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- ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take
- Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
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- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
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- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
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- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
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- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
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- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
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- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
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- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
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- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
Free domains registrar gets FOURTH breach notice
OpenTLD, the company that offers free and at-cost domain names under the Freenom brand, has received its fourth public breach of contract notice from ICANN.
The alleged violation concerns a specific expired domain — tensportslive.net — which was until its expiration last November hosting a Pakistani cricket blog.
ICANN claims OpenTLD failed to hand over copies of expiration notices it sent to the former registrant of the name, which expired November 12, despite repeated requests.
The blogger seems to have been royally screwed over by this situation.
ICANN first started badgering OpenTLD for its records on December 23, presumably alerting the company to the fact that its customer had a problem, when the domain had expired but was still recoverable.
ICANN contacted the registrar four more times about the domain before February 1, when it dropped and was promptly snapped up by DropCatch.com.
The public breach notice (pdf) was published February 27. OpenTLD has apparently since provided ICANN with data, which is being reviewed.
But it’s the fourth time the registrar has found itself in serious trouble with ICANN.
It got a breach notice in March 2015 after failing to file compliance paperwork.
Later that year, ICANN summarily suspended its accreditation — freezing its ability to sell domains — after the Dutch company was found to have been cybersquatting rival registrars including Key-Systems and NetEarth in order to poach business away from them.
That suspension was fought in an unprecedented arbitration case, but ICANN won and suspended the accreditation again that August.
It got another breach notice in 2017 for failing to investigate Whois accuracy complaints, which ICANN refers to in its current complaint.
OpenTLD/Freenom is perhaps best known as the registry for a handful of African ccTLD and Tokelau’s .tk, which is the second-largest TLD after .com by volume of registered domains.
Its business model is to give the names away for free and then monetize them after they expire or are deleted for abuse. In the gTLD space, it says it offers domains at the wholesale cost.
According to SpamHaus, over a third of .tk domains it sees are abusive.
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