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As .wed goes EBERO, did the first new gTLD just fail?

Kevin Murphy, December 11, 2017, 13:50:43 (UTC), Domain Registries

A wedding-themed gTLD with a Bizarro World business model may become the first commercial gTLD to outright fail.
.wed, run by a small US outfit named Atgron, has become the first non-brand gTLD to be placed under ICANN’s emergency control, after it lost its back-end provider.
DI understands that Atgron’s arrangement with its small New Zealand back-end registry services provider CoCCA expired at the end of November and that there was a “controlled” transition to ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program.
The TLD is now being managed by Nominet, one of ICANN’s approved EBERO providers.
It’s the first commercial gTLD to go to EBERO, which is considered a platform of last resort for failing gTLDs.
A couple of unused dot-brands have previously switched to EBERO, but they were single-registrant spaces with no active domains.
.wed, by contrast, had about 40 domains under management at the last count, some apparently belonging to actual third-party registrants.
Under the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, ICANN can put a TLD in the emergency program if they fail to meet up-time targets in any of five critical registry functions.
In this case, ICANN said that Atgron had failed to provide Whois services as required by contract. The threshold for Whois triggering EBERO is 24 hours downtime over a week.
ICANN said:

Registry operator, Atgron, Inc., which operates gTLD .WED, experienced a Registration Data Directory Services failure, and ICANN designated EBERO provider Nominet as emergency interim registry operator. Nominet has now stepped in and is restoring service for the TLD.
The EBERO program is designed to be activated should a registry operator require assistance to sustain critical registry functions for a period of time. The primary concern of the EBERO program is to protect registrants by ensuring that the five critical registry functions are available. ICANN’s goal is to have the emergency event resolved as soon as possible.

However, the situation looks to me a lot more like a business failure than a technical failure.
Multiple sources with knowledge of the transition tell me that the Whois was turned off deliberately, purely to provide a triggering event for the EBERO failover system, after Atgron’s back-end contract with CoCCA expired.
The logic was that turning off Whois would be far less disruptive for registrants and internet users than losing DNS resolution, DNSSEC, data escrow or EPP.
ICANN was aware of the situation and it all happened in a coordinated fashion. ICANN told DI:

WED’s backend registry operator recently notified ICANN that they would likely cease to provide backend registry services for .WED and provided us with the time and date that this would occur. As such, we were aware of the pending failure worked to minimize impact to registrants and end users during the transition to the Emergency Back-end Registry Operator (EBERO) service provider.

In its first statement, ICANN said that Nominet has only been appointed as the “interim” registry, while Atgron works on its issues.
It’s quite possible that the registry will bounce back and sign a deal with a new back-end provider, or build its own infrastructure.
KSregistry, part of the KeyDrive group, briefly provided services to .wed last week before the EBERO took over, but I gather that no permanent deal has been signed.
One wonders whether it’s worth Atgron’s effort to carry on with the .wed project, which clearly isn’t working out.
The company was founded by an American defense contractor with no previous experience of the domain name industry after she read a newspaper article about the new gTLD program, and has a business model that has so far failed to attract customers.
The key thing keeping registrars and registrants away in droves has been its policy that domains could be registered (for about $50 a year) for a maximum period of two years before a $30,000 renewal fee kicked in.
That wasn’t an attempt to rip anybody off, however, it was an attempt to incentivize registrants to allow their domains to expire and be used by other people, pretty much the antithesis of standard industry practice (and arguably long-term business success).
That’s one among many contractual reasons that only one registrar ever signed up to sell .wed domains.
Atgron’s domains under management peaked at a bit over 300 in March 2016 and were down to 42 in August this year, making it probably the failiest commercial new gTLD from the 2012 round.
In short, .wed isn’t dead, but it certainly appears extremely unwell.
UPDATE: This post was updated December 12 with a statement from ICANN.

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Comments (1)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:
    December 11, 2017 at 2:50 pm

    But if KSRegistry was providing services to .wed, even on an interim basis, that would make the alleged operational reason for transitioning to EBERO bogus.

    Reply

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