GoDaddy among five companies competing for .za contract

Five companies are bidding for the contract to run the back-end for South Africa’s .za domains, which is expected to be awarded shortly.

Local ccTLD overseer ZADNA has named ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC), Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium, GoDaddy Registry, The Bean App & GMO Internet Group, and Catalytic Peter capital Consortium as respondents to its 2021 RFP.

Of those, only GoDaddy is a lone bidder, and the only one without an obvious South African partner. The rest are consortia, apparently newly created to bid for the contract.

ZARC is a venture of incumbent back-end ZA Central Registry and its affiliated commercial arm Domain Name Services, according to ZACR.

Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium appears to be made up of local corporate registrar Lexsynergy and a South African consulting firm.

The Bean App is a South African startup registrar. Its partner GMO is the Japanese registry provider behind .shop and a bunch of geographic and dot-brand gTLDs.

I’m sorry to say I have no idea what “Catalytic Peter” is. It has no internet footprint and ZADNA has not revealed any information beyond the name.

ZADNA said it is “currently at the advanced stage of the final checkpoints of the procurement process.”

.za has over 1.3 million domains and over 600 registrars. While ZACR currently runs four additional African geographic gTLDs, .za is by far its biggest deal in terms of registrations.

GoDaddy Registry to raise some TLD prices, lower others

GoDaddy Registry is to raise the base price of three of its recent acquired gTLDs and lower the price on three others.

The company is telling registrars that the prices of .biz, .club and .design domains are going up later this year, while the prices of .luxe, .abogado and .case are going down.

For .biz, which GoDaddy took over when it acquired Neustar’s registry business in 2020, the price will increase by $0.87 to $13.50.

While .biz hasn’t been price-regulated by ICANN since 2019, the new rise is lower than the annual 10% it was allowed to impose under its previous, price-capped contracts. It’s around 7% this year, roughly in line with .com’s capped increase. It will mean the price of a .biz has gone up by over 70% in the last decade.

For .club, which GoDaddy acquired last year, registrations, renewals and transfers are going up by a dollar to $10.95, the fourth consecutive year in which .club fees have increased.

It’s in the ball-park of what previous owner .CLUB Domains was already doing — .club launched in 2014 with a $8.05 fee, but that went up to $8.95 in 2019, then $9.45 in 2020, then $9.95 last year.

.club has about a million domains under management at the moment. If that level holds, it’s an extra million bucks a year to GoDaddy, which frankly will barely register on the company’s now billion-dollars-a-quarter income statement.

For lower-volume .design, another one of the 2021 acquisitions, the price is going up by $2 to $35.

All of these price changes go into effect September 1 this year, giving registrants over six months to lock-in their pricing for up to 10 years by committing to a multi-year renewal before the changes kick in.

Registrars in most cases pass on registry price increases to their customers, but they don’t have the same six-month notification obligations as registries.

For three other GoDaddy Registry TLDs, prices are coming down in the same timeframe, so registrants may wish to see if the savings are passed on in future by registrars.

.luxe prices are going down from $15 a year to $12, .abogado is going down from $25 to $20 and .casa is going down from $7.50 to $6. The latter two mean “lawyer” and “home” respectively in Spanish.

GoDaddy isn’t currently altering the regular price of the TLDs it acquired from MMX, but it is bumping the restore fee for expired domains by $10 to $40, bringing them into line with .com.

Supreme Court allows fight for .nu to proceed

A lawsuit fighting for control of the .nu ccTLD can go ahead, the Supreme Court of Sweden has ruled.

The court confirmed last week that the Government of Niue has standing to sue, despite a lower court ruling in favor of .nu registry IIS’s claims to the contrary two years ago.

The ruling means the case will go to trial, according to Niue representative Pär Brumark.

IIS is the ccTLD registry for Sweden’s .se, but it also took over Niue’s .nu, which coincidentally means “.now” in Swedish, from its original American manager in 2013.

Niue has been fighting for .nu to be returned to its control for over two decades. The ccTLD has proven popular with Swedish speakers, and has about 250,000 current registrations, making about $5 million a year.

That’s a lot of money for a tiny island nation like Niue, which has never seen any cash from .nu sales.

Niue sued in 2018 and defied convention by publicizing its IANA redelegation request in 2021.

Niue’s case was dismissed by a lower court in 2020 after the judge ruled the government lacked ability to sue in Swedish jurisdiction. That decision was overruled (pdf) last year by a Court of Appeals.

IIS appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week declined (pdf) to hear the case, upholding the appeals court ruling. There’s no further avenue of appeal.

The case now goes back to the court of first instance for a trial. A date has not been set.

Liberties group appeals NIXI’s “two domains rule” brush-off

The Internet Freedom Foundations, an Indian online rights group, says it is continuing to try to find out why local registry NIXI has implemented a highly weird “two domains” rule.

The rule, which appeared in late December, requires registrars to ask the personal permission of NIXI’s CEO if a registrant wants to register more than two .in domains.

As NIXI acts under the authority of the Indian government, IFF filed a request last month under the country’s Right To Information Act, asking under what authority the rule was imposed and how NIXI reached its decision to impose it.

The terse reply (pdf) simply refers the reader to a clause of the registry-registrar agreement stating that NIXI can roll out new rules at will.

Its February 10 response adds: “Above decision is taken with respect to National Security.”

That’s exactly what NIXI CEO Anil Kumar Jain told DI a month earlier.

Because three or four of IFF’s questions went unanswered, the group says it has appealed the response and requested more transparency.

“Repeating ‘national security’ as a mantra to defeat transparency, even when not probably emerging from the topic of policy formation, is a growing tendency in decision making,” IFF said.

Greek .eu domains to be deleted

EURid has started warning registrants that their Greek-script .eu domains will be deleted this year.

The names will no longer work after November 14, the company said yesterday.

It’s part of the registry’s three-year plan to phase out mixed-script internationalized domain names, which are considered poor security practice.

The affected domains are Greek-script IDN.eu names, not IDN.IDN names using the Greek-script .ευ.

.ευ was introduced in 2019, after an amusingly Kafkaesque, yet typically ICANN, decade-long effort to crowbar the ccTLD through its IDN Fast Track rules.

Because EURid had been accepting Greek-script second-level names under its base Latin .eu domain for some time, it grandfathered existing registrants by “cloning” their .eu names into .ευ, albeit with only a three-year lifespan.

There were only 2,694 .ευ domains registered at the end of 2021, so one must assume that the number of domains on the deleting list must be smaller.

CentralNic buys a gTLD and a search engine for peanuts

CentralNic is on the acquisition trail again, picking up a new gTLD and an ancient search engine site for knock-down prices.

The company said today it has acquired .ruhr, as well as a German search site called Fireball, for a total of €600,000 ($678,000).

.ruhr is a geographic gTLD, currently restricted to German residents, covering the Ruhr valley region, a sprawling metropolitan area in the west of the country with multiple major cities including Dortmund and Essen.

The gTLD has about 10,000 registrations and serves about five million Ruhr inhabitants, CentralNic said.

The registry is currently Essen-based regiodot, which almost certainly spent more applying for the string, what with ICANN fees and consultants, than CentralNic is now paying for it.

While the string is geographic, it did not count as a geographic name under ICANN’s new gTLD rules and does not have a government sponsor. The deal will probably require ICANN approval, however.

CentralNic said operations of .ruhr will be brought in-house. It already runs the back-end for the similar geo .saarland.

German readers of a certain age may remember Fireball. It was quite popular there in the 1990s, but was one of the first wave of search engines to fade away with the rise of Google. It was once owned by Lycos, which gives you an idea of its vintage.

Nowadays, it’s a bare-bones site that uses Bing for its search results and appears to use Google for its advertising.

CentralNic said combined revenue for the two companies was €200,000 with EBITDA of €100,000, and that the deals will immediately boost its own results.

It said it expects its 2022 financial performance to come in ahead of what analysts currently expect and expects to provide an update at the end of the month when it reports its 2021 numbers.

PIR to offer industry FREE domain abuse clearinghouse

The DNS Abuse Institute will soon launch a free service designed to make it easier to report abuse and for registries and registrars to act upon it.

The Institute, which is funded by .org manager Public Interest Registry, is working on a system provisionally called CART, for Centralized Abuse Reporting Tool, an ambitious project that would act as a clearinghouse for abuse reports across the industry.

The plan is to offer the service for free to reporters and registrars alike, with a beta being offered to registrars late next month and a public launch hopefully before ICANN 74 in June.

DNSAI director Graeme Bunton said that CART is meant to solve the “mess” of current abuse reporting systems.

For abuse reporters, the idea is to give them a one-stop shop for their reports, across all gTLDs and registrars. CART would take their complaints, normalize them, furnish them with additional information from sources such as Whois records and domain block-lists, and shunt them off to the registrar of record.

“Registrars get boatloads of abuse reports every day,” Bunton said. “Hundreds to thousands. They’re often duplicative, often unevidenced — almost always. There’s no standardization. So they’re having to spend a lot of time reading and parsing these abuse reports.”

“They’re spending a huge amount of time triaging tickets that don’t make the internet any better,” he said. “It felt like trying to solve this problem across every individual registry and registrar was not going to work, and that a centralizing function that sits in the middle and absorbs a lot of the complexity would make a real difference, and we’ve been working towards that.”

CART reporters would be authenticated, and their reports would be filed through forms that normalized the data to make them easier for registrars to understand. There will be “evidence requirements” to submit a report.

“It’s a common lament that the abuse@ email that registrars have to publish are filled with garbage,” Bunton said. “This is intended to clean that up, as well as make it easier for reporters.”

Registrars will be able to white-label these forms on their own sites, replacing or adding to existing reporting mechanisms, which will hopefully drive adoption of the tool, Bunton said.

Registrars will be able to use an API to pull the abuse feed into their existing ticketing workflows, or simply receive the reports via email.

The plan is to send these enhanced reports to registrars’ publicly listed abuse@ addresses, whether they opt into the CART system or not, Bunton said.

One feature idea — possibly in a version 2 release — is to have a reputation-scoring function in which registrars can flag reporters as reliable, facilitating on-the-fly “trusted notifier” relationships.

While the DNSAI is focusing to the industry definition of “DNS abuse” — phishing, pharming, malware, botnets and a subset of spam — the plan is to not limit reporters to just those categories.

Copyright infringement claims, for example, would be acceptable forms of abuse report, if the registrar enables that option when they embed the CART forms on their own sites.

CART will most likely be renamed to something with “better mass-market appeal” before it launches, Bunton said, but there will be no charge to reporters or registrars.

“This is all free, with no plans to do cost-recovery or anything like that,” he said.

While Bunton didn’t want to comment, I think it’s unlikely that these projects would be going ahead, at least not for free, had PIR been turned into a for-profit company under its proposed acquisition by Ethos Capital, which was blocked by ICANN a couple of years ago.

A second project DNSAI is working on is called Intelligence.

This will be somewhat similar to ICANN’s own Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) system, but with greater granularity, such as giving the ability to see abuse trends by registry or registrar.

The current plan is to have a preview of Intelligence available in June, with a launch in July.

Surprising nobody, Verisign to raise .com prices again

Verisign has announced its second consecutive annual price increase for .com domain names.

The wholesale registry fee for .com names will rise from $8.39 to $8.97 on September 1 this year, an extra $0.58 for every new or renewing domain, of which there are currently over 160 million.

Verisign announced the move, which was expected, as it announced a 2021 profit of $785 million and a 65.3% operating margin.

CEO Jim Bidzos, speaking to analysts, played down the impact of the increases on .com registrants, pointing out that .com prices were frozen under the Obama administration and have only gone up once before, last year, since 2012.

“This is the second wholesale price increase for COM since January of 2012,” he said. “So, if you look back over the last 10 years, that translates into a cost increase of only 1.3% CAGR over the last ten and a half years actually.”

The current .com contract, signed off by the Trump administration and ICANN, allows for two more 7% annual price increases, excluding the just-announced one, but Bidzos would not say whether Verisign plans to exercise those options.

If it does (and it almost certainly will) it would raise the price to $10.26, where it would stay until at least October 2026, he said.

“We believe .com continues to be positioned competitively,” he said.

It’s still basically free money for Verisign, which saw strong fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 results.

The company yesterday reported revenue of $1.33 billion for 2021, up 4.9%, with net income of $785 million, down from $815 million. The operating margin was 65.3%, compared to 65.2%.

For the fourth quarter, revenue was up 6.3% to $340 million, with net income of $330 million compared to $157 million. Operating margin was 65.3%, compared to 63.9%.

For 2022, the company is guiding for revenue of between $1.42 billion and $1.44 billion, based on the price increases and predicted unit growth of between 2.5% and 4.5%. The operating margin is expected to be between 64.5% and 65.5%.

Bidzos also addressed the controversial .web gTLD, which it won at auction but has been unable to launch due to legal action pursued by rival bidder Afilias/Altanovo.

An Independent Review Process panel recently threw a decision about .web back at ICANN, which is now considering Afilias’ allegations of wrongdoing at the board level.

“ICANN looks to be moving forward with making the decision on the delegation of .web, and we will be monitoring their process,” Bidzos said. He said that Verisign has not budgeted for any revenue or costs from .web in 2022.

That’s probably wise. Afilias recently told us that it has not stopped fighting against Verisign’s .web win.

auDA ramps up marketing for direct .au launch

Australian domain overseer auDA has started national advertising for its second-level .au registration launch next month.

The organization said today it has started running television, radio, outdoor and digital ads, and will continue to do so through to November.

Second-level .au domains become available March 24, on a first-come, first-served basis if there are not already matching third-level domains.

If there’s a matching .com.au or .net.au, registered before February 4, 2018, applications for the 2LDs will be handled via a priority allocation process that runs for six months.

auDA’s marketing campaign focuses on five keywords that have a general meaning in English and also a unique or somewhat distinctive meaning in Australian English: station, pavlova, gummy, stoked and stubby.

A “gummy” could mean a type of confectionery, but “gummy.au” could refer to a type of shark that stalks Aussie waters, for example.

Microsites have been launched for each keyword, but they’re not all resolving for me yet.

Is the .sucks mass-cybersquatting experiment over?

The Everything.sucks experiment is mass-cybersquatting .sucks domains may be over and done with.

Thousands of .sucks domains have been deleted in a huge junk drop, newly created domains at Everything.sucks’ registrar of choice have dried up, and there have been no new UDRP cases filed in months.

Everything.sucks, you may recall, is a wiki-style web site where thousands of famous brands and public figures have pages populated by content scraped from third-party sites discussing, on the rare occasion when the scraping works, how terrible they are.

When the site emerged in 2020, it was a redirect destination for around 2,000 .sucks domains that exactly matched those brands. You typed jackdaniels.sucks into your browser, you wound up at the Jack Daniels page at Everything.sucks.

Various attempts were made at monetizing these names by persuading the brand owners to purchase or transfer them for fees measured in the hundreds, or more usually thousands, of dollars.

The domains were registered to a Turks & Caicos company called Honey Salt and a likely fictitious individual named Pat Honeysalt or Pat Collins. The registrant has fought 21 UDRP cases, most of which it lost, since July 2020.

There hasn’t been a UDRP complaint filed against a .sucks domain since November 2021, and this may be because most of Honey Salt’s domains were only registered for one year and have since expired and dropped.

Registry transaction reports filed with ICANN by .sucks registry Vox Populi show the registrar Rebel.com — Vox’s sister company and Honey Salt’s registrar of choice — deleted 2,179 .sucks domains in September 2021.

That’s very close to the 2,184 one-year adds Rebel recorded in June 2020.

The most likely interpretation of this data, in my view, is that it’s Honey Salt’s first junk drop — the company let the domains go on expiry having failed to sell them to the brand owners and failed to convince UDRP panels that it wasn’t cybersquatting.

At least couple thousand more .sucks domains were registered via Rebel over the year to June 2021, most likely to Honey Salt, but since then the registrar has been selling no more than two or three new .sucks domains per month.

It looks like Honey Salt stopped buying .sucks domains in bulk several months ago.

And zone files show that the total number of active .sucks domains has continued to decline by the thousands since Vox’s last transaction report, from an August 2021 peak of over 13,000, to fewer than 9,000 today.

If these trends continue, it looks like the experiment in mass cybersquatting might be over by the third quarter, when Honey Salt’s last remaining .sucks domains drop.

UDRP panelists and yours truly have speculated that Vox/Rebel and Honey Salt are probably affiliated, because the registry/registrar are the only parties that stood to benefit from Everything.sucks’ monetization techniques, but Vox has denied a connection.