Ukraine registry hit by 57 attacks in a week

Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster today said its infrastructure was hit by 57 distributed denial of service attacks last week.

On its web site, which has continued to function during the now month-long Russian invasion, the company said it recorded the attacks between March 14 and 20, which a top strength of 10Gbps.

“All attacks were extinguished. The infrastructure of the .UA domain worked normally,” the company, usually based in Kyiv, said.

Hostmaster took the initiative in the first days of the war to move much of its infrastructure out-of-country, to protect .ua from physical damage, and to sign up to DDoS protection services.

Nigeria slashes prices to compete with .com

Nigerian ccTLD registry NiRA has lopped about 40% off the price of .ng domain names, bringing them down to a level where they are .com-competitive.

The price for a second-level name has come down to a reported NGN 5,500, which works out to about $13 a year.

.ng currently has about 178,000 domains under management, which is pretty low for a nation of some 206 million people.

The move is in line with the Nigerian government’s digital economy policy, according to NiRA.

.au names available today

Australians are able to register domain names directly under .au for the first time today, after ccTLD registry auDA liberalized its hierarchy.

Second-level names under .au will at first only be available to existing registrants of matching third-level names in zones such as .com.au and .net.au, under a priority allocation process.

This process lasts for six months and allows domain owners to claim their matching 2LD more or less immediately, assuming there are no other registrants with matching rights.

In cases where more than one registrant applies for the name domain — such as when example.com.au and example.net.au are owned by different people — a contention process kicks in.

Registrants with reg dates before the cut-off of February 4, 2018 get priority over those with later dates.

If there are only registrants with names newer than the cut-off date, the oldest one gets priority.

If there are only registrants with names older than the cut-off date, they’ll have to come to a bilateral agreement about who gets the name. If they can’t come to a deal, the name stays reserved, and the applicants will have to renew their applications annually, until only one applicant remains.

There are no auDA-backed auctions envisaged by the process.

Any domains that are unclaimed at the end of the priority process will be released into the available pool on September 20.

It’s a much shorter grandfathering period than other liberalized ccTLDs, such as Nominet, which gave .co.uk registrants five years to claim their matching 2LD, and it will be interesting to see what impact this has on uptake.

Direct .uk domains became available in June 2014, and six months later barely a quarter million had been registered, against over 10 million third-level names.

As the five-year priority window drew to a close in 2019, there were about 2.5 million .uk 2LDs, but this spiked to 3.6 million in the final month, as registrants waited until the last minute to claim their names.

That turned out to be the peak — .uk 2LDs stand at fewer than 1.4 million today, compared to the 9.7 million third-level names. It’s still quite rare to spot a direct .uk name in the wild here.

One interesting kink in the priority process is that auDA, which has stricter rules than many other ccTLDs, will check that anyone who applies for a 2LD is in fact eligible for the 3LD they currently hold, which could dissuade applications.

.au currently has 3.4 million third-level domains under management.

Google to launch a shopping-themed gTLD next week

Google is dipping into its bag of dormant gTLDs again, planning to start selling a shopping-themed string next week, apparently having abandoned plans to use it as an exclusively YouTube-related space.

The gTLD is .channel, which it applied for 10 years ago as a closed, Google-only gTLD, with this mission statement:

The sole purpose of the proposed gTLD, .channel, is to host select YouTube channels’ digital content. The proposed gTLD will introduce a dedicated Internet space in which select YouTube channel providers can link to the content hosted on their respective YouTube page.

But the company has changed its mind in the intervening decade and the new plan bears little resemblance to the application.

Now, we’re looking at something commerce-themed that at least at first will be sold via hand-picked channel partners. There’s no mention of YouTube in the registry’s new policies, which state:

.channel domain names are intended solely for use by creators and publishers to host or redirect to storefronts featuring digital and physical products, and audience-building mechanisms for the purpose of monetization.

That sounds rather like it’s going up against the likes of .shop, .store and .shopping.

While a weaker string, Google’s brand carries a lot of weight when it comes to new gTLD sales, and it sounds like the company is going to lean into partners for its initial wave of registrants a little like Amazon did with .bot.

The current launch plan submitted to ICANN calls for a year-long Limited Registration Period starting May 2, saying:

prospective registrants may submit an application to register a .channel domain name through an onboarded content creation platform (each, a “Platform”) on which the prospective registrant has an account.

Platforms will review applications and work with Registry Operator to have domains registered to prospective registrants

I’m speculating a bit here, but I’m guessing we’re talking about e-commerce and storefront-creation services, which could include both registrars and non-registrars.

Before the LRP, the company has told ICANN (pdf) that the invitation-only Qualified Launch Period for .channel will begin on March 29 and run to May 2.

This period, where domains may carry a premium fee, gives the registry a chance to build up its base of anchor tenants who can be leveraged to market .channel to a broader customer base.

Trademark owners will want to note that the sunrise period runs from April 5 to May 9. They’ll have to launch a rules-compatible storefront or keep their domains defensively dark.

There’s no word on general availability yet.

Another DNSSEC screw-up takes down thousands of .au domains

Australia’s ccTLD has become the latest to see a widespread outage that appears to be the result of a DNSSEC misconfiguration.

A reported 15,000 .au domains were affected, though some suspect it could have been more.

Registry overseer auDA said on Twitter that .au “experienced an error” that affected a “small number of domains” and that an investigation was underway.

Earlier today the .au domain experienced an error. We regret that a small number of domains were affected but are pleased to report the .au is back up and operating. An investigation as to the cause of this issue is underway.

— auDA (@auda) March 22, 2022

Donuts subsidiary Afilias, which runs the back-end for .au’s more that 3.4 million domains, has yet to publicly comment.

Network operators and DNS experts took to social media and mailing lists to observe that .au’s DNSSEC was broken, though it appears the problem was fixed rather quickly.

(For those following along from home, .AU DNSSEC key management was broken from 05:48 – 06:18 UTC. Quick repair by AuDA.)https://t.co/jmHAbZdWKo https://t.co/SzOi9U7Kwi

— Bill Woodcock (@woodyatpch) March 22, 2022

DNSSEC creates a chain of cryptographic keys all the way to the DNS root, and when that chain is broken by a misconfiguration such as a missing key, most DNSSEC-enabled resolvers treat the affected domains as if they simply don’t exist.

That means services such as web sites and email addresses stop working until the chain is reestablished. People not using DNSSEC resolvers wouldn’t have seen a problem.

It’s the third TLD to experience a significant outage due to DNSSEC in the last six weeks.

In February, thousands of domains in Sweden’s .se went dark for hours, and Fiji’s entire .fj zone disappeared for DNSSEC users less than two weeks ago.

The outage comes at a particularly unfortunate time in terms of public relations for auDA, which on Thursday will start making direct second-level .au registrations available for the first time.

It’s not immediately clear whether the DNSSEC fluff is related to the SLD launch.

XYZ bought most of Uniregistry’s TLDs

XYZ.com has emerged as the winning bidder for 10 of the 17 new gTLDs that UNR, formerly Uniregistry, auctioned off last year.

The company bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics, according to ICANN, which approved the transfer of each registry agreement today.

As previously reported, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop, albeit not at auction.

The contract reassignments come almost a year after the auction took place, and were delayed after ICANN got nervous about the fact that UNR had apparently sold matching Ethereum Name Service blockchain domains at the same time.

“This raised concerns because ICANN org was being asked to approve transactions that included not only the transfer of gTLD operations set out in the relevant registry agreements, but also included references and/or implications of the transfer of ownership rights in the gTLDs,” ICANN veep Russ Weinstein wrote today.

“To be clear, the registry agreements do not grant any property ownership rights in the gTLD or the letters, words, symbols, or other characters making up the gTLD string,” he added.

Six more UNR gTLD contracts remain in the approval process, but ICANN blamed this on the timing of when the assignment requests were submitted.

The UNR auction last April raised over $40 million, according to UNR.

What to make of this strange trend in new domain regs?

Are people getting the shortest domain possible when they register in a new gTLD?

Every month uber-registry Donuts publishes data about its portfolio, such as which gTLDs are most popular, in which region, what its most popular premium names are, and what keywords are most commonly registered at the second-level.

For the past few months, I’ve noticed what may be considered an unusual trend — many of the most popular SLD keywords are already gTLDs in their own right, suggesting registrants may not be getting their optimal domain.

The top 10 second-level keywords in February were: today, meta, letter, first, digital, verse, online, club, life, and home.

Put a dot in front of them, and five are also gTLDs — .today, .digital, .online, .club, and .life — some of which Donuts actually manages. One of them, .home, has multiple outstanding applications but has been essentially banned by ICANN due to high levels of name collision.

It’s even more noticeable in January’s numbers, with seven gTLD matches — online, life, digital, free, green, shop, world — in the top 10 SLD keywords.

In December there are six — today, group, online, digital, world and life. In November, four — online, digital, life, group. In October, six — digital, online, life, tech, shop, group.

It shouldn’t be hugely surprising that there’s a crossover between gTLD strings and popular SLD strings — one of the ways Donuts and others picked their gTLDs was by scouring the .com zone file for the most-common SLD endings.

The idea was that if Peter owned, or was thinking of registering, peterspickledpeppersonline.com, he might reasonably want to upgrade to the shorter peterspickledpeppers.online.

Donuts consistently says that the domains it sells are 20% shorter than domains registered in .com over the comparable period.

But its data suggests that this they’re not always getting their optimal domain. People are registering in new gTLDs, but they’re often not using the gTLD that would make their overall domain shorter.

I wonder why this is.

Cost could certainly be a factor. There’s not a massive amount of difference between a .online and a .live, and both are typically more expensive than .com, but it might be an issue for registrants on tight budgets.

It seems more likely that a lack of awareness among registrants may be the main issue — they don’t know the full breadth of options available to them (hell, even I don’t, and this is my job).

Registrars’ name spinners aren’t always helpful raising this awareness.

I typed the string “peterspickledpeppersonline” into the storefronts of seven popular registrars, all of which carry new gTLDs, and found that two of them didn’t offer peterspickledpeppers.online among their suggestions at all.

On some, the domain was way down the list, after far less-relevant suggestions, even though it is shorter and carries a higher price.

EURid appoints new CEO

EURid has named its new CEO, or general manager, as Peter Janssen.

Janssen is currently technical manager at the registry, where he’s been since .eu went live over 15 years ago.

He’ll replace longstanding boss Marc Van Wesemael, who’s retiring.

Janssen previously worked for DNS Belgium, also as technical manager.

Nominet cuts off Russian registrars

Russian registrars will no longer be able to sell .uk domains, due to the war in Ukraine, Nominet announced today.

“We are not accepting registrations from registrars in Russia — we are suspending the relevant tags,” the registry said.

A “tag” is the unique identifier Nominet issues to its registrars to enable them to access the .uk registry.

I believe it’s the first example of a national domain registry taking action against Russian companies in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

While Nominet is independent, it’s pretty tight with the UK government, which with international partners has implemented some quite tough economic sanctions against Russia.

Nominet said that the “very small” number of existing domains with Russian addresses “will continue to operate as normal”.

Other measures the company announced include a £200,000 donation to the war relief effort, a reduction of its roughly £100,000 of investments in Russian companies to about £1,000, and the monitoring of new .uk registrations for possible Ukraine-related scams.

Other domain companies to announce what effectively amount to sanctions against Russia include Namecheap, Sedo, IONOS, GoDaddy and CENTR.

ICANN has also offered money to Ukraine and concessions to Ukrainian registrants, though the latter may also apply to Russians.

As Russia advances on Kyiv, .ua moves out-of-country

Ukraine’s ccTLD registry has moved its servers out of the country to avoid disruption due to the Russian invasion.

Hostmaster said that servers responsible for “the operability of the .ua domain” have been moved to other European countries, seemingly with the assistance of other registry operators.

The company’s technical operations were based in Kyiv, which is currently under threat from advancing Russian troops.

Hostmaster announced the news on Saturday, the third day of the invasion.

A day earlier, it said it had signed up to Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service to protect its two largest zones — .com.ua and .kiev.ua — from distributed denial of service attacks.

It had suffered one such attack earlier this month, before the invasion, with traffic at some points exceeding 150Gbps.

The company says it runs more than 550,000 .ua domains in total. This morning, all .ua web sites I tested from the UK were resolving normally.