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.gay prices and availability revealed as registry promises to give 20% of revenue to charity

Kevin Murphy, January 10, 2020, Domain Registries

The long-fought, once-controversial gTLD .gay is to launch a month from now.
Top Level Design, which won the string at auction against three other applicants last February, this week informed registrars that its sunrise period will begin February 10 this year. General availability will start May 20.
The registry, which beat a mission-focused, restricted “community” applicant for .gay, also said that it will give 20% of its top-line registration revenue to two LGBT charities — GLAAD and CenterLink.
With base registry fee of $25 per domain, that’s at least $5 going to gay charities for every domain sold. Registrars are being encouraged to match that donation at the retail level.
There will also be six tiers of “premium” domains — $100, $250, $650, $2,000, $5,000 and $12,500 — for which the 20% donation will also apply. Premium domains will renew at premium prices.
Top Level Design also says it is to enforce an anti-bullying policy. Any registrant using a .gay domain for “harassment, threats, and hate speech” will stand to lose their name. It’s a complaint-based enforcement policy; the registry will not actively monitor content.
Registrants who have forums on their .gay web sites will also have to police their user-generated content, to keep it in line with registry policy.
Its official policy even includes helpline numbers for bullied gay people who are feeling suicidal.
The registry appears to be making the right noises when it comes to calming concerns that an unrestricted, non-community .gay space could do more harm than good.
The key area where it diverges from the community application, which had been backed by dozens of gay-rights groups, is the lack of a ban on pornography. I’d hazard a guess that a good chunk of registration volume will come from that space.
The launch will comprise two sunrise periods and an early access period, before .gay goes to GA.
The first sunrise is the ICANN-mandated period, open only to those trademark owners with listings in the official Trademark Clearinghouse. That will run from February 10 to March 31. A second sunrise will be open to other trademarks, validated by back-end provider CentralNic. That runs from April 6 to May 6.
Both sunrise periods will include the automatic reservation of 10 potentially confusing Latin internationalized domain name variants, generated by CentralNic algorithm. This will include strings that transpose 0 and O or e and ë, for example.
EAP, the period in which early birds can grab the names they want for premium fees that decrease every day, runs from May 11 to May 17. Prices are not yet available.
GA is May 20.
Top Level Design originally planned to launch .gay last year, timed to coincide with National Coming Out Day in the US.
The new GA date appears to land on the anniversary of a landmark gay rights ruling in the US Supreme Court, Romer v Evans, but this may just be a coincidence.
.gay is launching about a month before the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in June, so we might see some marketing around that event.
Registrars signing up to sell .gay domains are also being given some schooling, apparently courtesy of GLAAD, about what language is currently cool and uncool to use in marketing.
Apparently, the terms “homosexual”, “sexual preference” and “transvestite” are considered offensive nowadays and are therefore verboten in registrar marketing. “Queer”, as a partially reclaimed offensive term, should be used with caution.
I suppose Top Level Design had better hope the word “gay” is not added to this list any time soon, otherwise it has a serious problem on its hands.

Google quietly launches .new domains sunrise

Kevin Murphy, October 14, 2019, Domain Registries

Google Registry will allow trademark owners to register domains matching their marks in the .new gTLD from tomorrow.
While the company hasn’t made a big public announcement about the launch, the startup dates it has filed with ICANN show that its latest sunrise period will run from October 15 to January 14.
As previously reported, .new is a bit of a odd one. Google plans to place usage restrictions that require registrants to use the domains in the pursuit of “action generation or online contention creation”.
In other words, it wants registrants to use .new in much the same way as Google is today, with domains such as docs.new, which automatically opens up a fresh Google Docs word processing document when typed into a browser address bar.
From January 14, all the way to July 14, Google wants to run a Limited Registration Period, which will require wannabe registrants to apply to Google directly for the right to register a name.
During that period, registrants will have to that they’re going to use their names in compliance with .new’s modus operandi. It’s Google’s hope that it can seed the space with enough third-party content for .new’s value proposition to become more widely known.
If you’re wanting to pick up a .new domain in general availability, it looks like you’ve got at least nine more months to wait.

.bond domains could cost a grand each

Kevin Murphy, September 19, 2019, Domain Registries

Newish registry ShortDot has announced the release details for its recently acquired .bond gTLD, and they ain’t gonna be cheap.
The TLD is set to go to sunrise in a little under a month, October 17, for 33 days.
General availability begins November 19 with a seven day early access period during which the domains will be more expensive than usual but get cheaper each day.
The regular pricing is likely to see registrars sell .bond names for between $800 and $1,000 a pop, according to ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas.
There won’t be any more-expensive premium tiers, he said.
The gTLD was originally owned by Bond University in Australia, but it was acquired unused by ShortDot earlier this year.
The company hopes it will appeal to bail bondsmen, offerers of financial bonds and James Bond fans.
The business model with .bond is diametrically opposed to .icu, where names sell for under $2 a year (and renew for under $8, if indeed any of them renew).
That zone has inexplicably gone from 0 to 1.8 million names in the last 16 months, and ShortDot says it’s just crossed the two-million mark of registered names.
That second million appears to have been added in just the last three months.

.gay picks the absolutely perfect launch date

Kevin Murphy, May 22, 2019, Domain Registries

Top Level Design has announced the launch date for its forthcoming .gay gTLD, and the timing couldn’t be more symbolic.
It’s picked October 11 as the date for general availability, which also happens to be National Coming Out Day in the US.
National Coming Out Day, which has been observed by gay rights organizations since 1987, is meant to celebrate LBGTQ people “coming out of the closet” and publicly acknowledging their sexual identity.
It happens on the same date every year to commemorate a 1987 civil rights march in Washington, DC.
According to Wikipedia, the event is also celebrated in Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK.
Leading up to its GA launch, Top Level Design plans to kick off its sunrise period in August.
Given that .gay has not yet been delegated, and has not filed its startup plan with ICANN, I imagine there’s some flexibility to the launch timetable.
The registry has recently been brainstorming ideas about how to promote positive content and reduce the inevitable abuse in its new TLD.

Got a spare three grand? For a limited period, you can buy a .th domain name

Kevin Murphy, May 21, 2019, Domain Registries

The Thailand ccTLD registry’s unusual, and unusually expensive, approach to selling second-level domains has seen .th open up for another limited-period application window.
Until June 30, anyone can pay THNIC Foundation a THB 10,000 ($313) fee to “apply for” a 2LD.
Each application will be manually reviewed, and successful registrants will be notified July 8.
But be warned: the fee for the first year and subsequent annual renewals is an eye-watering THB 100,000 ($3,130).
Trademark owners and owners of matching .co.th domains will get priority in the event of clashes with regular would-be registrants.
THNIC has been using this strange approach to second-level domain allocation — which looks more like a series of sunrise periods that never culminate in general availability — in sporadic, brief rounds for the last five years.
Most ccTLD registries with a legacy three-level structure — such as .uk, .jp and .nz — have opted to instead make 2LDs available in much the same way as 3LDs.

Pricey .inc does quite well in sunrise

Kevin Murphy, May 7, 2019, Domain Registries

The new gTLD .inc, which goes into general availability today, had a better-than-average number of sales in its sunrise period.
Intercap Registry, which runs .inc, said today that it had “over 270” sunrise registrations.
It’s not a massive amount, but it’s probably enough to put the TLD into the top 50 sunrises to date.
There had been 491 sunrise periods as of December 2018, according to ICANN data. The average number of sunrise regs was 137. The median was 77.
The largest sunrise to date was Google’s .app, which sold 2,908 domains during its sunrise last year.
Only five new gTLDs have racked up more than 1,000 sunrise sales, and three of those were porn-related. The fifth was .shop.
Based on 270 domains .inc would rank alongside similarly themed .llc, but also the likes of .solutions, .world and .team, where the case for a defensive reg is less clear.
While one can see a clear risk for companies whose names end in “Inc”, the expected retail price of .inc will be around $2,000, which Intercap says will deter cybersquatters.
Sunrise registrants will have paid a substantial markup on this regular price.
For those without zone file access, Intercap is actually posting the names and logos of the companies that have registered on its web site.

Registry offers “$2,500” in sweeteners for .inc registrants

Kevin Murphy, March 27, 2019, Domain Registries

The newly launching .inc gTLD may be eye-wateringly expensive, but the registry is offering a package of incentives it reckons adds up to a $2,500 value to new registrants.
Intercap Registry’s .inc went into sunrise today. It’s expected to have retail price of $2,000 and up when it goes to general availability May 7. Sunrise registrants can expect to pay a couple thousand more.
Given the high price, and the fact that many businesses that end in “Inc” will likely view it primarily as an opportunity to waste yet more cash on defensive registrations, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of this particular gTLD.
But I’ve got to give the registry credit for at least making an effort to bump up its value proposition.
It’s currently listing 17 freebies, provided mostly by partners, that new .inc registrants can cash in to soften the dent in their wallets.
Registrants can get a free business formation package from LegalZoom and a free press release announcing their new business issued on GlobalNewsWire, for example. Together, that’s worth over a grand, Intercap says.
Most of the other benefits on offer are discounts on services such as telephony, shared office space, printing, accounting, payment processing and advertising services. Some require additional spending before they can be cashed in.
Partners include Google, Ting, Delta Airlines, Vistaprint and Quickbooks. Some of the offers look like typical affiliate marketing deals.
I imagine different registrants will find different benefits appealing. Some may use none at all. Intercap says more sweeteners will be added in future.
The registry says that its high pricing is there to deter cybersquatters. I imagine this will be successful to a large extent, but that it will probably attract a healthy defensive registration business also.

Google launches .dev with some big-name anchor tenants

Kevin Murphy, February 20, 2019, Domain Registries

Google is bringing .dev to general availability this week, and it’s already signed up some recognizable brands as anchor tenants.
Salesforce.com, GitHub and Cloudflare are among several outfits that have already developed web sites using pre-launch .dev domains granted to them by Google Registry.
Salesforce is offering developer tools at the catch crm.dev, GitHub is running a spin-off tool at github.dev and Cloudflare has workers.dev.
All are developed sites, among many more highlighted by Google’s “chief domain enthusiast” Ben Fried in a blog post yesterday.
Sites targeting female coders and offering advice on accessibility issues have also been launched.
.dev appears to have attracted over 500 registrations during its pre-launch periods, including sunrise.
Yesterday, it entered its Early Access Period, a week in which early birds can acquire .dev domains for a premium fee.
From five figures yesterday, prices decrease each day until they hit their .com-equivalent regular pricing on February 28.

XYZ reveals .monster gTLD launch dates

Kevin Murphy, February 4, 2019, Domain Registries

XYZ.com has quietly unveiled its launch plan for its recently acquired gTLD, .monster.
General availability, with no eligibility requirements, is due to begin April 1.
The 30-day sunrise period is due to begin in just a couple of weeks — February 18.
.monster was acquired late last year from recruitment web site Monster.com, which had intended to operate it as a dot-brand, for an undisclosed sum.
Before the acquisition closed, Monster and ICANN amended the registry contract to cut the special dot-brand terms that would have removed the need for a sunrise period and would have prevented the domain being sold to regular registrants.
XYZ also intends to run a week-long Early Access Period — where premium prices apply — starting March 21.
I quite like the idea of .monster as an open gTLD.
While it’s certainly not going to perform as well volume-wise as .xyz, say, I can see it fitting nicely into the “quirky” niche occupied currently but the likes of Donuts’ .guru and .ninja — not really viable as standalone TLDs, but decent enough as part of a portfolio.
The company is pitching the TLD as “a domain for creative thinkers, masters of their craft, and modern-day renegades.”

Two controversial new gTLDs launching in January

Kevin Murphy, November 13, 2018, Domain Registries

Five years after the first batch of new gTLDs hit the market, registries continue to drip-feed them into the internet.
At least two more are due to launch on January 16 — .dev and .inc.
.dev is the latest of Google’s portfolio to be released, aimed at the software developer market.
It proved controversial briefly when it first was added to the DNS in 2014, causing headaches for some developers who were already using .dev domains on their private networks.
Four years is plenty of time for all of these collisions to have been cleaned up, however, so I can’t imagine many problems emerging when people start buying these names.
.dev starts a one-month sunrise January 16, sells at early access prices from February 19 to 28 before going to regular-price general availability.
Google has already launched one of its own products, web.dev, a testing tool for web developers, on a .dev domain.
Launching with a pretty much identical phased launch plan is .inc, from new market entrant Intercap Holdings, a Caymans-based subsidiary of a Toronto firm founded by .tv founder Jason Chapnik and managed by .xyz alumnus Shayan Rostam.
Intercap bought the .inc contract from Edmon Chong’s GTLD Limited earlier this year for an undisclosed sum. GTLD Ltd is believed to have paid in excess of $15 million for the TLD at auction.
.inc has proved controversial in the past, attracting criticism from states attorneys general in the US, which backed another bidder.
It may prove controversial in future, too. I have a hunch it’s going to attract more than its fair share of cybersquatters and will probably do quite well out of defensive registration fees.