CentralNIC: Powering the xyz to Google's abc

By Abhiram Nandakumar and Noor Zainab Hussain
Aug 13 (Reuters) - Ben Crawford was asleep 12,000 km (7,500
miles) from Google Inc 's GOOGL.O Mountain View, California
headquarters this week when the Internet giant unveiled its new
face.
Crawford, chief executive of London-based CentralNIC Group
Plc CNIC.L , woke up in Sydney to learn that the domain powered
by his company - .xyz - would host the website of Google's new
company, Alphabet Inc.
Google registered abc.xyz as Alphabet's website because
alphabet.com is owned by German automaker BMW BMWG.DE .
"I read it and I was amazed," said Crawford, whose company's
shares have soared almost 50 percent since Google stunned the
market with the announcement of its reorganization on Monday.
Companies such as CentralNIC provide the technology that
powers the registry of domains sanctioned by ICANN, which
oversees the introduction of new Internet addresses. Since 2014,
ICANN has been introducing hundreds of new so-called top-level
domain addresses, such as .london and .sex.
Google's move to use .xyz is a strong endorsement of these
new domains that give users more choice and flexibility as the
Internet grows bigger. Registrations on the .xyz domain have
increased by more than 27,000 since Google's announcement,
according to ntldstats.com.
CentralNIC is the exclusive wholesaler for .xyz, by far the
most popular of the new domains. It was created last year by
29-year-old Daniel Negari, ICANN's youngest registry operator.
Companies like CentralNIC sell these domains through
retailers such as GoDaddy Inc GDDY.N and MarkMonitor, a
company owned by Thomson Reuters Corp TRI.TO .
Google bought the rights to abc.xyz from MarkMonitor, which
registered the address in March 2014.
CentralNIC will get a share of the annual subscription that
Google will pay to keep the website. Crawford declined to say
how much his company would make off abc.xyz.
Premium top level domains, such as sex.com and
insurance.com, typically sell for hundreds of thousands to
millions of dollars in privately negotiated deals.
For instance, we.com was bought by Tencent, China's largest
Internet service portal, for $8 million earlier this month.
"I don't believe abc.xyz was anything like that amount, but
in terms of how much a domain name can sell for, that's around
the top of the range," 50-year old Crawford, still on holiday,
told Reuters on Thursday.
"I guess that's the message that Google wanted to get
across: that Alphabet is the Internet business of the future."