“Origami pinwheel” wins logo contest as Newfold comes out

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, Register.com, Network Solutions, Domain.com, CrazyDomains, ResellerClub, BigRock, BuyDomains, SnapNames and Namejet, among others.

It’s run by former Web.com CEO Sharon Rowlands.

The new logo was the result of a contest among over 100 Newfold employees that was won by system administrator Vishnu Pradeepan.

In a press release, he said:

The abstract shape of the ‘N’ in an origami-style pinwheel symbolizes good luck and represents an endless cycle of energy. That endless cycle of energy represents not just our team, who work tenaciously to ensure our customers are successful, but also the endless possibilities available in our connected world.

It seems you don’t need to pay an expensive ad agency for a decent-looking logo with a free side order of marketing waffle.

Pheenix goes AWOL, gets canned

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 notice last month, ICANN hasn’t been able to connect with Pheenix via email or phone or fax since May 2020.

Since then, it’s also discovered that the company is no longer at the mailing address it has on record.

The registrar has not added any domain names since April 2020. It seems clear it no longer has any interest in doing, or perhaps ability to do, business.

The de-accredited registrar bulk transfer process will now kick in. ICANN will select a registrar to move Pheenix’s 6,000-odd domains to.

Pheenix once specialized in drop-catching, and had over 500 ICANN-accredited registrars to its name. Almost all of those were ditched in November 2017.

PDR wins beauty contest to take over Net4’s stranded customers

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 in Mumbai.

ICANN expects PDR to start reaching out to its new customers next week with instructions on how to get access to their domains at their new registrar.

It goes without saying that Net4 customers should be wary of possible scams, which sometimes accompany this kind of event.

Customers won’t be charged for the transfers, and they won’t have to deal with transfer authorization codes, ICANN said.

PDR was part of the Endurance group until its recent merger with the Web.com group, which created Newfold.

It’s the second-largest registrar group and undoubtedly a safer set of hands than Net4, which has left thousands of customers struggling to renew, manage and transfer their domains for several months.

The bulk transfer to PDR comes after ICANN terminated Net4’s contract for multiple breaches.

Earnings reports: GoDaddy, Tucows and NameSilo report growth

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 emerging strategy of acting as a secondary-market intermediary, making it easier for domainers to sell their domains quickly to end-users (what it calls “independent customers”) and vice-versa.

“Independent customers added over 200,000 domain names that had otherwise been passive into the aftermarket, spurring activity for domain investors,” Bhutani said.

It currently has over 20 million domains listed on its aftermarket platform, contributing 10% of total revenue, the first time it’s broken into double-digits, analysts were told.

Domains was the best-performing segment in growth terms by some margin.

Including its other segments, GoDaddy’s overall Q1 revenue was up 13.8% year over year, at $901.1 million. It had a net income of $10.8 million, compared to $43.2 million a year earlier.

Tucows

Tucows reported domain services revenue up 4%, from $59.5 million in Q1 2020 to $61.2 million, with adjusted EBIDTA of $13.8 million versus $11.5 million a year ago.

CEO Elliot Noss said in a statement that new domain registration growth was slowing following the “pandemic surge” it experienced in 2020, when lockdown-hit businesses flew online to keep afloat.

Including its non-domain segments, Tucows reported Q1 revenue of $70.9 million. That was down from $84 million a year earlier largely as a result of the sale of its Ting Mobile business to Dish Network.

Net income for the quarter was $2.1 million, down 24% compared to the year-ago period.

NameSilo

Fast-growing registrar NameSilo reported revenue for its full-year 2020 of $31 million, up 14.3% on 2019. That was primarily driven by domains growth and its newish add-on services, it said, but it does not break down its revenue by segment.

It had net income of $6.5 million in fiscal 2020, compared to a net loss of $4 million in 2019.

It added 235,347 net domains in gTLDs in 2020, according to reports filed with ICANN, ending 2020 with 3,663,090 names under management. NameSilo said that number is now around 3.9 million.

Net4 nightmare almost over as court rules ICANN can shut down chaotic registrar

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 train services were being harmed by registrants being unable to transfer their domains away.

ICANN has now invoked its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure, which will see Net4’s tens of thousands of gTLD domains transferred to a different, more stable registrar, according to head of compliance Jamie Hedlund.

The Org had terminated Net4’s contract in February after hearing from thousands of customers whose names had ceased to work, expired, or were locked-in to Net4 due to its broken transfers function.

But the Delhi court handling the registrar’s insolvency asked ICANN in March to delay the termination at the behest of the resolution professional attempting to extract as much value as possible from Net4 in service of its creditors.

That order was lifted orally after a hearing on Tuesday, according to ICANN.

Under the DARTP, either the dying registrar picks a successor or ICANN picks one, either from a rotation of pre-approved registrars or by rolling out a full registrar application process.

Given the timing crisis, and Net4’s irresponsible behavior to date, it appears most likely that ICANN will hand-pick a gaining registrar from the pre-qualified pool.

Hedlund blogged that ICANN expects to name Net4’s successor within two weeks, after which the gaining registrar will reach out to registrants to inform them how to proceed.

Registrants will not be charged for the bulk transfer.

Net4 had over 70,000 gTLD domains under management at the end of 2020, but this number has likely decreased in the intervening time.

ccTLDs such as India’s .in will not be covered by the bulk transfer. It will be up to local registry NIXI to minimize disruption for Net4’s .in registrants.

ICANN asks registries to freeze Net 4 India’s expired domains

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.

Net4’s customers have been plagued with problems such as the inability to renew or transfer their domains for well over half a year, and ICANN has issued three public breach notices since December.

ICANN says it has received more than 8,000 complaints related to the registrar — which does not even seem to have a functioning web site any more — since things got real bad last September.

Today, ICANN’s head of compliance Jamie Hedlund blogged:

While we await a final order from the insolvency court, ICANN has requested that all registries not delete expired domain names registered through Net 4 India that registrants have not been able to renew or transfer.

While this may not solve every technical issue experienced by Net4 customers, it should at least prevent them permanently losing their domains, assuming a high level of registry compliance with ICANN’s request.

Registrants won’t be fully safe until ICANN is able to carry out the termination and move Net4’s domains to a stable third-party registrar.

While ICANN disputes whether the Indian insolvency court has jurisdiction over it, it is nevertheless currently complying with its instruction to delay termination until further notice.

Hedlund wrote:

ICANN org is taking actions permitted by its agreements, policies, and law to protect registrants and to facilitate the bulk transfer of the Net 4 India registrations to a functioning registrar that can service its customers. ICANN also is being respectful of the [National Company Law Tribunal’s] processes with this case, which have not yet concluded.

He wrote that the next scheduled hearing of the NCLT is tomorrow, April 27. It appears to have been called due to Hedlund recently impressing upon the court the importance of the crisis.

Formerly massive drop-catcher faces ICANN probe

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 May 14.

According to ICANN, for over a year Pheenix has been declining to provide data showing it is in compliance with the Expired Registration Recovery Policy and the Transfer Policy, related to dozens of domains.

Pheenix was told about at least one such disputed domain as far back as February last year, but ICANN says it’s been unresponsive to its outreach.

It’s also failed to implement an RDAP server, which ICANN has been nagging it about since October 2019. RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, is the successor protocol to Whois.

A quick spot-check reveals that the disputed names are traffic domains once belonging to legitimate organizations, usually with inbound Wikipedia links, that were captured after the organization in question folded and its domains expired. Most were repurposed with low-quality content and advertising.

That fits in with Pheenix’s registrar business model. It was until a few years ago a huge drop-catching player, with over 500 shell accreditations it used to gain speedy access to dropping domains.

But it dumped almost 450 of these in November 2017, and another 50 the following April.

Since then, Pheenix’s primary IANA number (the coveted “888”) has been associated with fewer and fewer domains.

It had 6,930 domains under management at the end of 2020, down from a November 2017 peak of 71,592.

It hasn’t recorded any new domain adds in any gTLDs since April 2020.

According ICANN’s chronology of events, it’s sent dozens of emails, faxes and voicemails over the last year, related to multiple domain names, and it’s only received a single email in response. And that was in May 2020.

Net4’s “complete breakdown” is bringing India to a screeching halt, and ICANN could have prevented it

Domains belonging to hospitals, power grids, public transit services, banks, and other critical services have gone offline due to the collapse of a major local registrar whose troubles ICANN has been aware of for years.

Net 4 India, which has been slowly imploding over the last year, saw a number of its name servers stop functioning last week, leading to customers’ web sites and email services ceasing to work.

Affected customers are not only domainers, web developers, mom-n-pop stores, and small businesses. We’re talking about major players in India’s physical infrastructure, some with billions of dollars of annual revenue.

Power Grid Corporation of India, for example, has complained to ICANN that its primary web site, at powergridindia.com, has gone down, and that its email at that domain is no longer working.

That’s a government-owned company that according to Wikipedia takes in $5.4 billion per year and is responsible for transmitting 50% of the electricity generated in India, a nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

“We are facing problems with DNS of Net4India and due to non availability of email service our operations would affect badly,” a Power Grid employee told ICANN, according to papers filed with Net4’s insolvency court at the weekend.

Others to inform ICANN of outages include:

• The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, which with over four million passengers per day is India’s largest mass transit rail network.
• Multi-billion-dollar conglomerate Bharti Group, which has its fingers in pies such as telecoms, insurance and food, said its “email and other essential business services have been rendered defunct”.
• The Punjab National Bank, which had revenue of over $9 billion last year, named eight domains, seven of which were in gTLDs, that were with Net4 but no longer work.
• Global Hospitals India, a private healthcare provider that sees to 18,000 transplant surgeries per year, has seen its .com domain stop working and has been unable to secure an auth code for a transfer out.

I’ve not seen any reports of these internet-based problems spilling over into actual life-threatening issues such as power outages or failures of critical hospital functions, but one can only assume that not having functional email represents a risk of this kind of thing happening.

The customer testimonies cited above were part of a second batch (pdf) sent to the insolvency court handling Net4’s case by ICANN’s head of compliance, Jamie Hedlund, on Sunday.

And those are just a sampling of the over 2,400 complaints about Net4 that ICANN said it received between April 14 and April 16 last week.

Net4’s own web site appears to have been dark for most or all of this month.

And this is all happening as India’s struggle with the coronavirus pandemic hits a low point. Not only have many heavily-populated areas of the country been forced into lockdown in recent days, but the country seems to have spawned its own virus variant, which is raising concerns among scientists worldwide.

A major internet infrastructure crisis couldn’t come at a worse time, but ICANN not only could fix it now but could have prevented it years ago.

ICANN on February 26 told Net4 it would terminate the company’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement, after the company did not get its act together to fix three previous breach notices detailing its customers’ woes, the first of which was issued December 10.

That meant — or should have meant — that after March 13 ICANN would kick off its process of transferring Net4’s domains and customers to a third-party registrar, where none of this downtime nonsense would have occurred.

But the “resolution professional” trying to keep Net4 alive long enough to service its corporate creditors asked the insolvency court to ask ICANN to halt the termination, and the court complied.

Even though neither ICANN nor the court seems to be claiming that the court has any jurisdiction over a California non-profit and an RAA governed by California law, ICANN has nevertheless spent the last five weeks noticeably NOT terminating Net4 and saving its customers as promised.

Hedlund told the court (pdf) at the weekend:

Unfortunately, ICANN currently is not in a position to assist these individuals, businesses and organizations in transferring their domain names from Net 4 to another registrar because ICANN has no access to AuthInfo codes or the technical ability to generate them the way that registry operators, like the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), and registrars, like Net 4, can. Rather, ICANN can only assist these registrants by transitioning all of Net 4’s registrations to a functioning registrar through a bulk transfer in connection with ICANN’s termination of Net 4’s RAA, which ICANN has been prevented from doing as a result of this Hon’ble Tribunal’s Ad Interim Order of 16 March 2021

It’s not at all clear from the record why ICANN’s lawyers are allowing Net4’s customers to suffer — and its own compliance department to turn into a de facto replacement for Net4’s absentee customer service department — to abide by the suggestion of a court they claim has no power over it.

In fact, it’s not even clear why ICANN has been playing softball with Net4 since it first issued a breach notice against the firm in June 2019.

At that time, ICANN threatened to suspend Net4 for going into insolvency proceedings — the RAA gives it the right to do so unilaterally when “proceedings are instituted by or against Registrar under any bankruptcy, insolvency, reorganization or other laws relating to the relief of debtors”.

If it had wanted to, ICANN could have terminated Net4 and transferred its domains to a safe registrar in 2019, a year before its troubles (arguably exacerbated by the pandemic) started to cause serious problems for the registrar’s customers.

But ICANN did not act at that time. Instead, court filings and other documents suggest, it chose to cooperate with Net4 and the resolution professional, allowing Net4 to continue to market itself to new customers as an accredited registrar.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it’s something ICANN didn’t have in June 2019.

But now that we do have that luxury, surely we can say that the Net4 debacle is going to have to go down as one of ICANN’s all-time most humiliating and potentially dangerous failures.

Squarespace files to go public in New York

Web site tools maker and registrar Squarespace has filed its papers for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company is focused on serving small businesses by simplifying the process of building web sites. It sells domains as a value-added service, but it’s not its core competency.

In filing for its IPO, the company said its revenue last year was $621 million, up 28% on 2019. It had a net profit of $30.6 million, down from $58.2 million the previous year.

Squarespace said it has 3.7 million unique subscriptions, but it did not break down how many of those are domain registrations.

Squarespace has been an ICANN-accredited registrar since 2018, but it has historically acted as a Tucows/OpenSRS reseller. That dynamic changed a little last year.

It sold about 10,000 .com domains per month on its own accreditation in the fourth quarter. It’s accredited in many other gTLDs, but has yet to sell any domains there on its own IANA tag.

Facebook gunning for Web.com in latest $27 million-plus cybersquatting lawsuit

Facebook has sued what it believes is a Web.com subsidiary, claiming the company has been engaged in wholesale cybersquatting for well over a decade.

The complaint, filed in a Pennsylvania District Court, alleges that New Venture Services Corp current owns 74 domains, and has previously owned 204 more, that infringe its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks.

While no other named defendants are listed, the complaint makes it abundantly clear that it believes NVSC is a subsidiary of Web.com and a sister of Network Solutions, Register.com, SnapNames and Perfect Privacy.

Facebook is suing partly under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, allowing it to claim $100,000 damages per infringing domain, so we’re looking at a floor of $27.8 million of potential damages should the lawsuit be successful.

But it’s also looking for NVSC to hand over any profits it’s made from the domains in question, which are generally parked with ads and listed for sale via the SnapNames network for premium fees.

While NVSC is registered in the British Virgin Islands and uses a Pennsylvania post office box as its mailing address, there’s a wealth of evidence going back to 2007 that it’s been affiliated first with NetSol and then Web.com.

Web.com’s last regulatory filing before it went private in 2017 lists NVSC as a subsidiary, which is probably the most compelling piece of evidence establishing ownership.

It appears that NVSC is a shell company that Web.com uses to hold potentially valuable or traffic-rich domains that its customers have allowed to expire. The names are then parked and put up for resale.

Example domains listed in the complaint include httpinstagram.com, faceebbok.com, facebooc.net, instagram-login.com, and installwhatsapps.com.

One would have to assume these names were captured using a fully automated process; even a cursory human review would clock that they’re useful only to bad actors.

The lawsuit is the latest in Facebook’s crusade against mainstream registrars it believes are profiting by infringing its trademarks, which has already ensnared Namecheap a year ago and OnlineNIC in October 2019.

Namecheap recently filed a counterclaim in which it tries to get some of Facebook’s trademarks cancelled.

Facebook has all but admitted that putting legal pressure on registrars is part of its strategy when it comes to getting the policies it wants out of ICANN on privacy and Whois access, where there’s currently an impasse.

Here’s the complaint (pdf).