India’s largest registrar goes insolvent, gets suspended

India’s largest independent registrar has been found insolvent by a local court, after failing to pay back $28 million in bank loans.

Net 4 India has now also had its right to sell gTLD domains suspended by ICANN as a result.

Judging by legal papers (pdf) buried on Net4’s web site, the insolvency relates to a series of loans the company took out with the State Bank of India between 2002 and 2012.

After the company failed to pay those loans back, in 2014 the debt was acquired from SBI by Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction, which specializes in buying debt cheap then recovering it through the courts.

Edelweiss sued Net4 to get its money back a couple of years ago and, in March this year after what appears to have been a slam-dunk, won its case.

The ruling states that the outstanding debt in 2017 was almost two billion rupees — Rs 1,940,860,284, which works out to just short of $28 million at today’s rates.

Having learned about the insolvency in April, ICANN set about trying to contact Net4’s management to see if the company was coming back into compliance.

ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement says ICANN can terminate registrars’ contracts if they are in insolvency proceedings for more than 30 days.

After the company failed to show it was compliant, this week its RAA was suspended from June 21 to September 19.

During that period, Net4 will not be able to sell new domain registrations or accept incoming transfers. It will also have to display a notice on its web site to that effect.

If it has not demonstrated compliance by August 28, ICANN may start its termination process.

Net4 is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar based in India, as measured by number of registered gTLD domains (excluding Public Domain Registry, LogicBoxes, and several affiliated dummy accreditations, which are all owned by US-based Endurance International).

It had over 100,000 gTLD domains under management at the end of February — almost all in .com and other legacy gTLDs — but its DUM had been shrinking hard for many months.

At some point, Net4 appears to have been listed on both India’s National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange, but was delisted about a year ago.