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Donuts to launch .contact next week

Kevin Murphy, September 23, 2020, Domain Registries

Almost a year and a half after buying it, Donuts is ready to launch its newest gTLD, .contact.

According to ICANN records, the sunrise period for the domain will run from September 29 to November 28.

Registrars report that general availability will begin December 9. Retail pricing is expected to be competitive with .com.

Donuts will also run its traditional Early Access Period, from December 2, a week during which prices start very high and decline day by day.

It will be an unrestricted space, as it Donuts’ wont, and I imagine the suggested use case is something similar to the .tel model — the publication of contact information.

Donuts acquired .contact from Top Level Spectrum for an undisclosed amount in April 2019.

World’s youngest country launches its Nazi-risk TLD next week

South Sudan is gearing up to launch its controversial top-level domain, .ss, on Monday.

It’s being run by the National Communication Authority for the country, which was founded in 2011 after its split from Sudan and is the world’s youngest nation.

As I noted back then, while SS was the natural and obvious choice of ISO country code, it’s potentially controversial due to the risk of it being used by modern-day Nazis in honor of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel.

Arguably, the risk nine years later is even greater due to the rise of the populist, nationalist right around the world.

So some readers may be pleased to hear that the registry is playing its launch by the book, starting with a sunrise period from June 1 to July 15. Trademark owners will have to show proof of ownership.

I’m sure Hugo Boss already has an intern with a checkbook, trademark certificate and sleeping bag outside the registry’s HQ, to be sure to be first in line on Monday.

Sunrise will be followed by a landrush period from July 17 to August 17, during which names can be acquired for a premium fee.

Immediately after that there’ll be an early access period, from August 19 to August 29, with more premium fees. General availability will begin September 1.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the direction other ccTLDs have been taking over the last decade, South Sudan has opted for a three-level structure, with registrations possible under .com.ss, .net.ss, .biz.ss, .org.ss, .gov.ss, .edu.ss, .sch.ss and .me.ss.

The com/net/biz/me versions are open to all. The others require some proof that the registrant belongs to the specific category.

The registry says it plans to make direct second-level regs available “at a later date”.

Getting your hands on a .ss domain may prove difficult.

Trademark owners won’t be able to use their regular corporate registrar (at least not directly) as NCA is only currently accredited South Sudan-based registrars. So far, only two have been accredited. Neither are also ICANN-accredited.

One is rather unfortunately called JuHub. It’s apparently using a free domain from Freenom’s .ml (Mali) and is listed as having its email at Gmail, which may not inspire confidence. Its web site does not resolve for me.

The other is NamesForUs, which is already taking pre-registration requests. No pricing is available.

The registry’s web site has also been down for most of today, and appears to have been hacked by a CBD splogger at some point, neither of which bodes well.

Google launches .meet gTLD after Meet service goes free during lockdown

Google Registry is to launch its .meet gTLD next week with a sunrise period for trademark owners, but, perhaps controversially, it intends to keep the rest of the domains for itself.

It is expected that the company plans to use .meet domains in its Google Meet conferencing service, which was recently revamped and went free-to-use after Google realized that rival Zoom was eating its lunch during the coronavirus lockdown.

Google bought the .meet gTLD from Afilias back in 2015 but has kept it unused so far, even after the Meet service opened in 2017.

But according to ICANN records, it’s due to go into a one-month sunrise period from May 25, with an open-ended Trademark Claims period from June 25.

In a brief statement on its web site Google says:

Google Registry is launching the .meet TLD. This domain is Spec 9/ROCC exempt, which means we will be the registrant for all domains on the TLD and it will not be made generally available. The RRA for the TLD is available upon request, but registrations on behalf of the registry will be processed through a small number of registrars with whom the relevant product teams at Google work.

Translated from ICANN-speak, this means that Google has an exemption from Specification 9 in its .meet registry contract, releasing it from the Registry Operator Code of Conduct, which obliges registries to treat all registrars equally.

This means Google can’t sell the domains to anyone else, nor can it allow them to be controlled by anyone else, and it can use a limited pool of registrars to register names.

Spec 9 is a bit different to Spec 13, which exempts dot-brands from ICANN trademark-protection rules such as sunrise and Trademark Claims. You could argue that Spec 9 is “dot-brand lite”.

But what both Spec 9 and Spec 13 have in common is that they can’t be used in gTLDs ICANN considers a “generic string”, which is defined as:

a string consisting of a word or term that denominates or describes a general class of goods, services, groups, organizations or things, as opposed to distinguishing a specific brand of goods, services, groups, organizations or things from those of others.

Does .meet qualify there? It’s undoubtedly a dictionary word, but does it also describe a class of things? Maybe.

Google’s search engine itself gives one definition of “meet” as “an organized event at which a number of races or other athletic contests are held”, which one could reasonably argue is a class of services.

When Afilias applied for .meet in 2012, it expected it to be used by dating sites.

Google did not addresses the non-genericness of the string in its Spec 9 application. That judgement appears to have been made by ICANN alone.

Previously, requests for Spec 9 exemptions from the likes of .giving, .star, .analytics, .latino, .mutual, and .channel have been rejected or withdrawn.

It seems that Spec 9 exemption is going to somewhat limit .meet’s utility, given that third-parties will not be able to get “control or use of any registrations”.

Coronavirus: more delay and free domains for .gay

Top Level Design is delaying its general-availability launch of .gay domains for an indeterminate period due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The company said that the new gTLD, which had been slated to go GA May 20, will instead carry on in its trademark holders’ sunrise period indefinitely, until it’s figured out a new launch date.

But in the meantime it’s going to offer a “limited” number of .gay domains for free to any “LGBTQ organization, community group, individual, or small business looking for ways to foster digital Pride”.

These will presumably come from the pool of 100 domains that ICANN permits new gTLD registries to allocate prior to launch, so it certainly will not be a free-for-all.

It’s not the first time Top Level Design has rescheduled its launch. It had originally planned to come out to coincide with National Coming Out Day last October, but delayed to give it more time to get its marketing ducks in a row.

It looks like prospective .gay registrants are going to have to wait until the world’s attention is not so obsessively focused on coronavirus and life has somewhat returned to normal before they nab their names.

.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

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

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

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.