[CPWG] Today's call and the ccTLD/gTLD trends/Following ccTLDs on DNS Abuse

[John McCormac]

There has been an ongoing new registrations trend with more new ccTLD 
registrations than gTLD registrations in many countries. It started back 
around 2005 but it has been accelerating for the last few years.

In some countries, the number of new ccTLD registrations each month is 
often double that of the gTLDs. The non-core gTLDs (i.e not .COM and to 
a lesser extent .NET and .ORG) still have their historical shares of 
country level markets but there is a very obvious shift. There is also a 
related trend where people register their domain name in the ccTLD and 
do not bother registering it in .COM or any gTLD. The increasing 
"uniqueness" of ccTLD registrations is also obvious with some ccTLDs.

There are phases for a country's domain name market development. The 
early phase involves early adopters setting up websites to sell outside 
the country. Traditionally, the local Internet and hosting 
infrastructure was not well developed so most sites were hosted outside 
the country and there are few if any gTLD registrars in the country. The 
ccTLD, in this phase, often finds it difficult to complete with gTLDs in 
terms of both registration fee and ease of registration.

As the country's market develops, along with the Intenet and hosting 
infrastructure, companies begin to host locally and local gTLD 
registrars appear along with more local ccTLD registrars. (The model may 
shift from a registry as registar one to a more typical 
registry-registrar one.)

With a mature market, the ccTLD dominates the market with there being 
more ccTLD registrars than local gTLD registrars and new ccTLD 
registrations overtake new gTLDs registrations each month. Rather than 
becoming an ICANN accredited registrar, resellers/hosters will decide to 
become a ccTLD accredited registrar and outsource gTLD registrations to 
a registrations as a service provider like some of the large gTLD 
registrars. A lot of the countries with strong ccTLDs are in this phase 
of development.

ICANN's registry-registrar model was great for the 1990s but is out of 
place in current the global domain name market. This will have a major 
impact on any geo-gTLD applications in the next round of new gTLDs. If 
the registrar infrastructure to sell locally is not there, then these 
new geo-gTLDs will find it very difficult to gain market share. Perhaps 
an even more worrying possibility for the next round is that the market 
for some prospective gTLDs does not exist or is much smaller than these 
applicants expect.

Even with .COM, the market is still dominanted by the early markets and 
countries with large hosting operations. These are the countries with 
most .COM websites by country resolved IP address. They are also skewed 
by large DDoS prevention operators like Cloudflare using US IPs.


| United States       | 99763877 |
| Germany             |  7663915 |
| Canada              |  3873167 |
| Seychelles          |  3765103 |
| China               |  2757786 |
| France              |  2487080 |
| Japan               |  2028834 |
| United Kingdom      |  1786066 |
| Netherlands         |  1707633 |
| Virgin Islands (UK) |  1330498 |

The Seychelles are largely Chinese/Hong Kong sites on Seychelles IP 
addesses that have been acquired by Chinese operators. The Virgin 
Islands sites are typically PPC parking and sales.

The distribution of .AFRICA sites is interesting in that South Africa 
leads with the marjority of sites.

| South Africa   | 10673 |
| United States  |  7936 |
| France         |  1943 |
| Germany        |  1572 |
| Canada         |   864 |
| United Kingdom |   741 |
| Switzerland    |   232 |
| Netherlands    |   192 |
| Morocco        |   124 |
| Poland         |    90 |

The .BERLIN gTLD is one of the better performers of the 2012 round and 
is closer to being a ccTLD in terms of distribution (as is .AFRICA).

| Germany        | 37381 |
| France         |  3852 |
| United States  |  2699 |
| Denmark        |   429 |
| Switzerland    |   225 |
| Austria        |   215 |
| United Kingdom |   189 |
| Canada         |   162 |
| Poland         |   159 |
| Hold/Expired   |   104 |

ALAC may not need to comment on the above but it needs to be aware that 
the market for domain names and websites is continually changing and is 
much more complex than the ICANN registry transactions reports suggest.


Another interesting point was made by Michael Palage about following 
ccTLD registries on best practice on DNS Abuse, registrant verification 
and data quality. This is a very good idea and will save ICANN/GNSO/ALAC 
from wasting time trying to reinvent the wheel.

The important thing to remember is that ccTLDs are very different 
markets to gTLDs and the ccTLD registries are often well ahead of ICANN 
on some of these issues (Know Your Customer is a big topic at the 
moment). We should steer well clear of basing any recommendations on 
that EU DNS report as it is flawed in conflating ccTLD DNS Abuse with 
gTLD DNS Abuse.

Regards...jmcc
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John McCormac  *  e-mail: jmcc at hosterstats.com
MC2            *  web: http://www.hosterstats.com/
22 Viewmount   *  Domain Registrations Statistics
Waterford      *  Domnomics - the business of domain names
Ireland        *  https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO
IE             *  Skype: hosterstats.com
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