Recent Posts
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Freenom is back, but no longer free
Controversial domain registry Freenom has returned, barely two and a half years after Facebook owner Meta sued it into the ground in a massive cybersquatting lawsuit.
But the company seems to have abandoned the free domains business model it pioneered that led to spammers registering millions of abusive domains and huge reputational harm.
Freenom was — and appears to still be — the registry operator for .tk, the ccTLD for Tokelau. It also ran four African ccTLDs: Equatorial Guinea (.gq), Central African Republic (.cf), Mali (.ml), Gabon (.ga).
Today, its web site is offering domains in .tk, .cf and .gq for sale, with a starting price of €8.22 per year.
In 2023, Mali and Gabon moved their ccTLDs to away from Freenom, with .ga going to Afnic and .ml going in-house. It was reported that CAR and Equitorial Guinea had also severed ties, but that does not appear to be the case.
Freenom appears to be starting from scratch — while .tk at one point had over 40 million registered domains, today potentially high-value dictionary keywords are available again.
A DI reader confirmed that he was able to register a short, rather nice keyword .tk for the €8.22 base price earlier this week.
Many keyword domains I checked are also being offered without premium pricing, while others carry higher price tags. For example, football.tk is being offered for €86.08 and whiskey.tk is listed at €1,739.13, while vodka.tk carries the base price.
Domains such as facebooklogin.tk also appear to be available.
Freenom’s original business model saw it primarily give domains away for free, then seize them to monetize their traffic as they expired or, more commonly, were suspended for abuse.
Actually charging for domain names will certainly help reduce Freenom’s exposure to the kind of abuse that caused Meta to file a $500 million cybersquatting lawsuit against it in early 2023.
When Freenom settled the case a year later, it said it had “independently decided to exit the domain name business, including the operation of registries”. The move reportedly made a noticeable dent in the prevalence of cybercrime.
The company also lost its ICANN registrar accreditation, meaning it became unable to sell domains in gTLDs. It gTLD registrations were transferred to Gandi.
But now Freenom is back in the domain game, albeit seemingly with a different, more conventional business model.
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Finally got my .tk domain back; thanks for the heads-up.