts, as a neutral registry, is under no obligation whatsoever to police content on the domains it sells. That would be a Bad Thing.
But I can’t help but feel that .news has the potential to take a big credibility hit due to the content of these sites.
Imagine a fox, buying up all the good .henhouse domains. It’s a bit like that.

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.

Famous Four following .sucks playbook with premium pricing for brands?

New gTLD registry Famous Four Media has slapped general availability prices of $500 and up on domain names matching famous brands.
The company plans to shortly introduce eight “premium” pricing tiers, ranging from $200 a year to $10,000 a year.
The first to launch, on July 8, will be its “brand protection tier”, which will carry a $498 registry fee.
Famous Four told its registrars that the tier “will provide an additional deterrent to cyber-squatters for well-known brands ensuring that domain names in this tier will not be eligible for price promotions”.
The gTLDs .date, .faith and .review will be first to use the tiered pricing structure.
It’s not entirely clear what brands will be a part of the $498 tier, or how the registry has compiled its list, but registrars have been given the ability to ask for their clients’ trademarks to be included.
I asked Famous Four for clarification a few days ago but have not yet had a response.
While other registries, such as Donuts, used tiered pricing for GA domains, I’m only aware of one other that puts premium prices on brands: .sucks.
Vox Populi has a trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains it calls Market Premium — formerly Sunrise Premium — that carry a $1,999-a-year registry fee.
Unlike Vox Pop, Famous Four does not appear to be planning a subsidy that would make brand-match domains available at much cheaper prices to third parties.
Famous Four’s gTLDs have seen huge growth in the last month or two, largely because it’s been selling domains at a loss.
.science, for example, has over 300,000 registrations — making it the third-largest new gTLD — because Famous Four’s registry fee has been discounted to just $0.25 from May to July.
The same discount applies to .party (over 195,000 names in its zone) and .webcam (over 60,000).
Those three gTLDs account for exactly half of the over 22,000 spam attacks that used new gTLD domains in March and April, according to Architelos’ latest abuse report.
With names available at such cheap prices, it would not be surprising if cybersquatters are abusing these gTLDs as much as the spammers.
Will intellectual property owners believe a $498+ reg fee is a useful deterrent to cybersquatting?
Or will they look upon this move as “predatory”, as they did with .sucks?

TLDH and Famous Four ink new gTLD revenue sharing deal

New gTLD portfolio applicants Top Level Domain Holdings and Famous Four Media did in fact make a deal to resolve three contention sets, as suspected.
TLDH has just confirmed that it withdrew its applications for .science and .review in exchange for Famous Four withdrawing its application for .fit.
But the deal also includes a revenue-sharing component — TLDH will get a cut of whatever revenue Famous Four makes selling .review domain names after it goes live.
All three of the gTLDs in question were in two-way contention sets between the two companies, as we reported yesterday.
TLDH gave the following update:

TLDH now has interests in 23 uncontested applications, including 15 wholly/majority owned applications, 6 where it is acting as the registry service provider for client applications, 1 equal joint venture, and 1 where it will receive a minority revenue share. Of the remaining 63 applications which TLDH either wholly-owns, is a joint-venture partner, or is acting as the registry service provider, 7 are in contention with a single other applicant, 17 with two other applicants and 39 are in contention with three or more applicants.

While the dollar amounts concerned were not disclosed, I can’t help but feel TLDH got a good deal with .review.
For the cost of an ICANN application fee*, much of which was recouped in refunds, it seems to be getting an ongoing revenue stream with no ongoing costs and little future risk.
* Of course, in TLDH’s case it has also been burning cash for the best part of five years waiting for new gTLDs to come to life, but you get the point.

Famous Four wins two new gTLD contention sets

Four new gTLD applications were withdrawn overnight, resolving three contention sets.
Top Level Domain holdings has pulled its bids for .review and .science, in both cases leaving subsidiaries of portfolio applicant Famous Four Media as the only remaining applicant.
Meanwhile, Famous Four withdrew its .fit application, leaving TLDH as the only remaining applicant.
Buyouts? It seems possible. The .review application passed its Initial Evaluation a month ago, so the ICANN refund due to TLDH will have been dramatically reduced.
As a publicly traded company, TLDH is likely to issue a statement at some point explaining the current state of its applications.
But one of the side effects of ICANN’s preference for private deals is that we won’t always know when two or more companies privately resolve their contention sets.
There are at least two other contention sets where I have very good reasons to believe that deals have already been done, partially resolving the set, but nothing has yet been disclosed.
Also overnight, L’Oreal’s application for .garnier, a dot-brand, was withdrawn. It’s the fifth, and probably not the last, of L’Oreal’s 14 original new gTLD application to be dropped.
Governmental Advisory Committee advice has been leveled against .fit and .review, but not .science.
UPDATE: The original version of this story erroneously reported that TLDH, rather than Famous Four, had withdrawn its .fit application. This has now been corrected. Apologies for the error.

TLDH applies for 92 gTLDs, 68 for itself

Top Level Domain Holdings is involved in a grand total of 92 new generic top-level domain applications, many of them already known to be contested.
Sixty-eight applications are being filed on its own behalf, six have been submitted via joint ventures, and 18 more have been submitted on behalf of Minds + Machines clients.
Here’s the list of its own applications:

.abogado (Spanish for .lawyer), .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa (Spanish for .home), .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, 网址 (.site in Chinese), 购物 (.shopping in Chinese).

There’s a lot to note in that list.
First, it’s interesting to see that TLDH is hedging its bets on the environmental front, applying for both .eco (which we’ve known about for years) and .green.
This puts it into contention with the longstanding Neustar-backed DotGreen bid, and possibly others we don’t yet know about, which should make for some interesting negotiations.
Also, both of TLDH’s previously announced Indian city gTLDs, .mumbai and .bangaluru, seem to have fallen through, as suspected.
Other contention sets TLDH is now confirmed to be involved in include: .blog, .site, .immo, .hotel, .home, .casa, .love, .law, .cloud, .baby, .art, .gay, .style and .store.
The company said in a statement:

During the next six months, TLDH will focus its efforts on marketing and operations for geographic names such as dot London and dot Bayern where it has the exclusive support of the relevant governing authority, as well as any other gTLDs that TLDH has filed for that are confirmed to be uncontested on the Reveal Date. Discussions with other applicants regarding contested names will be handled on a case-by-case basis.