Trump gives Verisign almost $1 billion in free money

The Trump administration may have just handed Verisign close to $1 billion in free money.
That’s according to the back of the envelope I’m looking at right now, following the announcement that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is reinstating Verisign’s right to increase .com registry fees.
As you may have read elsewhere already (I was off sick last week, sorry about that) a new amendment to the Verisign-NTIA Cooperative Agreement restores Verisign’s ability to raise prices by 7% per year in four of the six years of the deal.
The removal of the Obama-era price freeze still needs to be incorporated into Verisign’s ICANN contract, but it’s hard to imagine ICANN, which is generally loathe to get into pricing regulation, declining to take its lead from NTIA.
Verisign would also have to choose to exercise its option to increase prices in each of the four years. I think the probability of this happening is 1 in 1.
Layering this and a bunch of other assumptions into a spreadsheet, I’m coming up with a figure of roughly an extra $920 million that Verisign will get to add to its top line over the next six years.
Again, this isn’t an in-depth study. Just back-of-the-envelope stuff. I’ll talk you through my thinking.
Not counting its occasional promotions, Verisign currently makes $7.85 for every year that a .com domain is added or renewed, and for every inter-registrar transfer.
In 2017, .com saw 40.89 million add-years, 84.64 million renew-years and 3.79 million transfers, according to official registry reports.
This all adds up to 129,334,643 revenue events for Verisign, or just a tad over $1 billion at $7.85 a pop.
Over the four-year period of the price increases transaction fees will go up to $8.40, then $8.99, then $9.62, then $10.29. I’m rounding up to the nearest penny here, it’s possible Verisign may round down.
If we assume zero transaction growth, that’s already an extra $762.2 million into Verisign’s coffers over the period of the contract.
But the number of transactions inevitably grows each year — more new domains are added, and some percentage of them renew.
Between 2016 and 2017, transaction growth was 3.16%.
If we assume the same growth each year for the next six years, the difference between Verisign’s total revenue at $7.85 and at the new pricing comes to $920 million.
Verisign doesn’t have to do anything for this extra cash, it just gets it.
Indeed, the new NTIA deal is actually less restrictive on the company. It allows Verisign to acquire or start up an ICANN-accredited gTLD registrar, something it is currently banned from doing, just as long as that registrar does not sell .com domains.
Verisign’s .net contract also currently bans the company from owning more than 15% of a registrar, so presumably that agreement would also need to be amended in order for Verisign to get into the registrar business.
I say again that my math here is speculative; I’m a blogger, not a financial analyst. There may be some incorrect assumptions — I’ve not accounted for promotions at all, for example, and the 3.16% growth assumption might not be fair — and there are of course many variables that could move the needle.
But the financial markets know a sweetheart deal when they see one, and Verisign’s share price went up 17.2% following the news, reportedly reaching heights not seen since since the dwindling days of the dot-com bubble 18 years ago.
The reason given for the lifting of the price freeze was, for want of a better word, bullshit. From the NTIA’s amendment:

In recognition that ccTLDs, new gTLDs, and the use of social media have created a more dynamic DNS marketplace, the parties agree that the yearly price for the registration and renewal of domain names in the .com registry may be changed

Huh?
This seems to imply that Verisign has somehow been disproportionately harmed by the rise of social media, the appearance of new gTLDs and some unspecified change in the ccTLD marketplace.
While it’s almost certainly true that .net has taken a whack due to competition from new gTLDs, and that the domain marketplace overall may have been diminished by many small businesses spurning domains by choosing to set up shop on, say, Facebook, .com is still a growing money-printing machine with some of the fattest margins seen anywhere in the business world and about a 40% global market share.
If the Trump administration’s goal here is to make some kind of ideological statement about free markets, then why not just lift the price caps altogether? Give Verisign the right to price .com however it pleases?
Or maybe Trump just wants to flip the bird to Obama once more by reversing yet another of his policies?
Who knows? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Donuts loses to ICANN in $135 million .web auction appeal

Donuts has lost a legal appeal against ICANN in its fight to prevent Verisign running the .web gTLD.
A California court ruled yesterday that a lower court was correct when it ruled almost two years ago that Donuts had signed away its right to sue ICANN, like all gTLD applicants.
The judges ruled that the lower District Court had “properly dismissed” Donuts’ complaint, and that the covenant not to sue in the Applicant Guidebook is not “unconscionable”.
Key in their thinking was the fact that ICANN has an Independent Review Process in place that Donuts could use to continue its fight against the .web outcome.
The lawsuit was filed by Donuts subsidiary Ruby Glen in July 2016, shortly before .web was due to go to an ICANN-managed last-resort auction.
Donuts and many others believed at the time that one applicant, Nu Dot Co, was being secretly bankrolled by a player with much deeper pockets, and it wanted the auction postponed and ICANN to reveal the identity of this backer.
Donuts lost its request for a restraining order.
The auction went ahead, and NDC won with a bid of $135 million, which subsequently was confirmed to have been covertly funded by Verisign.
Donuts then quickly amended its complaint to include claims of negligence, breach of contract and other violations, as it sought $22.5 million from ICANN.
That’s roughly how much it would have received as a losing bidder had the .web contention set been settled privately and NDC still submitted a $135 million bid.
As it stands, ICANN has the $135 million.
That complaint was also rejected, with the District Court disagreeing with earlier precedent in the .africa case and saying that the covenant not to sue is enforceable.
The Appeals Court has now agreed, so unless Donuts has other legal appeals open to it, the .web fight will be settled using ICANN mechanisms.
The ruling does not mean ICANN can go ahead and delegate .web to Verisign.
The .web contention set is currently “on-hold” because Afilias, the second-place bidder in the auction, has since June been in a so-called Cooperative Engagement Process with ICANN.
CEP is a semi-formal negotiation-phase precursor to a full-blown IRP filing, which now seems much more likely to go ahead following the court’s ruling.
The appeals court ruling has not yet been published by ICANN, but it can be viewed here (pdf).
The court heard arguments from Donuts and ICANN lawyers on October 9, the same day that DI revealed that ICANN Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah had been hired by Donuts as its new CEO.
A recording of the 32-minute hearing can be viewed on YouTube here or embedded below.

KSK vote was NOT unanimous

ICANN’s board of directors on Sunday voted to approve the forthcoming security key change at the DNS root, but there was some dissent.
Director Avri Doria, a Nominating Committee appointee, said today that she provided the lone vote against the DNSSEC KSK rollover, which is expected to cause temporary internet access problems for potentially a couple million people next month.
I understand there was also a single abstention to Sunday’s vote.
Doria has released a dissenting statement, in which she said the absence of an external, peer-reviewed study of the risks could prove a problem.

The greatest risk is that out of the millions that will fail after the roll over, some that are serious and may even be critical, may occur; if this happens the lack of peer reviewed studies may be a liability for ICANN, perhaps not legal, but in terms of our reputation as protectors of the stability & security of internet system of names.

She added that she was concerned about the extent that the public has been notified of the rollover plan, and questioned whether the current risk mitigation plan is sufficient.
Doria said she found comments filed by Verisign (pdf) particularly informative to her eventual vote, as well as comments from the At-Large Advisory Committee (pdf), Business Constituency (pdf) and Registries Stakeholder Group (pdf).
These groups had called for more study and data, better outreach, more clearly defined success/failure benchmarks, and more delay.
Doria noted in her dissenting statement that the ICANN board did not have a chance to quiz any of the minority of the members of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee who had called for further delay.
The board’s resolution, apparently arrived at after two hours of formal in-person discussions in Brussels at the weekend, is expected to be published shortly.
The rollover, which has already been delayed a year, is now scheduled to go ahead October 11.
Any impact is expected to be felt within a couple of days, as the change ripples out across the DNS.
ICANN says that any network operator impacted by the change has a simple fix: turn off DNSSEC. Then, if they want, they can update their keys and turn it back on again.

ICANN faces critical choice as security experts warn against key rollover

Members of ICANN’s top security body have advised the organization to further delay plans to change the domain name system’s top cryptographic key.
Five dissenting members of the influential, 22-member Security and Stability Advisory Committee said they believe “the risks of rolling in accordance with the current schedule are larger than the risks of postponing”.
Their comments relate to the so-called KSK rollover, which would see ICANN for the first time ever change the key-signing key that acts as the trust anchor for all DNSSEC queries on the internet.
ICANN is fairly certain rolling the key will cause DNS resolution problems for some — possibly as much as 0.05% of the internet or a couple million people — but it currently lacks the data to be absolutely certain of the scale of the impact.
What it does know — explained fairly succinctly in this newly published guide (pdf) — is that within 48 hours of the roll, a certain small percentage of internet users will start to see DNS resolution fail.
But there’s a prevailing school of thought that believes the longer the rollover is postponed, the bigger that number of affected users will become.
The rollover is currently penciled in for October 11, but the ultimate decision on whether to go ahead rests with the ICANN board of directors.
David Conrad, the organization’s CTO, told us last week that his office has already decided to recommend that the roll should proceed as planned. At the time, he noted that SSAC was a few days late in delivering its own verdict.
Now, after some apparently divisive discussions, that verdict is in (pdf).
SSAC’s majority consensus is that it “has not identified any reason within the SSAC’s scope why the rollover should not proceed as currently planned.”
That’s in line with what Conrad, and the Root Server System Advisory Committee have said. But SSAC noted:

The assessment of risk in this particular area has some uncertainty and therefore includes a component of subjective judgement. Individuals (including some members of the SSAC) have different assessments of the overall balance of risk of the resumption of this plan.

It added that it’s up to the ICANN board (comprised largely of non-security people) to make the final call on what the acceptable level of risk is.
The minority, dissenting opinion gets into slightly more detail:

The decision to proceed with the keyroll is a complex tradeoff of technical and non-technical risks. While there is risk in proceeding with the currently planned roll, we understand that there is also risk in further delay, including loss of confidence in DNSSEC operational planning, potential for more at-risk users as more DNSSEC validation is deployed, etc.
While evaluating these risks, the consensus within the SSAC is that proceeding is preferable to delay. We personally evaluate the tradeoffs differently, and we believe that the risks of rolling in accordance with the current schedule are larger than the risks of postponing and focusing heavily on additional research and outreach, and in particular leveraging newly developed techniques that provide better signal and fidelity into potentially impacted parties.
We would like to reiterate that we understand our colleagues’ position, but evaluate the risks and associated mitigation prospects differently. We believe that the ultimate decision lies with the ICANN Board, and do not envy them with this decision.

SSAC members are no slouches when it comes to security expertise, and the dissenting members are no exception. They are:

• Lyman Chapin, co-owner of Interisle Consulting, a regular ICANN contractor perhaps best-known to DI readers for carrying out a study into new gTLD name collisions five years ago.
• Kimberly “kc claffy” Claffy, head of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California in San Diego. CAIDA does nothing but map and measure the internet.
• Jay Daley, a registry executive with a technical background whose career includes senior stints at .uk and .nz. He’s currently keeping the CEO’s chair warm at .org manager Public Interest Registry.
• Warren Kumari, a senior network security engineer at Google, which is probably the largest early adopter of DNSSEC on the resolution side.
• Danny McPherson, Verisign’s chief security officer. As well as .com, Verisign runs the two of the 13 root servers, including the master A-root. It’s running the boxes that sit at the top of the DNSSEC hierarchy.

It may be the first time SSAC has failed to reach a full-consensus opinion on a security matter. If it has ever published a dissenting opinion before, I certainly cannot recall it.
The big decision about whether to proceed or delay is expected to be made by the ICANN board during its retreat in Brussels, a three-day meeting that starts September 14.
Given that ICANN’s primary mission is “to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems”, it could turn out to be one of ICANN’s biggest decisions to date.

New gTLDs rebound in Q2

New gTLD registration volumes reversed a long trend of decline in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The DNIB (pdf), published late last week, shows new gTLD domains up by 1.6 million sequentially to 21.8 million at the end of June, a 7.8% increase.
That’s the first time Verisign’s numbers have shown quarterly growth for new gTLDs since December 2016, five quarters of shrinkage ago.
[table id=51 /]
The best-performing new gTLD across Q2 was .top according to my zone file records, adding about 600,000 names.
.top plays almost exclusively into the sub-$1 Chinese market and is regularly singled out as a spam-friendly zone. SpamHaus currently ranks it as almost 45% “bad”.
Overall, the domain universe saw growth of six million names, or 1.8%, finishing the quarter at 339.8 million names, according to Verisign.
Verisign’s own .com ended Q2 with 135.6 million domains, up from 133.9 million at the end of March.
That’s a sequential increase of 1.7 millions, only 100,000 more than the total net increase from the new gTLD industry.
.net is still suffering, however, flat in the period with 14.1 million names.
ccTLDs saw an increase of 3.5 million names, up 2.4%, to end June at 149.7 million, the DNIB states.
But that’s mainly as a result of free TLD .tk, which never deletes names. Stripping its growth out (Verisign and partner ZookNic evidently have access to .tk data now) total ccTLD growth would only have been 1.9 million names.

Have your say on single-character .com domains

ICANN wants your opinion on its plan to allow Verisign to auction off o.com, with a potential impact on the future release of other single-character .com domain names.
The organization has published a proposed amendment to the .com registry contract and opened it for public comment.
The changes would enable Verisign to sell o.com, while keeping all other currently unallocated single-character names on its reserved list.
The company would not be able to benefit financially from the auction beyond its standard $7.85 reg fee — all funds would be held by an independent third-party entity and distributed to undisclosed non-profit causes.
The arrangement would also see the buyer pay a premium renewal fee of 5% of the initial outlay, doubling the purchase price over the course of 25 years.
They would not be able to resell the domain without selling the registrant company itself.
It’s a pretty convoluted system being proposed, given that there may well end up only being one bidder.
Overstock.com, the online retailer, has been pressuring ICANN and Verisign to release o.com for well over a decade, and the proposed auction seems to be a way to finally shut it up.
The company has a US trademark on O.com, so any other bidder for the name would probably be buying themselves a lawsuit.
The proposed auction system does not address trademark issues — there’s no sunrise period of trademark claims period.
One party already known to be upset about lack of rights protection is First Place Internet, a search engine company that has a US trademark on the number 1.
It told ICANN (pdf) back in January that the o.com deal would “set a dangerous precedent” for future single-character name releases.
The ICANN public comment period, which comes after ICANN received the all-clear from US competition regulators, closes June 20.
As a matter of disclosure, several years ago I briefly acted as a consultant to a third party in support of the Verisign and Overstock positions, but I have no current interest in the situation one way or the other.

.com adds 5.5 million names, renewals back over 70%

Verisign reported first-quarter financial results that reflected a healthier .com namespace following the spike caused by Chinese speculation in 2016.
The company Friday reported that .com was up to 133.9 million domains at the end of March, an increase of 5.5 million over the year.
The strong showing was tempered slightly by a further decline in .net, where domains were down from 15.2 million to 14.4 million.
Over the quarter, there was a net increase of 1.9 million names across both TLDs and the renewal rate was an estimated 74.9%, a pretty damn good showing.
Actual renewals for Q4, measurable only after Verisign announced its earnings, were confirmed at 72.5%, compared to a worryingly low 67.6% in Q4 2016.
In a call with analysts, CEO James Bidzos confirmed that the turnaround was due to the surge in Chinese domainer speculation that drove numbers in 2016 finally working its way out of the system.
In Q1, the cash-printing company saw net income of $134 million, compared to $116 million a year earlier, on revenue up 3.7% at $299 million.
Bidzos told analysts that it’s “possible” that the company may get to launch .web in 2018, but said Verisign has not baked any impact from the contested gTLD into its forecasts.

Industry report show slightly stronger growth than Verisign’s

The latest domain name industry growth figures from CENTR show slightly better performance than a recent report from Verisign covering the same period.
CENTR says in its latest DomainWire Global TLD Report there were 331.1 million registered domains at the end of 2017, whereas Verisign, in its Domain Name Industry Brief last month, put that at 332.4 million domains.
But CENTR’s figures show growth of 1.2% compared to the end of 2016, a figure Verisign put at 0.9%.
The CENTR report shows growth in ccTLDs offset by a 0.4% decline in gTLD registrations. The drag factors for gTLDs were largely .net, .xyz and .top.
CENTR and Verisign use mostly the same sources for their data — published zone files for gTLDs and cooperative ccTLDs, and independent researcher Zooknic to plug the gaps — but they vary in how they calculate their growth numbers.
For example, Verisign said .com ended the year with 131.9 million names, but CENTR puts that number at 130.4 million. It looks to me like Verisign counts registered domains that do not appear in the .com zone file to get to its total.
In addition, CENTR excludes dot-brand gTLDs, gTLDs with fewer than 500 domains, and ccTLDs that do not provide reliable quarter-to-quarter data from its calculations.
The CENTR report can be downloaded here.

Domain universe grows almost 1% in 2017 despite new gTLD slump

The total number of registered domain names in all TLDs was up 0.9% in 2017, despite a third-quarter dip, according to the latest data compiled by Verisign.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published yesterday, shows that there were 332.4 million domains registered at the end of the year.
That’s up by 1.7 million names (0.5%) on the third quarter and up 3.1 million names (0.9%) on 2016.
Growth is growth, but when you consider that 2015-2016 growth was 6.8%, under 1% appears feeble.
The drag factors in 2017 were of course the 2012-round new gTLDs and Verisign’s own .net, offset by increases in .com and ccTLDs.
New gTLD domains were 20.6 million at the end of the year, down by about 500,000 compared to the third quarter and five million names compared to 2016.
As a percentage of overall registrations, new gTLDs dropped from 7.8% at the end of 2016 to 6.2%.
The top 10 new gTLDs now account for under 50% of new gTLD regs for the first time.
The numbers were primarily affected by big declines in high-volume spaces such as .xyz, which caused the domain universe to actually shrink in Q3.
Verisign’s own .com fared better, as usual, with .net suffering a decline.
The year ended with 131.9 million .com names, up by five million names on the year, exactly offsetting the shrinkage in new gTLDs.
But .net ended up with 14.5 million names, a 800,000 drop on 2016.
In the ccTLD world, total regs were up 1.4 million (1%) quarterly and 3.4 million (2.4%) annually.
Excluding wild-card ccTLD .tk, which never deletes domains and for which data for 2017 was not available to Verisign, the growth was a more modest 0.7 million (0.5%) quarterly and 2.3 million (1.8%) annually.
The DNIB report for Q4 2017 can be downloaded here (pdf).

Donuts releases free TLD-neutral name-spinner

Donuts has announced the release of a free name-spinner tool for registrars and resellers.
Relevant Name Search, found at rns.domains, isn’t a destination site in itself, but will be free for registrars to integrate into their storefronts.
The company said it’s been in beta testing with eNom, Dreamhost, Dynadot and Name.com, with eNom using it for over a year.
The service recalls something similar released by Verisign.
However, unlike the Verisign NameStudio tool, Donuts said RNS is “registry-neutral”, meaning it’s not designed to plug its own portfolio of TLDs over those from other registries.
I subjected the service to a quick, non-scientific test today and found the results much more semantically relevant than the Verisign tool, which only returns .com, .net and .cc results.
When I used NameStudio in November to search for “vodka”, my best offering was dogvodka.com. With RNS, I was offered the likes of vodka.bar, vodka.rocks, vodka.party, vodka.social and vodka.trade (all of which appear to carry premium pricing).
While Verisign offered me funattorney.com on a search for “attorney”, Donuts offered up attorney.lawyer, attorney.lgbt and attorney.blog.
RNS does not ignore legacy gTLDs, however. Doing a search for something a little more niche will bring up .com and .net domains, appropriately (in my view) ranked.
Search for “birmingham taxi” and you’ll get three relevant .limo domains (yeah, .limo exists, apparently) before birminghamtaxi.net.
Similarly, if you want to open up a pizza place in Cardiff, search for “cardiff pizza” and you’ll get offered cardiff.pizza, cardiffpizza.menu, cardiffpizza.restaurant, cardiffpizza.cafe and cardiffpizza.delivery before you get to cardiffpizza.com.
Many domain investors would say that the .com is unarguably the superior domain (it’s also unregistered and non-premium), but even those people would have to admit that the five more prominent suggestions have more semantic relevance.
Donuts said that RNS is configurable to take into account TLD-specific promotions, geography and marketing campaigns, and that it can be integrated with a single API call.