Frank Schilling

Affiliation:	Uniregistry
Country:	Cayman Islands
Website:	http://uniregistry.com/
Facebook:	Frank Schilling
Featured in the ICANN 50 - London playing card deck

Frank Schilling is an experienced domain name investor and operator. He lives in the Cayman Islands. He is a highly regarded Internet investor who saw, early on, the generic domain name business as a growth opportunity. Mr. Schilling is involved in ICANN's New gTLD Program through his company, Uniregistry, which applied for 54 TLDs.

Frank Schilling has his own blog called Domain Name Sales Seven Mile, which he has been administering since 2007. He was the first person to suggest a public television program about domain investing, in 2002.

Background & Current Role

Frank Schilling was the Managing Director of Domain Name Sales Corp, which eventually became iRegistry.

However, Frank Schilling decided to do more than just sell domain names, and instead use his successful personal experience to help others with the administration of their own portfolios. Thus, Frank Schilling founded NAmedia in 2001. Since then NAmedia has become a leading domain name administrator.

In the beginning of 2011, Frank Schilling declared that business NAmedia he was able to make $7 million dollars from the sales of around 250 domains, "without trying to hard".

In 2008, David Kesmodel, a reporter for the WSJ, published the book entitled, "The Domain Game", which describes the experiences of Frank Schilling and the evolution of the domain name industry, in which he played a very important role.

.XXX

ICM Registry, the entity behind the .xxx domain space, touted the fact that they got Frank Schilling involved in his first TLD launch ever. He was admitted into their Founders Program, which allowed some 35 companies bid access to over 1,500 names. Mr. Schilling acquired a number of domains, in a package worth a reported 7 figures. Those domains include live.xxx, hot.xxx, and free.xxx. He is required by the agreements involved in the Founders Program to develop the sites and not leave them as parked pages, which is a commonly associated activity with professional domainers, and the very one that ICM Registry was trying to avoid through its Founders Program. Mr. Schilling was later named in a IRP request, which is the ultimate contestation mechanism available through ICANN, by Manwin, a prominent porn provider that has also filed an Antitrust suit against ICM and ICANN. Frank Schilling was named because Manwin was pointing to the fact that the domain space was clearly not reserved strictly for members of the adult industry.

It's rumored that only several months after acquiring a substantial portfolio from ICM, Mr. Schilling is already leasing his names to various companies for some 5-figures per month.

New gTLDs

IOn June 10, 2012, Frank announced the launching of Uniregistry, a new company that would apply for new gTLDs, and offer registry solutions. According to Schilling the management team of Uniregistry is composed of domain name industry experts to ensure that the company provides the "most service-based and holistic approach registry operations" to registrants. He said, "Nothing is more important to us than the ongoing, long-term success of our namespaces, and the registrants we serve. Uniregistry has the rare combination of experience, infrastructure, and unwavering commitment required to make it happen." The company's infrastructure is designed and maintained by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and distributing open-source software and providing high quality online and professional services and infrastructure to the Internet community worldwide.

According to a report, Schilling invested $60 million dollars on UniRegistry and his target is for the company to operate 54 gTLDs including .lol and .home. Many of the applications are widely contested.

Videos

Watch Frank Schilling, along with other familiar ICANN participants, discuss the Multistakeholder Model. The video was produced with help from Google at ICANN 44 in June 2012, in Prague.

Ray King interviewed Mr. Schilling at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires about the rollout of New gTLDs.