Got junk? June’s biggest gTLD growers do

It’s becoming a truth universally acknowledged that when a gTLD sees a growth spike it’s because the registry is running a promo and tens of thousands of machine-generated junk domains have been registered.

That certainly seems to be true for June’s biggest growers.

The gTLDs the grew the fastest last month were .watch, .yachts, .autos, .irish, .boats and .qpon, each growing by between 50% and 73% and between 7,880 and 47,884 net domains compared to the end of May, according to zone file analysis.

But doom-scroll through lists of domains newly appearing in the zone in June (and presumably registered in the same month) and you’ll quickly see that the vast majority are utter crud.

XYZ’s .autos is a prime example. It’s currently retailing for under two bucks a name at the registrars I checked, and there were over 51,000 names in the July 1 zone that were not in the June 1 file.

Registrants took the opportunity to register hidden gems such as yqtsfg.autos, rgwydp.autos and l2xnnu7.autos… thousands of them. Not quite every new name but, eyeballing the list, very close to it.

I found that 37,428 of these 51,741 newly registered domains contain numerals. In .auto’s stablemate .yacht, 27,335 of its 33,620 new domains were partially numeric. These are not domains registered by investors.

The strings have clearly been algorithmically generated and bulk registered, but to what end?

It can be and is sometimes argued that there are legitimate reasons people might need to register tens of thousands of gibberish domains, but security researchers believe they’re primarily used for spam, phishing and other DNS abuse.

With ICANN being pressured to crack down on bulk regs, these kind of growth stories, along with the revenue they generate for the industry, might sooner or later become a thing of the past.

1 Comment

ICANN ditches Oman due to Middle-East conflicts

ICANN is relocating its next meeting, scheduled for this October in Muscat, Oman, due to travel difficulties and uncertainties caused by the ongoing conflicts in the region.

The meeting, ICANN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting, will now take place in Dublin, Ireland from October 25 to 30, the same dates as the Oman meeting was meant to take place, Org said.

“Recent developments, including associated flight disruptions and impending timelines related to planning the meeting, made it prudent and necessary to select an alternative and available location,” ICANN said.

While Oman is not involved in any current hostilities, other than as a mediator, Israel’s recent strikes on Iran have caused some busy air corridors in the region to be shut down.

Oman is over 2,000 kilometres distant from Israel, and just across the Gulf of Iran from Iran.

The switch will be frustrating not only for Omanis but also to community members from further afield who have booked their travel early or paid for visas and might have limited refund options. Dublin’s a way more expensive city to visit for travelers on a budget, too.

It also sucks for the organizers of Domain Days Dubai, the upcoming domainer conference. It is scheduled to take place in nearby Dubai immediately before ICANN 84.

ICANN has visited Dublin once before, exactly 10 years before the upcoming ICANN 84.

The Org hinted that Muscat could be selected for a future meeting, when and if things settle down.

Comment Tagged: dublin, ICANN, icann 84, muscat

ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency

ICANN is heading into uncharted waters after a key community group flexed its powers to hold the Org accountable for a recent board decision.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has become the first of ICANN’s overseers to push for a formal objection to ICANN’s decision to delay its next large-scale accountability review.

In layman’s terms, the ALAC wants the other DPs of the EC — the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, and the GAC — to support its ECRP for a CRR challenging ICANN’s decision to delay ATRT4.

All clear? Great. Thanks for clicking.

Or… perhaps that all deserves some unpicking.

ALAC, the group that represents end-users at ICANN, is one of the five members of the Empowered Community — the group from which, under its bylaws, ICANN derives its powers and authority over domain names and such.

The other Decisional Participants are the Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

One of the EC’s powers is the ability to file a Community Reconsideration Request challenging an ICANN board or staff decision, if three of the DPs support the request and no more than one objects.

ALAC has become the first EC member since ICANN split from the US government in 2016 to formally kick off the process of scrounging up support for such a reconsideration request.

It’s filed an Empowered Community Reconsideration Petition, giving the other four DPs 21 days to vote yay or nay on whether the request should be formally filed.

Its beef is with the ICANN board’s decision in May to delay indefinitely the fourth Accountability and Transparency Review Team, ATRT4, and replace it with a CEO-led meta-review.

ATRTs are community-led reviews that ICANN, according to its bylaws, have to carry out every five years. ATRT3 kicked off at the end of 2018 and concluded in 2020 but its recommendations have not yet been fully implemented by ICANN.

ATRT4 has already been delayed for a year once by the board, last April, but the board wants the delay to continue so the community can take a step back and review, as one group put it, “why we review, what we should review and how best to review”.

I’m not making this up. One review is being replaced with a broader, CEO-led, meta-review that reviews the reviews. I haven’t even mentioned the Pilot Holistic Review or the various Continuous Improvement Programs.

The root rationale here relates to intellectual bandwidth. Arguably the biggest issue facing ICANN in recent years is its perceived (or actual) inability to get anything done in a timely fashion, and part of the reason for that is that community members, most of whom have day jobs or are volunteers, are forced to spend so much time navel-gazing or entangled in Tolkienesque cobwebs of red tape.

ALAC’s petition (pdf) accused the board of “usurping” the community by delaying ATRT4, in violation of its bylaws:

The EC, and by extension the ICANN community, believes that this continuing contravention of the Bylaws and disregard for ICANN’s Core Values poses a serious threat to ICANN’s mandate… It also significantly undermines trust in, and protection of, ICANN’s multistakeholder model of governance. This brings about a real risk of negative actions against ICANN, which could result in the loss of its mandate or could substantially risk the credibility and effectiveness of ICANN’s multistakeholder model.

It wants the decision to delay ATRT4 reversed. The question is, will it be able to muster up support from two other Decisional Participants, as required by the bylaws? I’d say that ALAC’s most-natural ally is the GAC, with the GNSO, seemingly baffled by the ALAC’s filing, the most likely to object.

The other four DPs have until a minute before midnight July 10 to submit expressions of support or objection.

Comment Tagged: accountability, alac, atrt4, ec, empowered community, ICANN

ICANN faces first pushback over DEI U-turn

ICANN’s decision to remove the words “diversity” and “inclusion” from its web site has prompted the first public, angry response from a community organization.

The Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization, APRALO, one of the five regional groups making up the At-Large Community, wrote to ICANN’s top brass to say that “diversity, equity and inclusion” should be part of ICANN’s DNA.

As DI reported last month, ICANN buried a previously prominently linked “Diversity at ICANN” web page and changed all references to diversity and inclusion to “representation” or similar.

ICANN later said that the changes, which have not to date been reverted to the old language, were in response to “evolving external dynamics”. That’s broadly believed to be code for the Trump administration’s profound aversion to all things DEI.

Many US companies have been distancing themselves from DEI terminology since Trump took office in January, out of fear of reprisals. That includes Verisign, which deleted a section on DEI from its annual regulatory report.

But APRALO, which represents end-user groups across Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, reckons diversity is a core value of the ICANN multistakeholder model that should stay. Writing to ICANN, the group said:

ICANN is not a representative (or representational) model, but a multistakeholder participatory model that invites and welcomes broad spectrums of participation (i.e. diverse, inclusive, and not “representational”)… Therefore, the title change from “Diversity at ICANN” to “Representation at ICANN” is a misrepresentation.

…

ICANN cannot claim to be a multistakeholder-based organisation if diversity, equity and inclusion is not part of its DNA.

APRALO said that ICANN should restore the old DEI language or replace it with “alternative words that truthfully retain the meaning and intent”. Org should also be more transparent when it makes these kinds of changes, the group said.

Comment Tagged: apralo, dei, ICANN

Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program

A surprising number of would-be back-end registry service providers have already been eliminated from ICANN’s Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for not submitting their applications in time.

Program statistics for May recently published reveal that 19 potential RSPs were in the system but failed to submit their required information before the application window closed May 20.

That leaves a total of 46 RSPs still in the system (pretty much in line with expectations) with 26 of those still waiting to clear their background checks. Another 15 have fully submitted their bids, though none have yet been approved.

The stats, which are broken down by geographic region, means that a maximum of one RSP from the Latin America and Caribbean region and one from Africa will be pre-approved to provide back-end services when the next new gTLD application window opens next year.

But wannabe RSPs will be able to apply again, simultaneously with their clients gTLD applications.

Asia-Pacific has 15 live applications, Europe 17 and North America 12.

The RSP program gives new gTLD applicants the chance to tick the technical services questions box by simply signing up with an already-approved provider. Being preapproved gives a pretty strong competitive advantage to RSPs in the 2026 round.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, rsp evaluation program

presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life

Celebrities, politicians, tech bros, and hundreds of household brands are among the registrants of roughly 30,000 dormant .xxx domains that have suddenly awoke and found themselves live on the internet.

The sudden explosion of newly live domains happened around May 20, when .xxx registry GoDaddy made some technical changes to its .xxx database as a result of the TLD’s move from “sponsored” to open.

The move means names such as presidenttrump.xxx, presidentobama.xxx, elonmusk.xxx, kanye.xxx, jeffbezos.xxx, adele.xxx and scarlettjohansson.xxx are all suddenly real, resolving domains that could be configured to host web sites for the first time in a decade or more.

If they are defensive registrations, that’s arguably no big deal. If they are registered to third parties, the registrants are now free to throw up any AI-generated Rule 34 mischief they wish.

The .xxx zone file popped from around 6,500 domains to almost 36,000 by May 22, as GoDaddy lifted serverHold status from each affected domain. In the vast majority of cases, these will be domains defensively registered by brand owners, some as far back as 2011, or attempted cybersquats.

From launch until this year, .xxx was considered a sponsored gTLD. Anyone could register a domain, but the registry would keep the names dormant, non-resolving, and out of the zone file until the registrant applied for “Membership” of the porn community and obtained a special software token that their registrar could use to activate the domain.

Because .xxx is no longer a sponsored gTLD, the registry is sunsetting the token system. The current phase of this process has seen GoDaddy remove the serverHold status for domains where the registrant never bothered to obtain their token.

This means that the defensive domains are now discoverable via the zone file for the first time, revealing which brands considered themselves particularly vulnerable to cybersquatting.

Spare a thought for the registrant, presumably Big Three management consultancy Bain, which seems to have been spending north of four grand a year since 2012 sitting on this stash of domains:

bain-blows.xxx, bain-stinks.xxx, bain-sucks.xxx, bainbaingoaway.xxx, bainblows.xxx, baincapital-blows.xxx, baincapital-stinks.xxx, baincapital-sucks.xxx, baincapitalblows.xxx, baincapitaldestroysjobs.xxx, baincapitalfiredme.xxx, baincapitalhypocrisy.xxx, baincapitalkillsjobs.xxx, baincapitallies.xxx, baincapitalliesaboutjobs.xxx, baincapitallootsjobs.xxx, baincapitalscam.xxx, baincapitalscrewspeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewspoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewsthepoor.xxx, baincapitalsteals.xxx, baincapitalstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromthepoor.xxx, baincapitalstealspensions.xxx, baincapitalstinks.xxx, baincapitalsucks.xxx, baincapitalventures.xxx, baincapitalvultures.xxx, baincausespain.xxx, baincrapital.xxx, baincrematesjobs.xxx, baindestroysjobs.xxx, bainfiredme.xxx, bainhypocrisy.xxx, bainkillsjobs.xxx, bainlies.xxx, bainliesaboutjobs.xxx, bainlootsjobs.xxx, bainscam.xxx, bainscrewedme.xxx, bainscrewspeople.xxx, bainscrewspoorpeople.xxx, bainscrewsthepoor.xxx, bainsteals.xxx, bainstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, bainstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, bainstealsfromthepoor.xxx, bainstealspensions.xxx, bainstinks.xxx, bainsucks.xxx, bainthepredator.xxx, bainvultures.xxx, bewareofbain.xxx, blamebain.xxx, boycotbain.xxx, boycotbaincapital.xxx, fuckbain.xxx, fuckbaincapital.xxx, gotohellbain.xxx, occupybain.xxx, occupybaincapital.xxx, puttheblameonbain.xxx, saynotobain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbaincapital.xxx, therealbain.xxx, therealbaincapital.xxx

(In 2012, Bain was closely associated with Republican US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, its former CEO.)

The newly visible .xxx domains do not paint the full picture of defensive registrations in the gTLD. There are another roughly 8,000 registered .xxx domains that do not yet appear in the zone files, according to registry transaction reports.

There are also an unknown number of brands being blocked there, which do not show up in public records, as a result of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, defensive, godaddy, icm registry, xxx

One of the dumbest gTLDs just switched back-ends

Why does .blockbuster still exist, seriously?

Old-timers such as your humble correspondent will recall Blockbuster as the once world-conquering video rental chain that spectacularly failed to adapt to adapt to the era of Netflix and streaming and went almost completely out of business.

I say almost because, as was widely reported a few years back, there’s still one branch of Blockbuster open. It’s in Bend, Oregon and has sidelines as a tourist destination and, more lucratively, selling ironic merch mocking its own inexplicable existence.

So that’s a whole dot-brand gTLD essentially for a single retail outlet. Possibly the only smaller, dumber gTLD is .richardli, which is a dot-brand representing just one dude, Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li.

The Bend store is a franchisee, so it pays Dish DBS, owner of the brand, a licensing fee to use its trademark. But the gTLD is unused. Blockbuster has a holding page at blockbuster.com while the Bend store uses bendblockbuster.com.

Why mention this at all? Well, Dish has just changed the back-end registry services provider for .blockbuster and all of its other dormant dot-brands from Identity Digital to Tucows, indicating that it has no plans to terminate its ICANN registry contracts just yet.

.sling, .dish, .latino, .dot, .ott, .ollo, .mobile, .dtv, .dvr, .phone, and .data, none of which have any registered domains (but several of which would surely prove attractive to an acquiring portfolio registry) have also made the move to Tucows.

(Actually, .ollo may be an even dumber dot-brand given that the brand doesn’t exist and seemingly never has existed. Dish filed for a trademark on the string in 2011 but never used it.)

Running a gTLD isn’t free. The current ICANN fee alone is $25,800 a year per string. While Dish had $10.6 billion in revenue last year, its parent, EchoStar, is currently circling the drain-hole of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Ironically, EchoStar faces the dire choice because the US Federal Communications Commission is threatening to revoke some of its 5G spectrum licenses because the company acquired the licenses then didn’t use them.

3 Comments Tagged: blockbuster, dish dbs, echostar, new gTLDs

GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet

Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging.

The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC.

The handover will put an end to GoDaddy’s 15-year stint as .co’s back end. The TLD was relaunched globally as a .com alternative in 2010 by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.

It seems Team Internet was willing to price its services much lower than GoDaddy. The company said in a statement that Equipo PuntoCo is getting 8% of gross revenue from .co sales, compared to the 19% GoDaddy was getting and the 93% .CO Internet originally received. The rest goes into the Colombian public purse.

While it’s not the biggest TLD on Team Internet’s servers (that honor goes to .xyz), it’s going to be the second or third largest migration of a single TLD between registry services providers in the history of the DNS.

.co had about 3.2 million domains at the start of the year. Today, Team Internet says it has “more than 3 million”. It’s the same ballpark as .au’s 2018 move from Neustar to Afilias, which was 3.1 million names, but a million shy of this year’s migration of .in from GoDaddy to Tucows.

When it comes to retaining the big ccTLDs, it seems GoDaddy really can’t catch a break.

Radix and Identity Digital also competed for the contract.

3 Comments Tagged: .co, godaddy, team internet

Governments erect bulk-reg barrier to new gTLD next round

No new gTLDs should be added to the internet until ICANN develops policies addressing the abuse of bulk domain name registrations, according to the Governmental Advisory Committee.

The GAC this afternoon drafted formal Advice for the ICANN board stating that policy work on bulk regs should get underway before ICANN 84, which takes place in Muscat, Oman in late October.

While the wording still may change before it is sent to ICANN, the current draft advice reads:

The GAC advises the board: To urge the GNSO Council to undertake all necessary preparation prior to ICANN84 towards enabling targeted and narrowly scoped Policy Development Processes (PDPs) on DNS Abuse issues, prioritizing the following: to address bulk registration of malicious domain names; and the responsibility of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrar accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.

The advice on bulk regs is fairly self-explanatory: the GAC has become aware that spammers typically shop around for the cheapest TLDs then register huge amounts of domains on the assumption that some will start getting blocked quite quickly.

The second part of the advice probably needs some explanation: under the current ICANN contracts, registrars have to deal with abuse reports concerning domains they sponsor, but they’re under no obligation to investigate other domains belonging to the registrants of those domains.

So, if a scumbag registers 100 domains for a spam campaign and only one of them is reported as abusive, the registrar can comply with its contract by simply suspending that one domain. The GAC thinks it should be obliged to proactively investigate the other 99 names too.

The advice seems to have been inspired by two sources: NetBeacon’s recent Proposal for PDPs on DNS Abuse (pdf) and data from Interisle Consulting.

Both pieces of advice obviously could have an impact on registrars’ top and bottom lines. They could lose revenue if they currently make a lot of money from bulk regs, and their costs could be increased with new obligations to investigate abuse.

An added wrinkle comes in the GAC’s rationale for its advice, which suggests that dealing with bulk regs and abuse probes should be a gating factor for the next round of new gTLDs going ahead. It reads:

Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS Abuse.

The core text of the advice was compiled in furtive huddles on the edges of sessions at ICANN 83, and I believe Switzerland held the pen, but it seems the US government was the driving force behind the push to make abuse a barrier to the next round.

As I reported on Monday, the US GAC rep said that “in light of the global phishing problem… and similar concerns the United States is of the view that we should not expand the DNS too broadly”.

6 Comments Tagged: dns abuse, gac, ICANN, icann 83, new gTLDs, next round, prague

Little interest in cheapo gTLD program

ICANN’s program to offer heavily discounted new gTLD application fees to certain organizations has so far seen little uptake, and some governments are not happy about it.

The Applicant Support Program offers up to 45 qualified applicants a discount of up to 85% on their application fees. That’s worth almost $200,000 each. ICANN will also hook applicants up with pro-bono application consultants and help out with auctions if necessary.

While 40 applications are in the process of being drafted, according to ICANN’s latest monthly stats, only four finalized applications have been submitted and there’s no way of telling whether the other 40 will convert to full applications.

The low number has members of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee concerned, partly because of a deal it struck with ICANN last year that would encourage a change of strategy if it turned out some regions were more represented than others.

The arrangement saw ICANN promise to refocus its outreach efforts on under-served regions after tallying up the home nations of the first 20 submitted applications. With the 12-month program application window now well past the half-way mark, the GAC is worried that by the time the 20th bid is logged, it will be too late to course-correct.

It now seems likely that the GAC’s formal Advice from the ongoing ICANN 83 meeting in Prague will see language included saying ICANN should conduct its review of the applications now, while there’s still time to adjust the strategy.

Currently, the stats show a strange and surprising mix of geographies.

North America has the most applications in draft at 15. This is weird because entities based in the US and Canada don’t qualify for the discount, ICANN doesn’t count Mexico as North American, and the only other economies in the region are US island territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.

Meanwhile, the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean region, with all its half a billion citizens, has just two applications in draft. That’s the just one more than Europe, which has just a handful of qualifying nations.

Africa and Asia-Pacific both have seven applications in draft, and Asia-Pac also has three fully submitted bids.

Based on the current stats, you’d have to assume ICANN would need beef up its outreach in Latin America if it wanted to rebalance the numbers. Europe probably doesn’t need as much love because so few countries there qualify.

As well as encouraging ICANN to analyse its number immediately, the GAC is also considering text that would connect applicants in drafting with their local governments, to see if they need any assistance getting over the final hurdle.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round