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Tiny Russian registrar gets canned

Kevin Murphy, August 8, 2012, Domain Registrars

ICANN is to terminate a Russian registrar’s accreditation.
Name For Name Inc, which was given a breach notice last month, is being shut down for basically failing to act as a registrar.
Verisign had already cut off its .com/.net registrar contract and the company was not managing names, providing Whois, or doing any of the other things registrars are supposed to.
Under normal circumstances, a termination sees a mass transfer of all the domains under management to a nominated registrar, but in Name For Name’s case I can’t see that happening.
The company only had five gTLD domain names under management, according to the latest count.
Its accreditation will be terminated September 6.
ICANN also this week issued a breach notice to Visesh Infotecnics (Signdomains.com), apparently as the result of a badly handled domain name hijacking.

Verisign demands 24/7 domain hijacking support

Kevin Murphy, August 6, 2012, Domain Registrars

Verisign is causing a bit of a commotion among its registrar channel by demanding 24/7 support for customers whose .com domains have been hijacked.
The changes, we understand, are among a few being introduced into Verisign’s new registry-registrar agreement for .com, which coincides with the renewal of its registry agreement with ICANN.
New text in the RRA states that: “Registrar shall, consistent with ICANN policy, provide to Registered Name Holders emergency contact or 24/7 support information for critical situations such as domain name hijacking.”
From the perspective of registrants, this sounds like a pretty welcome move: who wouldn’t want 24/7 support?
While providing around the clock support might not be a problem for the Go Daddies of the world, some smaller registrars are annoyed.
For a registrar with a small headcount, perhaps servicing a single time zone, 24/7 support would probably mean needing to hire more staff.
Their annoyance has been magnified by the fact that Verisign seems to be asking for these new support commitments without a firm basis in ICANN policy, we hear.
The recently updated transfers policy calls for a 24/7 Transfer Emergency Action Contact — in many cases just a staff member who doesn’t mind being hassled about work at 2am — but that’s meant to be reserved for use by registrars, registries and ICANN.

Thomson Reuters buys MarkMonitor

Kevin Murphy, July 26, 2012, Domain Registrars

Thomson Reuters has acquired the corporate brand-protection registrar MarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum.
MarkMonitor will be absorbed into its new owner’s Intellectual Property & Science business unit, giving it a ready-made and pretty strong domain name management capability.
San Francisco-based MarkMonitor has almost 700,000 domain names in gTLDs under management and says it has over half of the Fortune 100 as clients and over 400 employees.
Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s leading providers of business information with annual revenue approaching $14 billion.
As an aside, I predicted back in October 2011 that MarkMonitor was about ready to be acquired, based on the consolidation trend in the industry. It took a little longer than I expected.

Go Daddy tones down the sex for Olympics ads

Kevin Murphy, July 16, 2012, Domain Registrars

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman recently promised a less salacious image for the company, and its new commercial, set to air in the US during the London 2012 Olympics, delivers.
Kinda.
The attractive female spokemodel is still in attendance, but she’s matched up with a data center geek stereotype. The idea is to show that the company is not just a pretty face. Or something.
It’s all very self-conscious.

Lady With An ErmineUnless it’s nothing more sophisticated than a “beaver” joke, the otter reference went completely over my head.
UPDATE: A reader speculates that the otter may be a high-brow reference to the Leonardo painting Lady With An Ermine.
According to Wikipedia, the ermine (a stoat) may be intended to symbolize purity, despite the fact that the subject of the painting is believed to be the 16-year-old mistress of Leonardo’s employer.

Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock can now be removed

Kevin Murphy, June 1, 2012, Domain Registrars

One of Go Daddy’s most unpopular practices – the infamous 60-day domain name transfer lock – has essentially come to an end.
From today, customers will be able to unlock their domains before the period is up, by contacting a special support team, according to director of policy planning James Bladel.
For many years Go Daddy has blocked domains from being transferred to other registrars if changes have been made to the registrant contact information within the last 60 days.
The company alerts users to the lock before they make changes to their Whois data, but that hasn’t stopped the policy bugging the hell out of domainers and regular registrants.
It’s designed to prevent domain hijackings – something Go Daddy says it does very well – but when false positives occur it often looks like a nefarious customer retention strategy.
“It’s a very effective tool for preventing harm, but it does catch out a lot of folks who want to legitimately change registrant data,” Bladel said.
Under the new policy, if Go Daddy blocks a transfer because of the 60-day lock, registrants will be given an email address to contact in order to appeal the block.
According to Bladel, after a human review the locks will be lifted and the Whois data will revert to its original state, unless the Go Daddy support team suspects a hijacking is in progress.
“The bad guys are not going to call and ask us to take a second look at this,” he said. “The bad guys want it to happen under the radar.”
The changes come thanks largely to a new revision of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which came into effect today and specifies that transferring registrants need to be given a way to remove the locks on their domains within five days.
But Bladel said the way the policy is written gave Go Daddy a lot of leeway in how to interpret it – it could have kept the locks in place as before – but it decided to revise its policy to improve the customer experience.

Blacknight now .co accredited

Kevin Murphy, May 31, 2012, Domain Registrars

Irish registrar Blacknight Solutions has been approved as a .co registrar, according to the company.
It’s one of the ongoing second wave of .co registrars following the initial 10 used by .CO Internet at launch.
Judging by .CO’s web site, Blacknight will be the 18th registrar to get approval to sell directly (13th if you don’t count the jointly owned registrars on the list), as well as the smallest.
Previously, the company was like so many others a reseller of My.co, the Colombian channel-oriented registrar.

OpenSRS now offering .jobs and .aero

Kevin Murphy, May 24, 2012, Domain Registrars

Tucows has started offering .jobs and .aero domain names through its OpenSRS reseller channel.
According to a blog posting, resellers will have to opt in to offering these gTLDs. Prices are $125/year for .jobs and $50/year for .aero.
It’s potentially good news for both registries, particularly .jobs. Both are restricted, sponsored gTLDs, but .jobs has a much less strict set of entry requirements than .aero.
The OpenSRS network has about 11,000 resellers, according to the company, which is largely responsible for Tucows being the third-largest ICANN-accredited registrar by domain volume.

Chinese DDoS knocks 123-reg offline

Kevin Murphy, May 23, 2012, Domain Registrars

Customers of major UK domain registrar 123-reg suffered a couple of hours of downtime this afternoon due to an apparently “massive” denial of service attack.
The attack targeted its DNS servers and originated in China, according to a report in The Register.
Users reported sites offline or with spotty availability, but the company managed to mitigate the effects of the attack fairly quickly. It’s now reporting mostly normal service.
123-reg, part of the Host Europe Group, has hundreds of thousands of domains under management in the gTLD space alone.

Domainmonster joins 123-reg stable

Kevin Murphy, May 16, 2012, Domain Registrars

Mesh Digital, owner of the Domainmonster and Domainbox registrars, has been acquired by rival/partner Hosting Europe Group for an undisclosed sum.
Operating mainly in the UK and Germany, the buyer says it is the largest privately owned hosting company in Europe, already the owner of large registrars including 123-reg/Webfusion, a Mesh reseller.
“They’ve been a technology partner of ours for some time with the Domainbox product, so it’s the logical partner for us,” Mesh CEO Matt Mansell said.
“Our focus isn’t on hosting,” he added. “They’ll bring a good range of hosting and software-as-a-service products to our customers and we’ll bring good domain services to their customers.”
Mansell will join Host Europe as head of domain strategy.
The fact that new gTLDs are expected to launch next year was not a particular driver of the deal, he said.
With its new acquisition, Host Europe will have five million domains under management, according to the company.
Mesh, based in Godalming, UK (it’s 30 miles away and I’ve never heard of it either) has 15 employees and turnover of about $5 million, Mansell said.

Even when the domains are free, Irish small businesses prefer .com to .ie

Kevin Murphy, May 16, 2012, Domain Registrars

Irish small businesses overwhelmingly chose .com domains over .ie and .eu during the first year of a Blacknight Solutions web presence freebie initiative.
Blacknight said today signed up 10,000 Irish small business customers through Getting Business Online, a partnership with Google and the local postal service, which it launched a year ago.
The scheme, which Google has been promoting with local partners in various territories around the world, gives companies a free domain and basic web hosting for a year.
According to Blacknight managing director Michele Neylon, 61% of sign-ups chose a .com domain, while 21% chose Ireland’s .ie, 13% chose .eu and 4% chose .biz.
“The way .ie is run, you have to go through an extensive validation process, and it’s also restricted what domains you can register,” Neylon, a regular critic of .ie policy, said.
As the initiative is just a year old, it’s not yet clear how many of these 10,000 companies plan to stick around on paid services.