XYZ adds 35th gTLD to its stable

XYZ has acquired .ceo, making its portfolio of new gTLDs now 35-strong.

XYZ, judging by a blog post and press release, seems to the sticking to the original use case of yourname.ceo, highlighting a couple of CEOs that are using .ceo as their primary domain. But it seems that many of the .ceo domains with Google juice are generics.

The former registry was CEOTLD of Australia, originally affiliated with social media wannabe PeopleBrowsr.

When the gTLD launched a decade ago the plan was to issue registrants with their own template calling card style web sites, but the idea never really caught on.

.ceo had 3,789 domains at the end of June, according to the latest registry reports. GoDaddy and Namecheap were its largest registrars.

Looks like XYZ bought another gTLD

XYZ.com appears to have added the 34th string to its swelling stable of gTLDs.

ICANN records suggest that it’s taken over the contract for .lat, a TLD aimed at Latin America.

While no contract reassignment documentation has been published, the transfer of .lat from ECOM-LAC, the Uruguay-based registry, to XYZ is on ICANN’s list of contract movements.

.lat’s addressable market is the over 600 million people in the Latin American region, not to mention the global diaspora. Names sell for as little as $25 per year.

But it only has about 5,500 domains under management right now, seven years after launch.

In theory, it would compete with .latino, but that appears to be a dodgy defensive delegation, never launched, by satellite TV company Dish.

Universal unacceptance? ICANN lets XYZ dump languages from UNR gTLDs

Even as CEO Göran Marby was accepting an ambassadorship from the Universal Acceptance Steering Group last month, ICANN was quietly approving a registry’s plan to drop support for several languages, potentially putting dozens of domains at risk.

It seems portfolio registry XYZ.com was having problems migrating the 10 gTLDs it recently acquired in UNR’s firesale auction from the UNR back-end to long-time partner CentralNic, so it’s cutting off some language support to ease the transition.

The company told ICANN in a recent Registry Services Evaluation Process request (pdf) that internationalized domain names in Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and German were “causing issues with the [Registry System Testing] for the technical transition”.

“So, in order to move forward with the migration to CentralNic, we have no choice but to remove support for these IDNs. This will only impact fewer than 50 registrations in these TLDs,” the company told ICANN.

I asked both XYZ and CentralNic whether this means the IDN domains in question would be deleted but got no response from either.

Support for the four languages will be removed in .christmas, .guitars, .pics, .audio, .diet, .flowers, .game, .hosting, .lol, .mom according to contractual amendments that ICANN has subsequently approved.

The RSEP was published the same week ICANN signed a memorandum of understanding with .eu registry EURid, promising to collaborate on IDNs and universal acceptance.

The same week, Marby, who has stated publicly on several occasions his commitment to IDNs and UA, was named an honorary ambassador of the UASG to “help amplify the importance of UA work to enable a multilingual Internet”.

UPDATE July 24, 2022: CentralNic CTO Gavin Brown says:

I can confirm that no domains will be deleted or suspended due to the withdrawal of these IDN tables. The RSEP request template we provided to XYZ incorrectly stated that domains would be deleted, however, neither we nor XYZ have any plans to delete or suspend any domains, and we hope to re-enable the IDN tables in the near future.

With mystery auction winner, .sexy prices go from $25 to $2,500

UNR is increasing the annual price of a .sexy domain from $25 to over $2,000, according to registrars.

The price increase will hit from April 30, according to registrars, but will not affect renewals on domains registered before that date.

French registrar Gandi said its retail price for a .sexy name will increase from $40 to $2,750. That’s after its mark-up. Belgian registrar Bnamed said in January prices were about to get 100 times more expensive.

The current wholesale price for .sexy is believed to be $25 a year. I’m guessing it’s going up to about $2,500, which is a price tag UNR has previously experimented with for its car-related gTLDs.

UNR CEO Frank Schilling has previously defended steep price increases for TLDs that under-perform volume-wise.

.sexy had barely 6,000 names under management at the last count, having peaked at about 28,000 in 2017.

The question is: who’s decided to increase the prices? Did .sexy actually sell when UNR tried to offload its portfolio last year, or is UNR keeping hold of it?

.sexy was among the 23 gTLD contracts UNR said it sold, mostly at auction, about a year ago. But it’s not one of the ones where the buyer has been yet disclosed.

The gTLDs UNR said it sold were: .audio, .blackfriday, .christmas, .click, .country, .diet, .flowers, .game, ,guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .llp, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy and .tattoo.

Of those, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop and XYZ.com bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics.

ICANN has approved those 11 contract reassignments — after some difficulty — and said that there are six remaining in the approval process.

That only adds up to 17, meaning there are six more that UNR said it sold but for which it had not, as of a week ago, requested a contract transfer.

But in May last year, UNR “announced gross receipts of more than $40 million USD for its 20+ TLDs”, said there had be 17 participating bidders, and that 10 to 20 had “came away as winners, including six who will be operating TLDs for the first time”.

That leaves with at least five as-yet undisclosed winners from outside the industry, six contract transfers outstanding, and six gTLDs with an unknown status.

Neither UNR nor ICANN have been commenting on the status of pending transfers.

XYZ bought most of Uniregistry’s TLDs

XYZ.com has emerged as the winning bidder for 10 of the 17 new gTLDs that UNR, formerly Uniregistry, auctioned off last year.

The company bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics, according to ICANN, which approved the transfer of each registry agreement today.

As previously reported, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop, albeit not at auction.

The contract reassignments come almost a year after the auction took place, and were delayed after ICANN got nervous about the fact that UNR had apparently sold matching Ethereum Name Service blockchain domains at the same time.

“This raised concerns because ICANN org was being asked to approve transactions that included not only the transfer of gTLD operations set out in the relevant registry agreements, but also included references and/or implications of the transfer of ownership rights in the gTLDs,” ICANN veep Russ Weinstein wrote today.

“To be clear, the registry agreements do not grant any property ownership rights in the gTLD or the letters, words, symbols, or other characters making up the gTLD string,” he added.

Six more UNR gTLD contracts remain in the approval process, but ICANN blamed this on the timing of when the assignment requests were submitted.

The UNR auction last April raised over $40 million, according to UNR.

XYZ bosses agree to pay $1.5 million to settle Fed’s loan scam claims

Some of XYZ’s top executives have agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a US Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging they “deceptively” harvested vast amounts of personal data on millions of people and sold it “indiscriminately” to third parties including potential scammers and identity thieves.

The FTC says that the execs, through a network of interlinked companies, deceptively collected loan applications through at least 200 web sites, promising to connect the applicant with verified lenders, but instead sold the personal data willy-nilly to the highest bidder through a lead-generation marketplace.

The data was bought by companies that in the vast majority of cases were not in the business of providing loans, the FTC said. The buyers were not checked out by the XYZ execs and exposed consumers to identity theft and fraud, it added.

The allegations cover activities starting in 2012 and carrying on until recently, the FTC said.

“[They] tricked millions of people into giving up sensitive financial information and then sold it to companies that were not making loans,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a press release. “The company’s extraction and misuse of this data broke the law in several ways.”

“The FTC’s allegations were wholly without merit,” the defendants’ lawyer, Derek Newman, told DI in an email. “But litigation against the FTC is expensive and resource draining. For that reason, my clients chose to settle the case and move on with their business.”

“In fact, the FTC did not require any changes to my clients’ business practices that they had not already implemented before the case was filed,” he added.

The suit (pdf) named as defendants XYZ.com CEO Daniel Negari, COO Michael Abrose, business development manager Jason Ramin, and general counsel Grant Carpenter. Two other named defendants, Anisha Hancock and Sione Kaufusi, do not appear at first glance to be connected to the domains business.

The settlement (pdf) sees the defendants pay $1.5 million and agree to certain restrictions on their collection and use of data, but they did not admit or deny any liability.

The lead generation business was carried out via at least 17 named companies, including XYZ LLC (which appears to be a different company to the .xyz registry, XYZ.com LLC), Team.xyz LLC and Dev.xyz LLC. The FTC complaint groups them together under the name ITMedia.

Some of the companies are successors to Cyber2Media, the FTC said, a company that in 2011 had to settle a massive typosquatting lawsuit filed by Facebook.

Despite the personnel crossover, nothing in the complaint relates directly to the .xyz domains business, and the only domains listed in the complaint are some pretty nice .coms, including badcreditloans.com, personalloans.com, badcredit.com, fastmoney.com and cashadvance.com.

The complaint alleged deceptive representations and unfair distribution of sensitive information as well as violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It reads:

In numerous instances, Defendants, through ITMedia’s actions, have shared and sold sensitive personal and financial information from consumers’ loan forms — including consumers’ full names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, Social Security numbers, bank routing and account numbers, driver’s license and state identification numbers, income, status and place of employment, military status, homeownership status, and approximate credit scores—without consumers’ knowledge or consent and without regard for whether the recipients are lenders or otherwise had a legitimate need for the information.

Essentially, the complaint alleged that the defendants bullshitted consumers into handing over personal info thinking they were applying for a legitimate loan, when in fact the info was just being harvested for resale to sometimes dodgy buyers.

The complaint reads:

ITMedia’s practice of broadly disseminating consumer information, including to entities that share information with others whose identities and use of the information are unknown to ITMedia, exposes consumers to the risk of substantial harm from identity theft, imposter scams, unauthorized billing, phantom debt collection, and other misuse of the consumers’ information. Some consumers have complained that, shortly after submitting loan applications to ITMedia, they have received communications using the names of ITMedia websites to present sham loan offers or demands for repayment of counterfeit debt.

The $1.5 million settlement will be paid by “Individual Defendants and Corporate Defendants, jointly and severally”, according to court documents.

UPDATE: This article was updated shortly after publication with a statement from XYZ’s lawyer.

XYZ counting standard sales as “premiums” because its fees are so expensive

Portfolio gTLD registry XYZ appears to be counting regular sales of domains in certain TLDs as “premium” wins, because the base reg fee is so high.

The company said in a recent blog post that it sold over 270 “premium” names in October, but it added the following caveat:

Premium XYZ Registry domains refer to premium domains for extensions with standard and premium domains, and XYZ’s premium namespaces such as .Cars, .Storage, .Tickets, .Security, etc.

So if a name in a .com-equivalent priced TLD such as .xyz had been flagged as a premium by the registry and sold for a few thousands bucks, that counts as a premium sale, but any sale at all in .cars, where all domains cost a few thousand bucks regardless of the second-level string, also counts as a premium.

This reporting practice appears to bring in .security, .storage, .protection, .car, .auto, and .theatre, which all retail for four figures as standard. It also includes .tickets, where you won’t get much change out of a grand. It doesn’t include the fourth member of the cars family, .autos, where domains are priced as .com-equivalent.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

You can’t accuse the registry of being misleading — it’s disclosing what it’s doing pretty prominently mid-post, not even reducing the font size.

And you can’t reasonably argue that a standard $3,000 .cars domain, which renews at $3,000 a year, for example, has less claim to the adjective “premium” than a domain in .hair that has a premium-tier EPP code selling for $3,000 but renewing at $20.

It just feels weird to see the word used in this way for what appears to be the first time.

XYZ scraps .tickets rules but won’t lower the price

XYZ.com has just formally announced the acquisition of the new gTLD .tickets, which we reported on in April.

The company said it plans to keep the domains at the current high price of $500 retail per year, in contrast to its recent practice of dropping its fees on some of its recent acquisitions.

But it is going to remove “complicated registration restrictions” and make .tickets names available according to the rules for gTLDs in the rest of its portfolio, which should broaden its channel appeal.

The company argues that, in the absence of stringent registration rules, the high prices make it “cost prohibitive” for bad actors to cybersquat.

.tickets was being managed by original applicant Accent Media until earlier this year.

.autos priced waaay below its XYZ rivals

When XYZ.com tied up the automotive gTLD market by bringing .car, .cars, .auto and .autos into its portfolio last year, I speculated that a big price increase may be on the cards for .autos. I was wrong.

The registry has in fact dropped its wholesale prices by quite a lot, keeping .autos domains a fraction of the cost of their stable-brothers and competitive with .com.

XYZ said yesterday that the recommended retail price for .autos will be around $20 per year, compared to the $100 under previous owner Dominion.

The new pricing comes into effect June 14.

By contrast, .auto, .cars and .car continue to be priced at around $2,000 per year at the cheaper registrars. At others your renewal fee could be as high as $4,000.

The pricing makes .autos a much more affordable choice for the likes of smaller car dealerships and garages, as well as an option for domain investors not scared away by the risky world of new gTLDs.

Under Dominion, .autos never broke through the 500 domains under management mark. Its three siblings all have roughly 300 names in their zones, with a leaning towards corporate registrar sales.

XYZ adds .tickets to its gTLD stable

XYZ.com has taken over the ICANN registry agreement for the gTLD .tickets, according to records.

It looks to be the registry’s 23rd TLD, the latest of XYZ’s acquisitions of unused or floundering new gTLDs.

In the case of .tickets, it’s picking up a low-volume, high-price TLD with some rather onerous registration restrictions.

The TLD was originally set up by UK-based Accent Media to provide a space where people going to music, theater and sporting events, for examples, could buy tickets in the assurance that the sellers were legit.

Would-be .tickets registrants have a five-day waiting period before their domains go live, while the registry manually verifies their identities from paper records such as passports or driving licenses.

That high-friction reg process is one reason the shelf price for a .tickets domain is well over $500 a year.

It’s also a reason why very few .tickets domains have been sold. The registry peaked at fewer than 1,200 names in its zone file in 2018 and has been on the decline ever since.

It had 769 names in its zone at the end of March this year.

Registry reports show that the majority of its names are registered via brand-protection registrars and are likely unused. Searches for active .tickets sites return fewer than 100 results.

XYZ might be able to turn this around by smoothing out the reg friction and lowering the price.

But even just 1,000 names at $500 a year could be considered a nice little earner as part of a portfolio with low overheads from economies of scale. XYZ already runs even higher-priced, lower-volume zones such as .cars and .auto.