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ICANN's antics rarely surprise me after close to a quarter-century of coverage, but today it's published what I can only describe as its "Woke Manifesto" and while reading through it this afternoon I pretty much peeled my uvula raw and ragged, alternating as I did between howls of outrage and uncontrollable fits of incredulous laughter. […] T...
Eleven registrars representing millions of domain names signed up to support ICANN's Registration Data Request Service last month. One registrar dropped out. One of Chinese tech giant Alibaba's registrars was among the additions. Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing), which has 2.6 million names under management, is a notable addition given that one of...
The Swiss government is relaxing the registration rules for its .swiss gTLD so that regular people will be able to register names there from next week. Previously available only to registered legal entities in Switzerland, from April 24 any Swiss person at home or abroad will also be able to buy .swiss domains. The TLD […] The post The Swiss ...
The .ai registry has provided its latest, sporadic update to its registration numbers, showing that Anguilla's ccTLD continues to be wildly popular compared to the country's size. It's grown from 353,928 domains on December 20 to 425,060 domains on April 12, according to the registry's web site. That's an increase of 71,132 since the last […]...
The new .music gTLD registry says it will give away up to one million first-year domains over the next five weeks as part of its launch program, but there are of course plenty of catches. DotMusic says the domains are available to what it calls "Music Community Member Organizations" — think record labels and the […] The post A million f...
New gTLD consultancy D3 Global has inked a deal to apply for the .ape gTLD on behalf of the ApeCoin community. The company said in a blog post that it will receive three million $APE — cryptocurrency coins currently worth about $5 million, according to Coinbase — in order to apply to ICANN for, operate […] The post D3 to get $5 mi...
One of the companies in the Alibaba Group, China's biggest registrar and one of the largest technology companies in the world, has been handed a breach notice, containing a long list of complaints including abuse failures and non-payment of fees, by ICANN Compliance. Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba's four accredited registrars, fai...
Specialist new gTLD consultancy D3 is to hold a two-day conference in Las Vegas at the end of the month it's describing as the "Davos for Web3 interoperability". Imposingly named Dominion, it's due to take place at the Cesar's Palace hotel from April 29 to 30. The theme is the interoperability between the traditional domain […] The post New V...
A move by ICANN to grant itself more formal "content policing" powers may be dead, after the community was split on the issue and governments failed to back the move. The Governmental Advisory Committee yesterday sent comments essentially opposing, for now at least, the idea of ICANN reforming its bylaws to give it more powers […] The post IC...
A Canadian telecommunications company is turning off its dot-brand gTLD after it was acquired and its brand was deprecated. Shaw Cablesystems has told ICANN it no longer wants .shaw, so could the registry contract kindly be terminated. The move follows the company's $26 billion acquisition by rival Rogers Communications, which closed a year ago. Ro...
The number of domains registered to Germany-based dot-brand registries crossed the 10,000 mark in the last few weeks, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic registrants. That's almost half of all the domains currently showing up in dot-brand zone files, which stands at just over 21,000, according to my database. German companies have been the most-pro...
Corporate registrar Com Laude is losing four company founders as part of a new investment from the private equity firm PX3 Partners. The company said last weeks that founders Nick Wood and Lorna Gradden will exit the firm, along with Penny Hearn and Andrew Lothian, who founded Demys, which Com Laude acquired in 2018. Wood […] The post Founder...
Public Interest Registry is losing its long-serving policy veep Paul Diaz, who will leave the company and domain industry later this year. Currently VP of industry affairs, Diaz has been with the .org registry for 12 years, and had 12 years at Network Solutions before that. A quarter-century in the domain industry should be enough […] The pos...
ICANN's two-year experiment in helping connect Whois users with registrars has grown its pool of participating registrars over the last few months, but it has lost a couple of not-insignificant companies along the way. The Registration Data Request Service launched in November, promising to provide a hub for people to request the private data in [&...
Ten million bucks of ICANN's money is up for grabs, starting today. The Org has opened the application window for the first stage of its Grant Program, which it hopes to eventually see hand out over the $217 million that it raised auctioning off contested gTLDs during the 2012 new gTLD program application round. In […] The post ICANN opens $2...
ICANN is set to loosen up its restrictions on single-character gTLDs in the 2026 application round, according to draft Applicant Guidebook language. But the exemption to the usual rule applies only to gTLDs written in one script — Han, which is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Applied-for Latin-script strings must be three characters and...
With too many auction winners failing to hand over the loot, the .ai registry has changed its auction terms to make being a deadbeat more expensive. The registry has increased its deposit requirement from 2% to 5% for bidders considered "high risk", which basically means new customers, or $100, whichever is higher. The deposit is […] The post...
Google and Amazon have publicly backed ICANN's plan to reserve the top-level domain .internal for private behind-the-firewall uses. ICANN picked the string "internal" as the one that it will promise to never delegate to the DNS root, allowing network administrators and software developers to confidently use it with a lower risk of data leakage shou...
The manager of the increasingly popular .ai ccTLD has seemingly escalated his beef with GoDaddy, now advising registrants to not transfer their .ai domains to the market-leading registrar due to technical and operational issues. The list of approved registrars on the .ai registry web site has contained a warning about problems transferring domains ...
The .post gTLD has opened a brand-protection sunrise period 12 years after it first launched, after liberalizing its registration policies to allow private businesses to buy domains. .post is a "sponsored" gTLD run by the Universal Postal Union, a UN agency, and so far the space has been restricted to national postal agencies which are […] Th...
Team Internet is back in acquisition mode, saying this morning it has picked up an Israeli content farm business for $41.8 million. It's bought Shinez IO, based in Tel Aviv and Denver, for the initial sum plus a potential extra $12.3 million if the company meets certain financial targets over the next two years, the […] The post Team Internet...
Epik has retracted a claim it made on social media that former customer Kiwi Farms was hosting child sexual abuse material on its web site. The troubled registrar had said on Twitter in January that it had received a complaint about a "doxxing" post on the Kiwi Farms troll forum that contained naked photographs of […] The post Epik backtracks...
A city gTLD launching exclusively on a blockchain alternative naming system? It's happened, with the announcement of .austin at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The extension is already on sale at $10 a name via Unstoppable Domains, in partnership with the Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce. The organizations said the names will serve [&...
Dying free-domains registry Freenom has shut down at least 12.6 million domains across three of its TLDs, according to research from Netcraft. Netcraft's latest web server survey shows that the domains — across .tk, .cf and .gq — no longer resolve, according to the company. That's 98.7% of the resolving domains Freenom had a month [R...
ICANN has published what could be the next version of GoDaddy's .xxx registry contract, and is framing it as very much open to challenge. The proposed Registry Agreement would scrap the "sponsored" designation from .xxx, substantially reduce GoDaddy's ICANN fees, and implement the strictest child-protection measures of any gTLD, as well as make ICA...
GoDaddy-led brand protection project GlobalBlock says it is already blocking over 2.5 million domains, just a couple of weeks after its formal launch. The GlobalBlock web site reports that 2,569,815 domains are currently being blocked across 559 extensions (a mix of ccTLDs, gTLDs, third-level domains and blockchain names), for an average of just un...
Microsoft is planning to move all of its Microsoft 365 apps off a multitude of .com domains and consolidate them all under .microsoft, its dot-brand gTLD. The company says it will move Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 web apps to the cloud.microsoft domain. They currently use domains such as outlook.office.com, teams.microsoft.com and microsoft365...
Transparency, an ICANN watchword since day one, was a noticeable undercurrent at the community's 79th public meeting in Puerto Rico last week. The problem of lawyers representing unnamed clients in policy-making groups was raised in several fora, while another section of the community seems to have separately been infiltrated by the same kind of an...
A Los Angeles court has handed ICANN a victory in a lawsuit filed against it by a domainer who thinks he has the rights to register all the remaining single-character .com domains. Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com sued ICANN back in August, claiming the Org was breaking the law by refusing to allow him to register […] The post ICANN scores ...
Brazilian cosmetics maker Natura has become the latest new gTLD operator to tell ICANN to terminate its dot-brand contract. The company said it is "no longer interested" in operating .natura, and ICANN has agreed to end the Registry Agreement. Natura was not using the domain beyond the mandatory nic.natura, but my records show that it […] The...
Nominet plans to lay off as many as 70 employees to cut costs, and is preparing for a .uk price increase, after years of dwindling domain registrations and the loss of a major government contract. CEO Paul Fletcher told members yesterday that it won't be providing the UK government with its Protective DNS recursive DNS […] The post Up to 70 j...
ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee has decided not to force the Org to pay for a independent cost/benefit analysis of the new gTLD program, removing the potential for timeline friction ahead of the planned 2026 next-round launch. In its latest communique, published following the ICANN 79 meeting in Puerto Rico last week, the GAC has essentiall...
ICANN is "sympathetic" to the view that private auctions between competing new gTLD applicants are a Bad Thing that should be discouraged in the next application round. Director Alan Barrett told the GNSO Council at ICANN 79 today that the board of directors, following Governmental Advisory Committee advice, has hired a consultant and is looking [&...
ICANN has taken some criticism over the decision to host its flagship Universal Acceptance 2024 meeting in Serbia. An individual named Dmitry Noskov has written to ICANN to complain that the Universal Acceptance Steering Group will hold its "Keystone" meeting — the main event of the UA Day series of meetings around the world — […]...
In an unusual diversification into third-level domains, GoDaddy Registry seems to be planning to sell names under .graphic.design. The company filed a request with the Public Suffix List yesterday, asking for the domain to be included on the list, so it will be recognized around the internet as a space where third-level names are registerable. [...
ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee had a habit of throwing delaying curveballs before and during the 2012 new gTLD application round, and it might be planning a repeat performance before the upcoming 2026 round. The GAC today assembled at ICANN 79 in Puerto Rico to discuss the latest developments in planning for the next round, and […] T...
GoDaddy's Brand Safety Alliance has finally released the list of TLDs supported by its new GlobalBlock brand protection service, and it's notable for including a couple dozen extensions that aren't real TLDs at all. Formally announcing its launch today, the company said GlobalBlock will initially allow trademark owners and others to block their mar...
The number of .uk domain names taken down as a result of requests from law enforcement shrank substantially last year, according to the latest stats from Nominet. The registry said today that it suspended 1,193 domains in the 12 months to October 31, down from 2,106 in the previous period. It's a record low since […] The post Police .uk domai...
Norwegian startup NameBlock is set to launch its suite of brand protection and domain security services later this week, with a somewhat different take on the market to its primary competitor. Recently appointed CEO Pinky Brand tells me the company plans to formally launch March 1, the day before the ICANN 79 public meeting begins […] The pos...
Swiss blockchain naming startup Freename has released a service it says it hopes will help make blockchain-based naming systems easier to integrate with the traditional DNS. It's called NOTO, and it has launched in closed beta this week. Freename says NOTO crawls blockchain naming systems (currently its own Freename service, Ethereum Name Service, ...
David Olive, senior VP of policy development and support, will retire from ICANN at the end of May, the Org announced today. Olive joined ICANN in February 2010 after 20 years with Fujitsu and has led his department ever since. He also was the first managing director of ICANN's office in Istanbul, though he's been […] The post Olive retires f...
ICANN has updated its Registration Data Policy, the rules that govern what data registries and registrars need to collect from registrants and when to publish or supply it through Whois lookups or disclosure requests. When it becomes enforceable in August next year, the new RDP will make full-fat ICANN Whois policy compliant with EU privacy […...
The UK government has set out how it intends to regulate UK-related top-level domain registries, and it's taken its lead mostly from existing ICANN policies. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said last year that it was to activate the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that allow it to seize control […] The post UK g...
Tucows reported a domains business that was slightly stronger in the fourth quarter, as the company's overall revenue grew by over 10%. The registrar said its Tucows Domains unit grew by 2.6% at $61.8 million in the period, compared to Q4 2022. Gross profit was up 2.5% at $18.9 million and adjusted EBITDA was $10.8 […] The post Tucows reports...
Elon Musk's Twitter is "completely unresponsive" to outreach about Universal Acceptance of domain names, including problems such as the lack of linkification of new gTLD domains, according to an ICANN technologist. Speaking at an ICANN 79 Prep Week session yesterday, senior UA technology manager Arnt Gulbrandsen said the Org has been attempting to ...
ICANN published its second fiscal quarter financials yesterday, revealing a roughly $5 million overspend in the second half of 2023. The Org spent $72 million of its $74 million revenue in the six months to December 31, more than the $67 million spend it had budgeted for. ICANN said the overspend came mainly in its […] The post ICANN spends $...
UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, is removing premium pricing from over a million domain names and slashing the premium pricing on others. The company said today that most of the names losing their premium tag were on the lowest pricing tier, which is $70 wholesale a year. I believe the standard wholesale fee […] The post .art takes ...
A security vulnerability in the DNSSEC standard that could crash DNS resolution in software such as BIND and services such as Cloudflare and Google Public DNS has been called "the most devastating vulnerability ever found in DNSSEC". Named KeyTrap, it enables attackers to overwhelm a DNS resolver's CPU for as long as 16 hours, forcing […] The...
Facebook has claimed another domain industry scalp. Freenom said this week it has settled the cybersquatting lawsuit filed against it by Meta last year, and that it is getting out of the domain name business. The registry/registrar said in a brief February 12 statement (pdf) that it will pay Meta an undisclosed sum and has […] The post Freeno...
Remember The Draw? It was the mechanism ICANN used to figure out which new gTLDs from the 2012 application round would get a first-mover advantage, and it's coming back in 2026. The Org is currently considering draft Applicant Guidebook language setting out the rules for how to pick which order to process applications in the […] The post New ...
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