Massive firewall vendor lets domain expire

Check Point Software, one of the world’s leading firewall vendors, forgot to renew its main domain name and it wound up parked by its registrar over the weekend.

The domain checkpoint.com had an expiry date of March 30.

According a screenshot over on The Register, it was resolving to a Network Solutions placeholder page until this afternoon.

The Whois record at DomainTools still shows NetSol’s pending renewal or deletion details, but the domain – a 1994 registration – appears to be resolving normally now.

The company has a market cap of $13.37 billion.

More layoffs planned at NetSol

Web.com plans to lay off more people than previously expected at recently acquired domain name registrar Network Solutions, according to a report.

“There is significantly more overlap than we originally estimated, and so it’s likely going to be more headcount reduction,” CEO David Brown said in a Reuters interview.

He named marketing, development, and engineering as areas where the merged company plans to cut more than $30 million in costs.

If there was any doubt about it, he confirmed that NetSol’s incumbent CEO faces the chop. Lower-level staff appear to have safer positions.

At least two senior NetSol executives have already jumped shipped since the acquisition was announced.

Senior director of policy Statton Hammock left to form his own consulting business a month ago, and last week senior policy manager Paul Diaz joined the Public Interest Registry.

Web.com announced its $561 million acquisition of NetSol in early August. It had already acquired the company’s old rival, Register.com.

NBT agrees to $236m buy-out

Following in the footsteps of larger rival Go Daddy, the UK-based registrar Group NBT has agreed to be bought out by private investors for £153 million ($236m).

NBT owns registrars including NetNames, Ascio and Indom.

The all-cash offer comes from investors led by HgCapital and represents a 22.5% premium on the company’s closing share price yesterday.

At 550p a share, the offer stands to make a profit for anybody who has bought NBT shares in the last ten years, according to the company.

The news came as NBT reported an annual profit, excluding certain items, up organically 9% at £8.9 million ($13.8m) on revenue that was up 4% at £45.7 million ($70.6m).

Including the results from French registrar Indom, which the company acquired last December, profit was up 18% at £9.6 million ($14.8m) on revenue up 13% to £49.5 million ($76.5m)

The NBT deal is merely the latest in a series of buyouts and mergers to hit the registrar market this year.

As well as Go Daddy’s $2 billion+ change of control, Network Solutions recently sold out to Web.com for $561 million in cash and stock, and Tucows acquired EPAG Domainservices for $2.5 million.

At least one city analyst thinks the buyout timing relates to ICANN’s forthcoming new generic top-level domains program, and is bullish on Top Level Domain Holdings shares as a result.

Will the wave of consolidation continue? Who’s next?

Together at last: NetSol merges with Register.com

The first-ever .com domain name registrar and its first-ever competitor are to merge as part of Web.com’s strategy to scale up and better compete with Go Daddy.

Web.com, which bought Register.com a little over a year ago, has now turned its attention to bigger fish. It’s agreed to buy Network Solutions for $561 million in cash and stock.

The combined company will have three million customers, revenue of over $450 million, and over nine million domains under management.

By my reckoning, this means Web.com becomes the fourth-largest registrar by domain count, a position already held by NetSol, a couple of million domains behind Tucows.

NetSol was of course the original .com registrar/registry and Register.com was the first competitor to start selling domains after ICANN introduced competition to the market.

Both registrars were briefly public companies in their own right, before being re-privatized around the same time it became apparent Go Daddy and the other discount registrars were eating their lunch.

This shared history is still evident today – both companies still sell domain names for 1999 prices, and they’re both still losing customers as a result.

CEO David Brown said on a conference call announcing the deal that Register.com is currently losing 13,000 subscribers, net, per quarter.

This is not as bad as the 20,000 per quarter at the time of the acquisition, but it’s still over 140 customers jumping ship, on average, every day.

Brown said that NetSol’s churn is similar; its customer base is “declining very slowly”, albeit from a stronger starting position.

When VeriSign sold NetSol in 2003, it said the unit had about four million customers. Today, according to Web.com’s announcement, it’s closer to two million.

The NetSol deal will enable Web.com to expand its focus from small businesses, Register.com’s core market, to medium-sized businesses too, Brown said.

“This is a unique chance for Web.com to quickly gain major scale in our sweet spot – the small and mid-size business market,” he told analysts.

The larger scale will also enable the company to ramp up its marketing efforts, he said, helping it to gain mindshare from “another company” (cough–Go Daddy–cough).

Both the NetSol and Register.com brands will stay, but the primary brand in its advertising campaigns will be Web.com

Both NetSol and Register.com still operate at very much the high-end of the pricing spectrum, having stubbornly resisted pricing pressures for the last decade.

Register.com currently sells .com domain names for $38 a year, NetSol sells them for $35.

However, on the analysts’ call, Brown discussed the success of a recent marketing campaign at Register.com, which offered domains at cheaper prices than usual.

“We discovered marketing a lower-price domain name was driving a total order value that was more than ten times higher due to additional offerings,” he said.

I wonder where they got that idea from.

ICANN beefs up new TLD fraudster checks

ICANN has broadened the background checks in its new top-level domains program to ban companies with a history of consumer fraud from applying for a new gTLD.

The new check in the Applicant Guidebook reads as follows:

a final and legally binding decision obtained by a national law enforcement or consumer protection authority finding that the applicant was engaged in fraudulent and deceptive commercial practices as defined in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Protecting Consumers from Fraudulent and Deceptive Commercial Practices Across Borders may cause an application to be rejected. ICANN may also contact the applicant with additional questions based on information obtained in the background screening process.

The OECD guidelines, which define deceptive practices, were suggested by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee as a way to keep out the fraudsters.

I speculated last week that implementation of such rules could capture Network Solutions and/or VeriSign, due to their dodgy dealings almost a decade ago.

But it appears that the two companies are safe – the wording is such that it likely does not apply to the settlement NetSol made with the Federal Trade Commission which, while legally binding, was explicitly not a “finding” of fact or law.

The Guidebook also now asks applicants to disclose if they have been “disciplined by any government or industry regulatory body for conduct involving dishonesty or misuse of funds of others”. The “industry regulatory body” text is a new insertion.