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The number of registered domain names in the world grew by 2.7 million in the third quarter, despite market-leading .com shrinking, according to Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief. There were 359.3 million domains across all TLDs at the end of September, according to the DNIB. up from 356.6 million at the end of June. […] The post D...
There's evidence that Google Registry may have sold a .ing domain name for seven figures during its pre-launch period. Google is well into its Early Access Period for the new gTLD, which runs for five weeks with premium prices decreasing every week or day until December 5, when they go to general availability pricing. The […] The post Did som...
Controversial free-domains company Freenom has lost its ICANN accreditation, signalling the end of its life as a gTLD registrar. Org said that as of November 25, Freenom (aka OpenTLD) will no longer be able to sell or renew any domains. The termination follows the company's failure to resolve or respond to three separate breach notices, […] T...
A senior Jewish member of the ICANN community is calling on the Org to end its partnership with a company run by a Palestine-born Jordanian businessman who recently broadcast some outrageously anti-Semitic remarks. Jeff Neuman of JJN Solutions and Dot Hip Hop, who has spent the last quarter-century involved in countless ICANN community roles, made ...
GoDaddy sold more than half a billion dollars of domain names in the third quarter even as volumes slightly decreased, according to its latest earnings release. The company had domains revenue of $508.2 million in Q3, compared to $494 million a year ago and $492.7 in the second quarter, according to regulatory filings. The aftermarket […] The...
One of Bosnia and Herzegovina's two governments has said it will sue a US domain name company — probably Verisign — for turning off the domain it was using for official government business. "The Government of the Republic of Srpska will hire legal experts to prepare a lawsuit against the company that disabled the use […] The post ...
Freenom is "essentially finished as a company". That's the conclusion of a truly excellent piece of reporting at the MIT Technology Review today, which takes a deep dive into the company's ccTLD antics over the last couple of decades, particularly regarding Tokelau's .tk domain. The article reveals not only that all four of Freenom's African [̷...
American clothing retailer Gap has dumped two of its unused dot-brand gTLDs. The company has told ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .oldnavy and .bananarepublic, the names of two of its store chains, saying it isn't using them. Gap still owns .gap, and hasn't yet asked for it to be cancelled, but it isn't […] The post Gap drops so...
A group composed of displaced Chagossians will ask ICANN to redelegate the increasingly popular .io top-level domain, according to the group's lawyer. The move, still in its very early stages, follows a recent ruling under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, which mildly chastised the current registry,...
A small UK software firm has given Facebook owner Meta, well known in the domain industry for pursuing cybersquatters, 30 days to stop using the brand name "Threads" or face legal action. Meta launched a Twitter clone called Threads back in July and quickly gathered over 100 million users (since declining to eight million daily […] The post M...
ICANN's six top executives have been given pay raises up to 3.5%, according to resolutions passed at ICANN 78 last week. The increases are a little ahead of US inflation but a little below the market rate if these officers were to work elsewhere, according to the resolutions. Interestingly, interim CEO Sally Costerton is named […] The post Mo...
Nominet has taken over back-end registry services for Microsoft's small portfolio of dot-brand gTLDs. The company said it's now running .azure, .bing, .hotmail, .microsoft, .windows and .xbox TLDs, bringing the total number of gTLDs on its registry platform to 74. Microsoft had been with Verisign to date, but Verisign told us in July that it's [...
One of the longest-running fights over a new gTLD may be over, after three unsuccessful applicants for .hotel appeared to throw in the towel on their four-year-old legal fight with ICANN. In a document quietly posted by ICANN last week, the Independent Review Process panel handling the .hotel case accepted a joint request from ICANN […] The p...
Nominet has been picked as the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator for failed gTLD .desi, the company confirmed today. The gig means the .uk registry will be responsible for keeping .desi ticking over — handling DNS, EPP, Whois etc — while ICANN looks for a successor registry. .desi was operated by mom-n-pop outfit Desi Networks of [&#...
Nominet members have selected Steve Wright to a non-executive directorship on the company's board. The .uk registry said today that his three-year term started at the company's AGM yesterday. Wright came very close to winning in the first round of voting, securing 723,027 votes. That was just shy of the threshold of 743,038 required to […] Th...
Public Interest Registry is to keep Identity Digital as its back-end registry services provider following a competitive RFP process, the organization announced today. The deal's highlight TLD is of course .org, with its 11 million domains, but it also includes the much smaller .charity, .foundation, .gives, .giving, .ngo, .ong, ., . , and .. Identi...
Freenom has been hit by its third ICANN contract-breach notice in under a month, this time because the organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics could not transfer a domain out to another registrar. The registrar, formally OpenTLD, failed to take off the ClientTransferProhibited status from the domain club2024.tickets, preventing the registrant from tr...
A member of the Belgian parliament has reportedly registered hamas.be and redirected it to the Israeli Defense Forces' web site. Michael Freilich, the country's only Jewish MP, bought the domain after seeing it was available and to keep it out of the hands of Hamas supporters, according to The Jerusalem Post. He also reportedly caused […] The...
Some companies are using their trademarks to grab potentially valuable domain hacks in the upcoming .ing gTLD, possibly avoiding having to cough up seven figures for them later on. There's about a week left on Google Registry's .ing sunrise period, but some hacks have already started showing up in the .ing zone file. Not counting […] The post...
"Arabic ‘Dot Shabaka' goes online, ‘Dot Com' era nearing end". That was a headline from a Turkish news site in February 2014 when the first Arabic gTLD — . — went to general availability, having been delegated to the DNS root October 23, 2013, 10 years ago next week. It was one of the first […] The post The first four ...
Team Internet, formerly CentralNic, has named Simon McCalla as CEO of its domains-related business. McCalla is formerly CTO of .uk registry Nominet, though he's been taking a break from the domains industry for the last few years. Team Internet said he is now CEO of its "Online" division, which I can only assume is the […] The post Team Inter...
XYZ has acquired .ceo, making its portfolio of new gTLDs now 35-strong. XYZ, judging by a blog post and press release, seems to the sticking to the original use case of yourname.ceo, highlighting a couple of CEOs that are using .ceo as their primary domain. But it seems that many of the .ceo domains with […] The post XYZ adds 35th gTLD to its...
A Swedish wood-products company has become the latest company to ask ICANN to terminate its dot-brand gTLD registry agreement. Svenska Cellulosa AB, which Wikipedia tells me makes almost $2 billion a year selling paper and wood pulp, is dumping .sca, which it has never used. While ICANN will not transition the gTLD to another operator, […] Th...
ICANN Compliance is really up in Freenom's face now, filing yet another contract-breach notice against its registrar arm barely a week after the last one. The September 29 notice adds three new tickets to the 12 in the September 20 notice I wrote about last month. It's the sixth notice OpenTLD has received since 2015. […] The post Freenom get...
The category-killer domain name university.com appears to have been sold to the world's biggest douchebag, Andrew Tate. According to a press release from last-but-one owner VPN.com, the domain changed hands last month for "an undisclosed, but record-breaking amount". The buyer, according to the release, is The Real World, and the seller is an indiv...
ICANN's fiscal 2023 revenue came in $2 million light when compared to its budget, the annual report published today shows. The Org blamed lower-than-expected transaction fees for the shortfall, suggesting the domain industry wasn't quite as buoyant as its accountants had hoped. Funding for the year came in at $150 million against a budgeted target ...
Russia did not pay its usual annual tribute to ICANN in the Org's fiscal 2023, newly published funding data reveals. Coordination Center for TLD RU usually funnels $50,000 a year into ICANN's budget, but that was reduced to nothing in the year to June 30, 2023, according to ICANN's FY23 annual report, published today. While […] The post Russi...
Epik lost almost 50,000 domains under management in June, dropping below half a million domains for the first time since 2019, according to just-published registry transaction reports. The registrar ended the month with 461,822 DUM, down from 511,028 in May and an August 2022 peak of 808,160. The transfer exodus continued in the month, which [̷...
ICANN is devolving into a trade association hiding under a thinning veneer of multistakeholderism and the domain industry is becoming a cartel. Those are two of the conclusions reached by consultant Michael Palage, who's been involved with ICANN since pretty much the start, in an epic Request for Reconsideration in which he asks the Org […] T...
ICANN has appointed Krista Papac as interim Ombudsman, following the resignation of Herb Waye earlier this year. Papac is currently the Org's complaints officer, a similar role to that of the Ombudsman. The move means that an ICANN staffer is taking the structurally independent role for the first time. ICANN chair Tripti Sinha blogged that […...
Nominet has taken over management of the Pitcairn Islands' ccTLD, .pn, judging by its web site and IANA records updated this week. The site at nic.pn says UK registry Nominet is going to modernize the registry to use the EPP standard — this should make .pn accessible to thousands of registrars — and implement DNSSEC. […] The post ...
Latin American Telecom, the company that runs the .tube gTLD, has claimed victory in its fight to get popular social media apps to "linkify" more than 400 TLDs that have gone live in the last eight years. As I reported two weeks ago, CEO Rami Schwartz managed to figure out that any TLD that entered […] The post .tube registry claims victory i...
A thirty-year-old registrar — practically prehistoric by internet standards — has been hit with an ICANN breach notice after apparently failing to transfer a domain lost in a UDRP and not paying its fees. ICANN has told Texas-based GKG.net that it failed to implement a July UDRP decision (pdf) over the domain top-rx-market.com, which wa...
Almost 10 years have passed since ICANN delegated its first 2012-round new gTLDs and the Org has started to auto-renew their contracts. As far as I can tell, the first delegated gTLD, . (Arabic ".web", .xn--ngbc5azd) got its Registry Agreement renewed on July 13. The registry, dotShabaka, was informed all the way back in April. […] The post I...
Is time up for Freenom? After being sued by Facebook and losing its contracts to operate ccTLDs for at least two countries, now it also has ICANN Compliance to deal with. Its registrar arm, Netherlands-based OpenTLD, has been hit with a lengthy ICANN breach notice that alleges the company failed to allow its customers to […] The post Freenom ...
.au domains failed to resolve for many internet users for almost an hour on Monday, after the registry operator messed up a DNSSEC update. ccTLD overseer auDA said the issue was caused by a "key re-signing process that generated an incorrect record". Users on ISPs that strictly enforce DNSSEC would have returned not-found errors for […] The p...
Nominet wants to add a new clause to its foundational Articles of Association that would prevent it adventuring into non-domain businesses without telling its members. The proposal follows the scandal surrounding its CyGlass security business, which the company invested about $23.5 million in before eventually selling for a dollar. "The Board will ...
It's looking like ICANN won't ban companies from applying for plural versions of existing singular gTLDs, and vice-versa, after all. Among the pieces of the GNSO's new gTLD policy advice ICANN's board of directors rejected at the weekend was a proposal to essentially ban potentially confusing singular/plural combos coexisting in the DNS. The board ...
ICANN has delivered some bad news for dot-brands, applicants from poorer countries, and others, at the weekend rejecting several items of new gTLD policy advice that the community spent years cooking up. The board of directors on Sunday approved a scorecard of determinations, including the rejection (or non-adoption) of seven GNSO recommendations t...
Another major car-maker has thrown in the towel on its key dot-brand gTLD. This time it's Volkswagen. Referring to .volkswagen, the company has told ICANN: "This top level domain has never been utilized by Volkswagen of America and we do not intend to utilize it." The company had already ditched its secondary dot-brand, . (.xn--3oq18vl8pn36a), [...
Radix is looking for a back-end registry services provider, possibly ending its 10-year relationship with CentralNic (now Team Internet). The company announced an invitation-only RFP covering all of its stable of TLDs: .online, .store, .tech, .website, .space, .press, .site, .host, .fun, .uno, and .pw. .online alone has 2.6 million names in its zon...
Developers of major pieces of internet software, including the world's most-popular messaging app, may be relying on seriously outdated lists of top-level domains. That's the picture that seems to be emerging from one new gTLD operator's quest to discover why WhatsApp doesn't recognize its TLD, and many others including major dot-brands, as valid. ...
Controversial free domains provider is reportedly losing its contract to manage Mali's ccTLD, its second loss in as many months. The Financial Times quoted Freenom CEO Joost Zuurbier as saying a 10-year-deal with Mali's government to run .ml was due to expire yesterday. I reported last month that the deal looked like it was ending. […] The po...
DENIC has won the contract to be the sole supplier of registrar data escrow services for ICANN, the Org has announced. The German registry is replacing NCC Group, which acquired Iron Mountain's escrow business two years ago. Iron Mountain has been ICANN's chosen escrow agent since it started requiring registrars to escrow registrant data in […...
ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years. IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the "caretaker" sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday. The Org replaces […] The post ICAN...
Herb Waye has quit as ICANN's independent Ombudsman, according to ICANN. His last day will be September 30 and ICANN is already looking for his replacement, the Org said in a statement. While the announcement includes a glowing quote from board chair Tripti Sinha it does not contain a quote from Weye and no reason […] The post ICANN Ombudsman...
The Internet Commerce Association isn't happy about a plan to ban domain investing in India's .in domain, saying it will "destroy a valuable and thriving secondary market". NIXI, the government-overseen ccTLD registry, already has a policy in its Registrar Accreditation Agreement that bans registrars from "squatting, grabbing, hoarding, infringemen...
ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators. The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight. But […] The post No $8 million...
Epik's domains under management total fell by over 125,000 in the first quarter, March registry transaction reports reveal. The company had 607,891 domains in its stable at the end of March, down from 732,914 at the start of the year. The number was down 40,000 in the month, almost double the decrease of February. Most […] The post Epik lost ...
Nominet director Phil Buckingham has stepped down from Nominet's board of directors just a few months before his seat comes up for reelection. Nominet said he was leaving the board for personal reasons immediately. He was a member-elected non-executive director approaching the end of a three-year term. He will not stand for reelection, Nominet said...
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