Com Laude acquires Scottish rival

Brand protection registrar Com Laude has picked up smaller competitor Demys for an undisclosed sum.

Demys, based in Edinburgh, is an ICANN-accredited registrar that specializes in the UK automotive, retail/leisure, media and consumer goods sectors.

It also acts as the registry manager and exclusive registrar for .bentley, the lightly-used dot-brand of luxury car-maker Bentley Motors.

It had around 12,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count, about 7,200 of which were in .com.

It’s about an eighth the size of Com Laude in terms of gTLD domains under management.

Demys has a very light footprint in new gTLDs, with local geo .scot — where it is the largest corporate registrar and fifth-largest registrar overall — being a notable exception.

London-based Com Laude said it was also interested in the company for its brand monitoring services and dispute resolution work.

Two of Demys’ top guys act as arbitrators for UDRP and .uk’s Dispute Resolution Service.

Comment Tagged: .bentley, acquisition, bentley motors, brand protection, com laude, demys, trademarks

CentralNic acquired yet another company

Acquisitive registry/registrar CentralNic has picked up another company, paying up to €2.56 million ($2.95 million) for a small Delaware-based registrar.

It will pay €1.5 million up-front for GlobeHosting, with the rest coming in two annual installments.

GlobeHosting may have a US corporate address, but it plays primarily in the Romanian and Brazilian markets.

It’s not ICANN-accredited. Instead, it acts as a Tucows reseller for gTLD domains (though I imagine that arrangement’s days are numbered).

The company had revenue of €849,000 for the 12 months to July 31 2018 and EBITDA of €419,000, CentralNic said.

The timing is arguably opportunistic. Earlier this year, Romanian registry ICI Bucharest (or ROtld) introduced an annual domain registration renewal fee for the first time (for real).

It recently started deleting names that do not pay the fee, a modest €6 per year.

CentralNic said that GlobeHosting, which appears to be notable player in the .ro market, is “expected to benefit” from this change.

Comment Tagged: .ro, acquisition, centralnic, globehosting, ici bucharest, rotld, tucows

Empty Whois a threat to the US elections?

Could a lack of Whois records thwart the fight against attempts to interfere in this year’s US elections?

That’s the threat raised by DomainTools CEO Tim Chen in a blog post, and others, this week.

Chen points to recent research by Facebook, based on an investigation by security company FireEye, that linked a large network of bogus news sites and social media accounts to the Iranian state media.

FireEye’s investigation used “historical Whois records”, presumably provided by DomainTools, to connect the dots between various domains and registrants associated with “Liberty Front Press”, a purportedly independent media organization and prolific social media user.

Facebook subsequently found that 652 accounts, pages and groups associated with the network, and removed them from its platform.

The accounts and sites in question were several years old but had been focusing primarily on politics in the UK and US since last year, Facebook said.

Based on screenshots shared by Facebook, the accounts had been used to spread political messages bashing US president Donald Trump and supporting the UK’s staunchly pro-Palestinian opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Google’s research, also inspired by FireEye’s findings and Whois data, linked the network to the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

The actions by Google and Facebook come as part of their crackdown on fake news ahead of the US mid-term Congressional elections, this November, which are are largely being seen as a referendum on the Trump presidency.

Because the domains in question predate the General Data Protection Regulation and ICANN’s response to it, DomainTools was able to capture Whois records before they went dark in May.

While the records often use bogus data, registrant email addresses common to multiple domains could be used to establish common ownership.

Historical Whois data for domains registered after May 2018 is not available, which will likely degrade the utility of DomainTools’ service over time.

Chen concluded his blog post, which appeared to be written partly in response to data suggesting that GDPR has not led to a growth in spam, with this:

Domain name Whois data isn’t going to solve the world’s cyberattack problems all on its own, but these investigations, centering on an issue of global importance that threatens our very democracy, likely get severely impaired without it. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, a few uniquely important investigations among the hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks going on all day every day all over the globe by people and organizations that can now hide behind the anonymity inherent in today’s internet. It’s reasonable that domain names used for certain commercial or functional purposes should require transparent registration information. Whois is not a crime.

DomainTools is one of the founders of the new Coalition for a Secure and Transparent Internet, a lobby group devoted to encouraging legislatures to keep Whois open.

Representatives of Facebook and Iran’s government are among the members of the Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, an emergency ICANN working group that is currently trying to write a permanent GDPR-compliant Whois policy for ICANN.

6 Comments Tagged: DomainTools, elections, epdp, facebook, fake news, fireeye, gdpr, google, privacy, security, whois

Donuts gets bought by former ICANN CEO’s firm

Donuts is to be bought by a private equity firm that has a former ICANN CEO as a partner.

The company, which holds the largest portfolio of new gTLDs, has agreed to be acquired by Boston-based private equity firm Abry Partners for an undisclosed sum.

Not much info about the deal has been released, but one senses an ICANN alum’s hand at the wheel.

Former ICANN chief Fadi Chehade is a partner at Abry, having been initially employed as senior advisor on digital strategy back in 2016 after he left ICANN.

Abry, on its web site, says it focuses its investments on profitable companies, adding:

Depending on the type of fund, we target investments from $20 million to $200 million.

Since Abry’s inception, we’ve developed deep industry expertise in Broadband, Business Services, Communications, Cybersecurity, Healthcare IT, Information Services, Insurance Services, Internet-of-Things, Logistics, Media, and Software as a Service.

Since its formation in 1989, Abry has “completed more than $77 billion of transactions, representing investments in more than 650 properties.”

Donuts was founded by domain veterans Paul Stahura, Jon Nevett, Richard Tindal and Daniel Schindler in order to take advantage of ICANN’s new gTLD program..

It was initially funded by $100 million from Austin Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, TL Ventures, Generation Partners and Stahurricane.

It currently runs over 200 TLDs, the most populous of which I believe is .ltd, with over 400,000 names.

Donuts is the latest of a series of domain companies to exit via the private equity route, notably following Neustar and Web.com.

Chehade was ICANN’s CEO between 2012 and 2015. While he was not involved in the industry during the new gTLD’s program’s inception, he did oversee its early years.

3 Comments Tagged: abry partners, acquisition, donuts, ICANN

.tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned

A Chinese registrar that focused exclusively on selling .tel domain names has been shut down by ICANN.

Tong Ji Ming Lian (Beijing) Technology Corporation Ltd, which did business as Trename, had its registrar contract terminated last week.

ICANN claims the company had failed to pay its accreditation fees and failed to escrow its registration data.

The organization had been sending breach notices since June, but got no responses. Trename’s web site domain currently resolves to a web server error, for me at least.

Trename is a rare example of a single-TLD registrar, accredited only to sell .tel domains. It didn’t even sell .com.

It is Telnames’ second-largest registrar after Name.com, accounting for about 6,000 names at the last count. At its peak, it had about 55,000.

Its share seems to be primarily as a result of a deal the registry made with a Chinese e-commerce company way back in 2011.

I’m a bit fuzzy on the details of that deal, but it saw Trename add 50,000 .tel names pretty much all at once.

Back then, .tel still had its original business model of hosting all the domains it sold and publishing web sites containing the registrant’s contact information.

Since June 2017, .tel has been available as a general, anything-goes gTLD, after ICANN agreed to liberalize its contract.

That liberalization doesn’t seem to have done much to stave off .tel’s general decline in numbers, however. It currently stands at about 75,000 names, from an early 2011 peak of over 305,000.

ICANN told Trename that its contract will end September 19, and that it’s looking for another registrar to take over its domains.

With escrow apparently an issue, it may not be a smooth transition.

2 Comments Tagged: .tel, breach, compliance, ICANN, telnames, termination, trename