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Registrar terminated after what looks like domain hijacking

Kevin Murphy, January 10, 2020, Domain Registrars

ICANN has canned its first registrar of the year.
Los Angeles-based World Biz Domains will be going out of bizness after ICANN terminated its registrar contract earlier this week, following its non-responsiveness to what appears to be case of domain hijacking.
It’s a nothing registrar, with fewer than 100 domains under management, but it once had over 5,000.
The termination comes following the suspension I blogged about in October, which was related to the transfers to World Biz of 15 potentially valuable domains in late 2018.
The names were all either short numerics or the names of famous places in Singapore and Malaysia.
ICANN spent most of last year demanding records showing that the transfers were legit, but was ghosted.
World Biz allegedly also had failed to deliver Whois records in the proper format, and was behind on its ICANN accreditation fees.
The company will lose its accreditation officially on January 22.

Registrar suspended over dodgy transfers

Kevin Murphy, October 1, 2019, Domain Registrars

ICANN has suspended a Los Angeles-based registrar after failing to get answers to its questions about a bunch of domain transfer.
World Biz Domains won’t be able to sell any gTLD domains, or accept transfers, from October 16 until January 13 next year. It will also have to post ICANN’s suspension notice on its home page.
Its crime? Failing to provide ICANN with records proving that the change of registrant requests for 15 potentially valuable domain names were legitimate.
ICANN has been badgering World Biz for these records since April, but says it was given the runaround.
The domains in question — 28.net, 68.net, 88.org, changi.com, tay.net, goh.net, koh.net, kuantan.com, yeong.com, merlion.org, og.net, raffles.net, sentosa.org, sg.org and shenton.com — all appear to have been registered to a Singaporean investor using the registrar DomainDiscover until about a year ago.
The non-numeric names all have significance to Singapore or neighboring Malaysia one way or the other. Some of them are arguably UDPR fodder.
Shenton is a busy street and hotel in the city, Merlion is Singapore’s lion mascot, Sentosa is a Singaporean island, and Raffles is of course the name of the famous hotel. Other domains on the list are common Chinese surnames used by Singaporeans.
It appears that about a year ago, according to DomainTools’ historical Whois records, they were transferred to World Biz and put under privacy protection.
There’s no specific claim in ICANN’s notice that any domain hijacking has taken place, but it’s easy to infer that the original registrant was for some reason not happy that the domains changed hands and therefore complained to ICANN.
Some of the domains in question have since been transferred to other registrars and may have been returned to the original registrant.
If ICANN’s track record of demanding records is any guide, this will not help World Biz come into compliance.
Should it be terminated, it looks like very few registrants will be affected.
While World Biz at one point had over 5,000 gTLD domains under management, it’s been shrinking consistently for the best part of a decade and in May had just 74 DUM.
September last year, when the domains in question moved to World Biz, was the company’s most-successful month in terms of inbound transfers — 17 domains — since I started tracking this kind of data nine years ago.