Amazon planning new push into registrar market?

Amazon has kept a pretty low profile to date both as a registry and registrar, but there are reasons to believe it’s on the verge of becoming a more visible player in the market.

The e-commerce and web services giant has secured a second ICANN registrar accreditation and appears to be readying a new domain-focused web site.

The subsidiary Amazon Domain Registrar US LLC picked up its accreditation this week, and its official web site domain is domains.amazon, which was registered November 29.

The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

Amazon already uses the dot-brand domain registry.amazon for its 50-odd new gTLDs, almost all of which remain unlaunched.

In the registrar market, Amazon’s subsidiary Amazon Registrar Inc has been accredited for well over a decade and has been taking registrations since 2015 as part of its Route 53 managed DNS service.

It’s not a conventional registrar storefront by any stretch — registrations seem to be available only via the management console used by existing Route 53 customers — but it has amassed over 1.3 million gTLD registrations so far.

So could domains.amazon become the newest player in the retail registrar market? Smaller registrars that cheered the exit of the Google brand from the registrar space may soon have a new big boy to contend with.

Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars

Gname, the fast-growing Singaporean registrar, has added 150 ICANN registrar accreditations to its drop-catching army.

The companies are named Gname 151 through Gname 300. The companies Gname 2 through Gname 150 were accredited in June 2021.

Gname’s primary accreditation has grown massively since it became a drop-catcher in the last two years, going from under 10,000 names under management at the start of 2021 to 3.9 million at the end of August this year. About 3.2 million of its names were in .com.

Its first 150 secondary accreditations had almost a million names between them.

In August, it was the fastest-growing registrar of gTLD names, growing by over 156,000 domains and becoming the 12th-largest registrar accreditation overall.

Drop-catchers use large numbers of accreditations because registries rate-limit their connections. More accreditations means more connections and a better chance to register a valuable domain when it drops.

The primary accreditation was originally Chinese, in the name of Beijing Huaqi Weiye Technology Co and doing business at iwanshang.cn, before it moved to a Singaporean company called Gname.com.

ICANN’s current budget predicts an increase of five accrediations in fiscal 2024, which ends next June. Its high estimate was an increase of 60. So it’s now getting about half a million bucks more than it was expecting.

Drop-catcher adds 100 more registrars after rapid growth

Drop-catcher Gname has added 100 new ICANN shell registrar accreditations, according to ICANN records.

The Singapore-based company has created companies with the names Gname 051 through Gname 150 for the new accreditations, which are used to increase its number of concurrent EPP connections to the .com registry and therefore its chance of catching a valuable deleting domain.

Each accreditation costs a minimum of $4,000 in ICANN fees per year.

The latest ICANN registry reports show that the parent Gname accreditation had 1,864,283 .com domains under management at the end of August, when it had only 50 active accreditations.

That was a huge increase on the 354,644 domains it had a year earlier, when it had just 10 active registrars. It seems the company is testing how far this up-scaling strategy can go.

The move means ICANN now has 2,655 accredited registrars on its books, far ahead of the 2,447 predicted for the end of June 2023 by ICANN’s current fiscal-year budget.

Bizarre redactions in Pirate Bay founder’s ICANN registrar ban

ICANN has finally published a complaint from Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, who has been banned from owning an accredited registrar, but it’s full of bizarre redactions that serve only to make it look like the Org is hiding something.

You may recall that Sunde said in March that ICANN had rejected his application to have his registrar, Sarek, formally accredited.

He told DI that it happened because ICANN was worried he’d be a “pain in the ass” due to his previous association with the Pirate Bay file-sharing site and his criminal conviction for copyright infringement.

Not long after speaking to us, he filed a formal complaint with ICANN, which ICANN, five months later, published this week.

There’s not much in the complaint (pdf) that we have not already reported, but what’s notable is the amount of unnecessarily redacted text.

ICANN seems chiefly concerned with poorly obfuscating the identity of the staffer with whom Sunde was dealing on, and who ultimately rejected, his accreditation application.

The Org goes to the extent of redacting gender pronouns, so the reader can’t tell whether the person in question is male or female.

But the information that remains unredacted in the very same sentence is more than sufficient to identify the staffer concerned.

I’ve even been on national TV mentioning [NAME REDACTED] that I talked to today, regarding [PRONOUN REDACTED] failure to disclose the 3200 comments that was against the price cap removal of .ORG in [PRONOUN REDACTED] summary report for ICANN regarding the case.

The person who compiled the comment summary on the .org price caps issue, a public document (pdf), was Russ Weinstein, who’s also the guy in charge of registrar accreditation matters.

What possible benefit could be had from obfuscating his identity? And if doing so is so important, why do it in such an incompetent way?

The document also appears to redact the names of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Swedish prog-rocker Björn Afzelius, both in the context of well-reported news stories mere seconds away in a search engine.

Reference to Sunde’s own criminal convictions, which are also well-reported and he has never been shy about addressing, also appear to be redacted.

For avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that ICANN is hiding anything sinister, nor am I saying Sunde’s complaint has merit, but this redaction-happy attitude serves only to make the Org appear less transparent than it really should be.

If these redactions are attempts to hide personally identifiable information under ICANN’s privacy policy, they failed miserably on pretty much every count, even after five months.

This is privacy theater, created by people who don’t know the first thing about privacy.

ICANN has yet to respond Sunde’s complaint.

Pirate Bay founder says ICANN won’t let him be a registrar

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the controversial Pirate Bay file-sharing web service, says ICANN is unfairly refusing him a registrar accreditation and he’s not happy about it.

Sunde told DI at the weekend that his application for his new registrar, Sarek.fi, to obtain accreditation was recently denied after over 18 months on the grounds that he lied about his criminal convictions on his application form.

He denies this, saying that his crimes were not of the type ICANN vets for, and in any event they happened over a decade ago.

He thinks ICANN is scared about doing business with a disruptive and “annoying” “pain in the ass” with a history of criticizing the intellectual property industry.

Would-be registrars have to select “Yes” or “No” to the question of whether any officer or major shareholder of the company has:

within the past ten (10) years, has been convicted of a felony or of a misdemeanor related to financial activities, or has been judged by a court to have committed fraud or breach of fiduciary duty, or has been the subject of a judicial determination that is similar or related to any of these;

Sunde was convicted by a Swedish court of enabling copyright infringement via the Pirate Bay in 2009, and was sentenced to a year in prison — later reduced to eight months on appeal — and hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines.

The Pirate Bay was a web site that collected links to BitTorrent files, largely copyrighted movies and music.

Because he was not based in Sweden, Sunde avoided jail for several years despite an Interpol arrest warrant.

He eventually served five months of his sentence after being arrested in 2014.

He checked “No” on his registrar accreditation application form, on the basis that he had not been convicted of fraud or any of the other listed financial crimes, and certainly not within the last 10 years.

But ICANN took a broader interpretation, and refused him accreditation due to the Pirate Bay conviction and his Interpol status in 2014, he says.

Since then, the Org, including CEO Göran Marby (with whom he had a brief email exchange) have been ignoring his emails, he says.

Sarek.fi has already been accredited to sell ccTLD domains by the likes of Nominet, Verisign and Donuts, but ICANN’s rejection means the company won’t be able to sell gTLD names.

Sunde says he’s now faced with the likelihood of having to leave his own company in order to secure accrediation, though he’s not ruled out pursuing ICANN through its own appeals process.

He says he suspects ICANN just doesn’t want to do business with him due to his reputation as a disrupter. He’s attended ICANN meetings in the past but wants to get more involved in the policy process.

“it’s really a way for ICANN to make sure that an annoying person with media influence and with a dislike for centralised organisations and monopolies to be there to raise concerns — that they just proved valid,” he told DI in an email.

I take quite an offence to their denial. Not just on the basis of their interpretation of the law (copyright infringement is not fraud, i would have been convicted of fraud then…) Not just because it seems that it’s ok to be a murderer the past 10 years. Or a wife beater. Or a neonazi. These things that are a bit worse than being an internet activist, caring about the free and open internet. The biggest offence I take is to their obligation to the general public to have a broader membership than what they allow today.

Sarek.fi’s business model is to charge a flat fee above wholesale cost for every domain registered.

It’s Sunde’s second domain business. He launched Njalla, a Tucows reseller with a focus on protecting the privacy of registrants, in 2017.

Chile opens .cl to all ICANN registrars

The Chilean ccTLD registry has opened its doors to all ICANN-accredited registrars, no matter where they are based.
NIC Chile, part of the University of Chile, this week announced its Registrar Agents Program, an effort to grow the TLD internationally.
Becoming .cl-accredited appears to be a relatively simple process, requiring a brief application, technical tests (it’s an EPP registry) and contract-signing.
A pilot program that kicked off in September 2016 has already attracted 11 ICANN-accredited registrars, mostly but not exclusively those in the corporate brand-protection space.
Chilean companies that want to act as registrars must go through a separate process and do not need ICANN accreditation.
There are no local presence requirements to register a .cl domain.
Today, the TLD has just shy of 575,000 registered domains, having broke through the half-million mark about three years ago.
It may be interesting to see if growth rates increase with a larger pool of registrars, but .cl is already quite broadly available at major retail registrars (presumably via gateway or reseller arrangements) so getting hold of one doesn’t appear to be problematic.

Chinese registrars on the decline

Having been on a growth trajectory for some years, the number of ICANN-accredited registrars based in China appears to be on the decline.
According to my records, so far this year 26 registrar contracts have been terminated, voluntarily or otherwise, 11 of which were Chinese. I’m excluding the mass drop of Pheenix accreditations from these numbers.
The country with the next-highest number of terminations was the USA, with three.
ICANN has terminated nine registrars for breaches of the RAA this year, six of which were Chinese.
All the Chinese notices included non-payment of ICANN fees as a reason for termination, though it appears that most of them had a negligible number of gTLD domains under management.
ICANN Compliance tells me there’s no particular focus of China at the moment, this is all a result of regular day-to-day enforcement.
ICANN has sent breach notices to 28 companies this year, seven of which were to Chinese registrars.
Meanwhile, 22.cn has moved 13 of its accredited shell registrars to Hong Kong. Another registrar moved its base from China to Australia.
Seven Chinese registrars have been newly accredited this year,
Net, this has all reduced the number of accredited registrars based in China to 91.
The country still has the second-most registrars ahead of the US, with its almost 2,000 registrars, and a clear 31 registrars ahead of third-place India.

Wix.com obtains ICANN accreditation — bad news for Web.com?

Web site building tools provider Wix.com has got itself an ICANN accreditation, potentially bad news for current partner Web.com.
The Nasdaq-listed, Israel-based company popped up on the official registrar list in the last day or so with the IANA ID 3817.
That means it could before long start selling gTLD domains directly from the registries rather than going through its current business partner.
According to its domain services agreement and other online sources, Wix currently acts as a reseller for Network Solutions, a Web.com company.
Its retail prices are therefore, as you might expect, rather above the market average, pretty much in line with NetSol’s.
If it does choose to go solo, it could potentially pass on savings to its customers, or just pocket higher margins on domain sales.
While Wix says it has 110 million users, obviously it has sold nowhere near that number of domains.
Its relationship with NetSol is not lucrative enough for Web.com to count the relationship as a risk factor in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, though Wix is listed as one of just a small handful of competitors.
If Web.com should lose Wix as a reseller, we won’t get to find out what impact that had on revenue; Web.com’s going private in a $2 billion deal.
Disclosure: I’ve had to listen to or skip through repetitive Wix ads on YouTube a dozen times a day for what seems like years, so I’m not naturally predisposed to like this company. Same goes for Grammarly. Grrrr!

Pheenix adds 300 more registrars to drop-catch arsenal

The domain drop-catching arms race is heating up, with budget player Pheenix this week acquiring 300 more registrar accreditations from ICANN.
According to DI records, the company now has almost 500 registrar accreditations in its family.
More accreditations means more registry connections with which to attempt to acquire expired domains as they return to the available pool.
It also means that Pheenix’s dropnet (a word I just made up that sounds a bit like “botnet” in a pathetic attempt to coin a term for once in my career) is now a bit bigger than that of Web.com, the registrar pool behind Namejet and SnapNames.
It’s still a long way behind TurnCommerce, owner of DropCatch, which two weeks ago added a whopping 500 new accreditations, bringing its total to over 1,250.
An extra 300 accreditations would have cost Pheenix over $1 million in up-front ICANN fees and will incur ongoing fixed annual fees in excess of $1.2 million.

DropCatch spends millions to buy FIVE HUNDRED more registrars

Domain drop-catching service DropCatch.com has added five hundred new registrar accreditations to its stable over the last few days.
The additions give the company a total accreditation count of at least 1,252, according to DI data.
That means about 43% of all ICANN-accredited registrars are now controlled by just one company.
DropCatch is owned by TurnCommerce, which is also parent of registrar NameBright and premium sales site HugeDomains.
Because gTLD registries rate-limit attempts to register names, drop-catchers such as DropCatch find a good way to increase their chances of registering expiring names is to own as many registrars as possible.
DropCatch is in an arms race here with Web.com, owner of SnapNames and half-owner of NameJet, which has about 500 registrars.
The new accreditations would have cost DropCatch $1.75 million in ICANN application fees alone. They will add $2 million a year to its running costs in terms of extra fixed fees.
That’s not counting the cost of creating 500 brand new LLC companies — named in the new batch DropCatch.com [number] LLC where the number ranges from 1046 to 1545 — each of which is there purely for the purpose of owning the accreditation.
In total, the company is now paying ICANN fixed annual fees in excess of $5 million, not counting its variable fees and per-transaction fees.
Because the ICANN variable fee is split evenly between all registrars (with some exceptions I don’t think apply to DropCatch), I believe the addition of 500 new registrars means all the other registrars will be paying less in variable fees.
There’s clearly money to be made in expiring names.