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.tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned

Kevin Murphy, August 31, 2018, Domain Registrars

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.

Another .tel-only registrar accredited

Kevin Murphy, January 19, 2012, Domain Registries

A Chinese firm has become the second company to emerge as a seemingly pure-play .tel registrar.
Unlike most registrars, Beijing Tong Guan Xin Tian Technology Ltd is not approved to sell .com domains. According to ICANN’s records it’s only been accredited in .tel so far.
The company, which does business as Novaltel, even has a .tel domain listed as its official site in ICANN’s registrar directory, which is a first.
Its customer-facing site, at novaltel.com, which I don’t think is fully live yet, is heavy on the .tel branding.
This all makes me wonder whether Telnic, the .tel registry, has another big deal in the works.
At the moment, the reason .tel is a gTLD of roughly 270,000 domains rather than 220,000 is that another pure-play .tel registrar distributed about 50,000 names in one big batch in January 2011.
Unusual as it is, Novaltel is not the first Chinese registrar to devote itself entirely to .tel.
The other is Tong Ji Ming Lian Technology Corporation Ltd, also based in Beijing, which does business as Trename.
Trename is currently responsible for 20% of .tel’s total domains under management, about 55,000 names, according to the most recent official registry reports.
Those domains were registered a year ago as part of a deal Telnic announced with HC International, a business-to-business e-commerce firm also based in China.
That deal is basically the reason that .tel’s overall volumes have not been affected so badly by two years of speculators dropping post-landrush registrations following its 2009 launch.
So does .tel have another spike on the cards?