4Domains customers transferred to Internet.bs

Customers from the insolvent registrar 4Domains have had their domains transferred to Bahamas-based Internet.bs, only a few days after ICANN told 4Domains it was shutting them down.
In a notice posted last night, ICANN said that 4Domains had nominated Internet.bs as its registrar of choice for refugee customers, which likely speeded up the transaction.
ICANN’s letter telling 4Domains it was losing its accreditation, alleging multiple breaches of its contract, was sent September 30, last Thursday.
A 4Domains customer contacted me earlier this week to say she had received a renewal notice from Internet.bs (which she had never heard of) as early as Sunday, October 3.
That’s possibly the fastest turnaround between a registrar losing its accreditation and the new registrar taking over to date.
ICANN tells former 4Domains customers worried about fraud that any emails they receive from Internet.bs should link only to internet.bs or internetbs.net.
Customers should probably also be aware that their domains are now handled by a registrar subject to Bahamas law. 4Domains was US-based.

ICANN cans broke registrar

4Domains.com has lost its registrar accreditation after ICANN decided it had gone insolvent.
ICANN has alleged numerous other violations of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but told the registrar that its insolvency allows it terminate the accreditation with immediate effect.
ICANN’s letter to 4Domains (pdf) describes a company unable not only to pay its roughly $6,110 in due ICANN fees, but also to fund its registry accounts, service its customers and pay its staff.
From this, ICANN has concluded that the registrar is insolvent, and has terminated its accreditation.

4Domains is acting in manner that endangers the stability and operational integrity of the Internet, which is a separate grounds to support ICANN’s termination of the 4Domains RAA.

ICANN said 4Domains was also failing to escrow its registrant data, “due to an inability of the 4Domains programmer to resolve the escrow deposit issues”.
But it has this week supplied ICANN with an electronic copy of its customer database, so it appears that most registrants will be protected should their domains be transferred to another registrar.
The company has been told it may now nominate another registrar to take over its accounts in bulk.
4Domains was accredited in 2000, making it one of the first registrars to go live. According to DotAndCo.net, it has about 25,000 active registrations in five gTLDs.

Is Ella Koon the hottest Go Daddy Girl yet?

Go Daddy has added yet another spokesmodel to its small army of Go Daddy Girls.
Ella Koon is a Hong Kong-based singer/actress/model described by Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons thus: “She’s smart, she’s talented and she knows how to leverage the Internet.”
Those are the three most important qualities in any woman, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
Koon’s primary responsibilities will be promoting the registrar’s brand specifically to the Asian market by looking pretty and wearing a tight T-shirt.

eNom to crack down on fake pharma sites

Demand Media is to tighten security at its domain registrar arm, eNom, after bad press blighted its recent IPO announcement.
The company has signed a deal with fake pharmacy watchdog LegitScript, following allegations that eNom sometimes turns a blind eye to illegal activity on its customers’ domains.
The news emerged in the company’s amended S-1 registration statement (large HTML file), filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. New text reads:

We recently entered into an agreement with LegitScript, LLC, an Internet pharmacy verification and monitoring service recognized by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, to assist us in identifying customers who are violating our terms of service by operating online pharmacies in violation of U.S. state or federal law.

LegitScript will provide eNom with a regularly updated list of domain names selling fake pharma, so the registrar can more efficiently turn them off. The companies have also agreed to work together on research into illegal online pharmacies.
Surrounding text has also been modified to clarify that eNom is not required, under ICANN rules, to turn off domains that are being used to conduct illegal activity.
This is a bit of a PR win for the small security outfits KnuJon and HostExploit, firms which had used the occasion of Demand’s S-1 filing to give eNom a good kicking in the tech and financial press.
HostExploit reported last month that eNom was statistically the “worst” registrar as far as illegal content goes.
ICANN executives are reportedly going to be hauled to Washington DC at the end of the month to explain the problem of fake pharma to the White House.
Registries and registrars have also been invited, and I’d be surprised if eNom is not among them.

Scary fitness trainer is new Go Daddy girl

Jillian Michaels, a trainer from TV’s The Biggest Loser, is Go Daddy’s latest spokesmodel, according to CEO Bob Parsons.
Parsons just uploaded this publicity shot:

She looks like she could happily beat the crap out of an entire ICANN meeting with one arm tied behind her back.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a little scared.

Registrar banned from Swedish namespace

A Danish registrar has been banned from selling .se domain names for 30 days after it registered a “large number” of names on behalf of customers but without their permission.
The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, which runs .se, had this to say (translated from Swedish):

One.com has registered during the summer a large number of domain names without having a mandate from customers. In several cases, inaccurate customer data has been used. This means that today there may be customers who are not aware that domain names are registered on their behalf.

One.com reportedly defended itself by saying it merely renewed names on its customers’ behalf, to prevent them losing their domains.
The company needs to rectify the situation within the month, or it faces a permanent ban.
UPDATE: One.com has released a statement explaining its side of the story.
It seems the company made its unauthorized renewals following a little customer confusion over recent billing changes made at the registry end. Here’s a PDF explaining its position. (thanks @findub)

Local news scrapes barrel with Whois lookup

“Local man and 300,000 others killed in earthquake”.
You’ve seen the headlines. Local news operations will go to crazy lengths in order to put a local spin on international news.
This angle is new to me. The Province, a newspaper in British Columbia, Canada, yesterday managed to localize a hostage situation over 2,300 miles away in Maryland entirely because the gunman used a BC-based domain registrar.

The gunman identified as the suspect in an unfolding hostage situation at the Discovery Channel offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, uses a Burnaby-based company to host his website.
The suspect, identified in media reports as James Jay Lee, has a website named savetheplanetprotest.com. A Whois.com search shows the website is registered to a man by the same name and lists a Burnaby P.O. box as is [sic] address.

The registrar in question is DotEasy.com. It offers Whois privacy services at said PO Box. Unsurprisingly, the company had no comment.
The original The Province headline was “Gunman holding hostages at US Discovery Channel has tenative [sic] BC links”.
Links? A nutter registered a domain name. If all reporters followed this logic, the Scottsdale Times would be the busiest newspaper on the planet.

Two registrars get stay of execution

ICANN has given two registrars another year of accreditation, after previously threatening to terminate their contracts for non-payment of fees.
Abansys & Hostytec and Namehouse, two small registrars, have had the terms of their registrar accreditation agreements extended to August 15, 2011 and July 6, 2011, respectively.
In June, ICANN had told both companies they would be de-accredited on July 1, 2010. Together, the two firms owed almost $20,000 in unpaid fees.
Yesterday, a small note appeared on ICANN’s compliance page:

18 August 2010: Abansys & Hostytec, S.L. RAA effective date extended to 15 August 2011.
18 August 2010: Namehouse, Inc. RAA effective date extended to 6 July 2011.

It’s not entirely clear to me whether this means the registrars have paid up or not. Unlike previous occasions, there’s no mention of whether the companies “cured all outstanding contract breaches”.
According to DotAndCo.net, neither registrar has any domains under management in the gTLDs, although Abansys & Hostytec claims to run over 100,000 domains.

Will Go Daddy be the next domain name IPO?

It was four years ago this week, August 8, 2006, when Bob Parsons unexpectedly canceled Go Daddy’s planned IPO at the eleventh hour.
But with its closest competitor, eNom parent Demand Media, ready to go public, eyes inevitably turn to Scottsdale to see if the market leader is ready to follow suit.
I’ve no doubt Go Daddy will be watching Demand’s IPO carefully, but there are some reasons to believe a me-too offering is not a short-term certainty.
Bob Parsons owns Go Daddy
First, and most importantly, Bob Parsons owns Go Daddy. At the time of the 2006 S-1, he was the company’s sole investor, and I believe that’s still the case.
Unlike Demand Media, which raised about $355 million in financing in its early days, Go Daddy doesn’t have a gang of institutional investors clamoring for a return on their investments.
The flip-side of this argument is that it does have is a loyal senior management team holding share options they’re not yet able to cash in on the public markets.
The fact that Parsons is still in charge may cause some investor nerves, given the trust hit he will have taken on Wall Street four years ago, but I don’t think that’s a massive consideration.
The IPO market is still poor
The first attempt at an IPO was canceled mainly due to poor market conditions, according to Parsons’ blog post at the time.
It had only been a few months since Vonage’s catastrophic offering, which saw early-mover investors lose millions, and there was little appetite for tech IPOs.
A lot has changed in the last four years, but the current tech IPO market is still struggling, with many companies recently under-pricing their offerings or losing value since.
According to VentureDeal stats reported at GigaOm, of the 21 tech IPOs in the first half of this year, only five were trading above their IPO price at the end of July. Most had seen double-digit declines.
While some analysts think the upcoming Skype and Demand Media IPOs could breathe life into the market, it’s far from a certainty.
Go Daddy is a cash cow
Go Daddy’s financial statements will look a lot healthier today that back in 2006.
Parsons said he yanked the IPO in part because there was too much focus on Go Daddy’s performance under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
Under GAAP, Go Daddy was a loss-making company, due to the way that revenue from domain names has to be recognized over the course of the registration while the associated costs are incurred up-front.
This meant that Go Daddy was a cash machine – with something like $95 million of deferred revenue on its balance sheet at the time of the 2006 filing – but technically unprofitable.
Whether this has changed or not, I don’t know; Go Daddy is still growing. But it’s a lot larger now than it was in 2006, and its cashflow and balance sheets will certainly look impressive even if its income statement does not.
I’m guessing a lot will depend on how Demand performs over the coming months as to whether Go Daddy follows its lead.
But Parsons said four years ago that the firm would revisit the public markets again, and I’m sure we won’t have too long to wait until it does.

eNom called world’s most “abusive” registrar

A small security firm has singled out eNom as the domain name registrar and web host with the most criminal activity on its network.
HostExploit released a report today claiming the concentration of “badware” on the network belonging to eNom and its soon-to-be-public parent Demand Media is “exceptionally high”.
The claim is based on the proportion of dodgy sites on eNom’s network relative to its size, rather than the actual quantity.
The report says the Demand-owned autonomous system AS21740 has the fifth-highest amount of badware and the sixth-highest number of botnet command and control servers.
It goes on to say that the four or five AS’s with larger amounts of malware are themselves between 10 and 7,500 larger than eNom, as measured by address space.
The report, which I’m guessing HostExploit released to coincide with the hype around Demand Media’s upcoming IPO, draws heavily on existing research, such as this recent KnuJon registrar report (pdf).
It also uses stats from Google-backed StopBadware.org to demonstrate that eNom hosts a disproportionately large number of malware-serving URLs.
According to StopBadware, Go Daddy actually hosts more bad URLs than eNom – 10,797 versus 7,429 – but Go Daddy’s market share is of course over three times larger.
According to WebHosting.info, eNom currently has 9.5 million domains under management, compared to Go Daddy’s 35.2 million.
In Demand Media’s IPO registration statement, filed last Friday, the company acknowledges that it sometimes gets bad publicity but says it’s caught between a rock and a hard place.

We do not monitor or review the appropriateness of the domain names we register for our customers or the content of our network of customer websites, and we have no control over the activities in which our customers engage.
While we have policies in place to terminate domain names if presented with a court order or governmental injunction, we have in the past been publicly criticized for not being more proactive in this area by consumer watchdogs and we may encounter similar criticism in the future. This criticism could harm our reputation.
Conversely, were we to terminate a domain name registration in the absence of legal compulsion, we could be criticized for prematurely and improperly terminating a domain name registered by a customer.