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Don't get excited about the next round of new gTLDs launching any time soon. That's my takeaway from recent correspondence between ICANN's chair and brand-owners who are apparently champing at the bit to get their teeth into some serious dot-brand action. Maarten Botterman warned Brand Registry Group chair Cole Quinn that "significant work lies ahe...
Who said competition in the domain drop-catching space was dying? Domain registrar Sav.com, which has been emerging as a bit of a favorite among domain investors over the last year or so, has just formed 50 new registrars with ICANN accreditation to power its drop-catching service. ICANN records show the creation of newly accredited registrars [...
TL;DR — I made about $3,700 selling Tucows shares. I've never been much of an investor in anything, largely because I've never really had the disposable income. However, back in 2006, when I lived in the US, I opened an online share-trading account and bought around $1,000 worth of shares in various technology companies. The […] The pos...
ICANN is planning to auction off .wed, the first new gTLD from the 2012 application round to fail. The TLD has been running on Nominet's Emergency Back-End Registry Operator platform since late 2017, when former registry Atgron suffered a critical failure — apparently planned — of its registry services. After some lawyering, Atgron fina...
Newfold Digital, by my reckoning the second-largest registrar group, has officially announced itself with a new logo and branding. The company was formed in February when Clearlake Capital merged Endurance International with Web.com, bringing dozens of domain and hosting brands under one roof. The company now acts as an umbrella for Web.com, Regist...
Celebrities and holders of unregistered trademarks are now able to buy porn domain blocks from MMX. The company's subsidiary, ICM Registry, has broadened its eligibility criteria in order to shift more units of the product, upon which it is banking much of its growth hopes. Previously, to get an AdultBlock subscription you either had to […] T...
Drop-catch registrar Pheenix has had its registrar contract terminated by ICANN after apparently going AWOL. ICANN has been chasing the company for breaches related to Whois and access to registrant data since October 2019, but hasn't heard a peep out of the outfit for a year. As I noted when ICANN published its first breach […] The post Phee...
UNR has some big plans for .trust, a gTLD that mysteriously was omitted from its big fire-sale auction last month. When UNR auctioned 23 of its gTLD portfolio, raising over $40 million over a three-day event, it escaped pretty much everyone's notice — including mine — that .trust was not among those up for sale. […] The post Could...
The French government has opened up a call for expressions of interest from registries who fancy a bash at running .fr, the local ccTLD. A brief procurement document was published last month. The deadline for responses is June 30. .fr, along with several other ccTLDs representing French overseas territories, has been managed by AFNIC since […...
One of the most heavily contested new gTLDs, .music, could launch this year after new registry DotMusic finally signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN. The contract was signed over two years after DotMusic prevailed in an auction against Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX. It seems the coronavirus pandemic...
MMX saw its revenue dip in 2020, and it reported shocking renewal rates at two of its highest-volume gTLDs, according to the company's annual financial results, published this morning. The portfolio registry, which is in the process of selling off essentially its entire operating business to GoDaddy, reported revenue of $16.8 million for the year, ...
A domain investor has reportedly sold the domain eth.co for $300,000, making it the second-highest amount a .co domain has sold since the ccTLD relaunched in 2010. Domain marketplace Efty today reports that MagnumDomains used its platform to sell the domain via its buy-it-now function, with no broker involvement. eth.co is expected to refer to [...
CentralNic today announced that it's taking over back-end registry operations for .london. It's taking over from Nominet, which has run the technical aspects of the registry since 2016 when MMX dumped its registry business. The contracted registry is London & Partners, the marketing arm of the London mayor's office. CentralNic is based in Lond...
Donuts has launched a tool to show off its TrueName offering, which blocks potential phishing attacks at the domain registry level. It's like a regular name spinner, but instead of showing you available domains it shows you visually confusingly similar domains — homographs — that it will block if you register said name in any […] ...
A chemicals company called Merck has beaten another chemicals company called Merck for the right to run .merck as a dot-brand gTLD. But it looks like we may be looking at an unprecedented case of a shared dot-brand. US-based Merck Registry Holdings and Germany-based Merck KGaA appear to have resolved their long-running battle over the […] The...
The .eu ccTLD shrank a bit in the first quarter as a result of Brexit finally kicking in fully. Registry EURid reported that there were 3,681,337 registered .eu, . and . domains at the end of March, down from 3,684,984 at the end of 2020, a dip of just a few thousand names. Domains registered […] The post Brexit specter creeping up on .eu fir...
ICANN CEO Gran Marby was paid over a million bucks out of the domain-buying public's pocket in the org's fiscal 2020, newly released tax documents show. He's now, I believe, the best-paid CEO ICANN's ever had and the first to make more than $1 million per year in the role. ICANN's FY20, which covers the […] The post ICANN CEO is first to get ...
PublicDomainRegistry.com, part of the new Newfold Digital registrar group, has been picked to take over thousands of domain names from disgraced and defunct Net 4 India. ICANN seems to have used the beauty contest method of picking Net4's successor, saying that PDR was picked in part because it already operates in the region. It's based […] T...
ICANN is set to reject a plea for it to reconsider its decision to allow Donuts to buy Afilias last December. Its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee recently threw out a Request for Reconsideration filed by Dot Hotel and Domain Venture Partners, part of a multi-pronged assault on the outcome of the .hotel gTLD contention set. […] The p...
Three of the industry's largest registrars announced revenue growth in their latest reporting periods in recent days. GoDaddy Market-leading GoDaddy reported a whopping 18.8% year-over-year revenue growth from domains in its first quarter, with $422.7 million. CEO Aman Bhutani told analysts that much of this growth is being driven by the company's ...
Six entities are entering the domain registry business for the first time following UNR's auction last month, which saw over 20 new gTLDs sold off for a total of over $40 million, according to UNR. While playing its cards close to its chest and revealing the auction results in rather general terms, UNR disclosed last […] The post $40 million ...
ICANN's primary name servers came under a distributed denial of service attack, the Org said earlier this week. The incident appears to have gone largely unnoticed outside of ICANN and seems to have been successfully mitigated before causing any significant damage. ICANN said on its web site: ICANN was subjected to a Distributed Denial of […]...
The popular NamesCon conference has scrapped its plan to return to in-person events this year, and will instead host another virtual con in September. Organizers said today that NamesCon Online 2020 will take place from September 22 to 24, in a return to its in-house online networking platform. It's shuffled its pricing scheme since the […] T...
ICANN is finally moving to shut down Net 4 India's gTLD domains business, after months of upheaval and thousands of customer complaints. An Indian insolvency court this week lifted its ban on ICANN terminating Net4's registrar contract, after ICANN appealed to it with a wealth of evidence showing how critical services such as hospitals and […...
The Internet Watch Foundation last year found child sexual abuse material on 3,401 domains that it says appeared to be commercial sites dedicated to distributing the illegal content. The UK-based anti-CSAM group said in its annual report, published last week, that it found 5,590 domains containing such material in 2020, and 61% were "dedicated comm...
ICANN could be forced to reimpose price caps on .org, .biz and .info domains, an Independent Review Process panel has ruled. The panel handling the IRP cased filed by Namecheap against ICANN in February 2020 has decided to allow the registrar to continue to pursue its claims that ICANN broke its own bylaws by removing […] The post Price caps ...
Security researcher Dan Kaminsky, best known for uncovering the so-called "Kaminsky Bug" DNS vulnerability, has reportedly died at the age of 42. It has been widely reported that Kaminsky's niece confirmed his death from serious complications from his longstanding diabetes. On Twitter, she rebutted emerging conspiracy theories that his death was li...
The .gov TLD used exclusively by governmental entities in the US has quietly changed managers. On Friday, the IANA records for .gov changed from the General Services Administration to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It was not unexpected. CISA announced the move in March. But it's less clear how the change request was handled....
ICANN has asked all domain registries to exempt from deletion expired names registered via collapsed Indian registrar Net 4 India. The company has been in receipt of an ICANN termination notice since the end of February, but it's in insolvency proceedings and ICANN says the insolvency court is preventing it from carrying out the execution. […...
UNR has reduced the opening bids on almost all of the gTLDs it plans to auction off later in the week, to the tune of a whopping $5.2 million. According to the minimum opening bids listed on the auction web site today, the job lot of 23 TLD contracts could go for as little as […] The post UNR cuts $5.2 million from price of new gTLD portfolio...
Pheenix, which used to operate a network of hundreds of accredited registrars, now faces potentially losing its last remaining accreditation, due to an ICANN probe. ICANN told the US-based company in a breach notice last week that it faces additional action unless it fixes a bunch of problems related to domain transfers and Whois before […] T...
Verisign tonight significantly upgraded its estimate of how many .com and .net domains it expects to sell this year, citing an improving economy and increased growth in online commerce. CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that it's now expecting its domain base to increase by 4% to 5.5% this year. Three months ago, it had cautiously […] The post Ver...
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