George Kirikos: “How can *objectively* argue that sunrise program has been a success, when the data says otherwise?”

George Kirikos has been arguing about the New gTLD sunrise success with the ICANN community and the GNSO Working Group.

In my opinion his views are 100% correct and his suggested procedure could save all a lot of time and money, and stop the sunrise exploitation by some trademark sharks. Sunrise has been a waste of time and money even for the large companies that is supposed to be protecting.

Here are 3 of the comments that George Kirikos left:

“Hi Claudio,

Changing the topic to one that is more appropriate, the numbers speak for themselves, namely a greater than 99% reduction in sunrise utilization rates per TLD.

Trying to reframe the issue, to look at things in aggregate can’t hide that startling truth. That’s the same kind of “bad math” that suggests that the new gTLD program is a “success” because there’s 20+ million registrations in aggregate (despite the fact that’s spread over many, many new TLDs, and that nearly all, if not all of them, individually are considered weak, with stats propped up with high counts of sub-$1 registrations, or even domains that are stuffed into the accounts of registrants of other TLDs (e.g. .xxx with NSI, or .kiwi).

If you wanted to start looking at things in aggregate, consider a company like Microsoft, registrant of approximately 80,000 domain names according to DomainTools:

https://whois.domaintools.com/microsoft.com

or Google with 20,000:

https://whois.domaintools.com/google.com

and so on.

i.e. the fraction of domains they’re acquiring via sunrise is still a tiny proportion of their overall holdings. All that would happen, when sunrises are eliminated, is that they would shift their spending to the landrush period instead. Easy-peasy.

Why not aggregate the number of unique users of the sunrise, even when across TLD? If Microsoft or Apple or Dell or Google register 2 or 3 or 10 marks each in sunrise, across most/all TLDs, that starts to look like a very narrow group of stakeholders who would be affected by its elimination (and the extent that they are affected is small, given they would just shift their demand to landrush), compared to a situation where it’s many different sunrise users in different TLDs.

Suppose I own an ice cream shop had sells a cone generating $X in sales per day, and I decide to launch a new flavour of that ice cream cone. That new flavour generated less than 1% of $X (i.e. a 99%+ reduction). I would call that a failure. I would call that a disaster. I would not be “declaring success” and launching 1000 more flavours each generating less than 1% of $X.

So, the new talking point is the 99%+ reduction in sunrise utilization rates per TLD (no need to even mention 130 domains anymore, when one can simply talk about a 99%+ decline).

As for DPML, that’s essentially an attempt to privately replicate and monetize the poorly received “Globally Protected Marks List” proposal.
Can’t see how folks like paying for domains they can’t use (i.e. it’s a scaremongering purchase, buy this or someone else might get it, and
once again using TMs to jump the queue), and also preventing good faith purchasers who might desire it. That’s even worse than sunrise,
in my opinion.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/”

“Jon,

How can *objectively* argue that sunrise program has been a success (I can see how one can argue the political angle, but we’re not here to
argue politics, we’re here to look at facts and evidence), when the data says otherwise? We know that on average a mere 130 registrations
occur per TLD in sunrises, which means that the benefits are small, and one must compare those with the costs.

Let’s try to put 130 per TLD in perspective. I was looking for stats on the .eu sunrises, and perhaps others have better sources, but according to a Google search for “.eu sunrise period registrations total” one of the hits was to the book “Information Technology Law” (Diane Rowland et al), it stated there were 346,218 applications filed for 245,908 different domain names. Those numbers don’t provide a citation, but they seem consistent with a Eurid report:

Click to access quarterly_2006_q2.pdf

which states (page 9) that the validation agent had validated (while sunrise validations were still in progress) 140,000 applications.

I couldn’t find the .info stats (although I did find that there were more than 15,000 *challenges* to sunrise registrations, see http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/reports/info-sunrise/report/index.html, so the aggregate total must have been much higher ),  but I did find the .asia ones, where there were 30,780 sunrise domain applications:

.Asia Sunrise Completed with Over 30,000 Domain Applications

Calzone.org provided their own stats:

http://calzone.org/tld/calzonenews/2014/03/04/rolling-average-for-tld-sunrises-will-this-trend-continue/

.xxx sunrise: 80,000 blocks (2011)
.co sunrise: 11,000 domains (2010)
.asia sunrise: 32,000 domains (2008)
.mobi sunrise: 15,000 domains (2006)
.eu sunrise: 140,000 domains (2006)
.biz IP claims: 80,000 (2001)

If new gTLDs had anywhere close to those sunrise statistics, it would be clear there were substantial benefits, and there would be no argument from me. If that was the data, anyone would be laughed at for trying to seriously suggest the benefits were small, given the large
uptake. I would be on the other side, arguing that the benefits were obviously high.

But, that *isn’t* the data. We know that the numbers are very small. So, let’s face the facts, the sunrises were a complete disaster in terms of uptake. That speaks directly to the “benefits” part of the equation.

And we know what the costs were, I won’t go into them again.

So, again, I ask anyone to objectively attempt to argue that the new gTLD’s sunrise policy was a success, given those disastrous figures compared to .eu, .xxx, .co, .asia, etc. (perhaps someone else can add the complete .info stats with citations, so that we have a full picture).

Instead, the only “basis” for perpetuation of the failed policy is “let’s not rock the boat”, or “GAC members might get upset” essentially, rather than calling a spade a spade — it’s been an obvious failure.

Let’s do our job, look at the evidence objectively and fairly, and use evidence-based policymaking.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/”

“Hello,

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 11:21 PM, Greg Shatan <gregshatanipc@gmail.com> wrote:

I don’t see the math that created your “talking point” of a “99%+ reduction
in sunrise.” Can you show your work please?

The post at:

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-August/002321.html

showed numerous sunrise statistics, ranging from 15,000 on the low end
for .mobi (.co was slightly lower, although that’s a ccTLD, not a TLD
that ICANN is involved with in any way), 32,000 for .asia, 80,000 for
.biz/.xxx, and who knows what it was for .info?

Even taking the lowest of those (15,000) as the base, 130 (average
new gTLD sunrise from The Analysis Group report) divided by 15,000 =
0.0087 = 0.87%, which is less than 1%, i.e. a 99%+ reduction. Of
course, if one chose a higher base (.asia, .xxx, .biz, .etc.), or an
average of those other sunrises, the reduction is even greater than if
one had used the lowest sunrise (from .mobi).

As for your other statement:

We can’t expect Sunrise registrations to outperform the New gTLD Program generally.”

While the new gTLD program has been a disaster, it hasn’t been an
underperformance of 99%+ of expectations (perhaps more like 80% to 90%
underperformance). Thus, while it’s obvious that both have been
failures, sunrise usage is an even greater failure than new gTLDs
overall. So, even on that relative scale, the sunrise period should be
eliminated.

Since I know you’ll ask “George, why do you say there’s been an 80% or
90% underpeformance for new gTLDs?” let me answer that now to save
time. I’ll use as my reference (besides the obvious general
observations of most informed observers) ICANN’s own stats:

http://domainincite.com/18857-new-gtld-sales-miss-icann-estimates-by-a-mile

where the numbers came in at just 18% of ICANN’s original 2014
expectations. For the math-challenged, 100% – 18% = 82% as the level
of underperformance.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/“