Another registrar goes AWOL

ICANN has started takedown procedures against another registrar that appears to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

The registrar is 0101 Internet, based in Hong Kong, not to be confused with 101 Domain, which is based in Ireland and California and a completely different company.

0101 has been around for 15 years and had a little over 1,000 domains under management at the last count, mostly .com. Its DUM peaked at over 10,000 over a decade ago but has been declining since.

Currently, its web site doesn’t reliably resolve, which may be the reason ICANN can’t find contractually required information there. Archives show the place on its site where you would usually expect to see a company name or logo, it has just said “Your Brand” for the last few years.

The main problem outlined in ICANN Compliance’s breach notice is that 0101 has not been escrowing its registrant data with DENIC, which could cause problems when its customers’ domains are migrated to a new registrar.

It also hasn’t been paying its ICANN fees, according to the notice.

0101 has until October 3 to come into compliance or risk losing its contract.

gTLD loses its second-largest registrar after breach

ICANN has terminated another registrar’s accreditation, this time putting about 10,000 domains at risk.

The registrar in question is Dubai-based Intracom Middle East, which does business at domains.gdn.

As the domain suggests, the company specialized in .gdn domain names. It had about 10,000 of them under management at the last count, sold for under a dollar each for the first year.

It was the .gdn registry’s second-biggest registrar after Dynadot.

ICANN Compliance is terminating its contract for not paying its fees, not implementing RDAP, and generally not publishing required transparency information on its web site.

As I noted in May, its web site appeared to be down, and archived versions of the site suggested it had been hacked at least once recently.

ICANN, which had been chasing Intracom for a little over a year, said it will follow the De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to move the company’s remaining domain names to a new registrar.

Reseller loss hits Tucows’ DUM but not revenue

Tucows reported revenue growth in its domains business in the second quarter, despite its domains under management going down due to a major reseller.

The company said last night that domains revenue was up 8% annually to $67.6 million at the end of June, with adjusted EBITDA for the segment going up 12% to $12.5 million.

But Tucows had 24.02 million domains under management at the end of the quarter, down from 24.3 million three months earlier. David Woroch, CEO of the domains business said in prepared remarks:

As anticipated, total domains under management and transaction volumes declined modestly—down 2% and 3%, respectively—reflecting the continued impact of one reseller that has moved a portion of its portfolio in-house.

Despite this, revenue for the wholesale/reseller domains channel rose 8% on last year to $57.3 million. Retail domains revenue was up 10% year over year to $10.3 million.

Including all of the company’s non-domains businesses, Tucows Q2 revenue was up 10.1% to $98.5 million and adjusted EBITDA was up 37% to $12.6 million, both compared to the year-ago quarter.

GoDaddy counts cost of losing .co deal

GoDaddy has revealed how hard losing its .co registry back-end deal will hit revenue, but insisted that it has no plans to exit the registry business.

The company said in its second-quarter earning release that it anticipates “an approximate 50 basis point headwind to bookings and revenue” when the deal expires in the fourth quarter.

So that’s 0.5%, or about $6 million given GoDaddy’s quarterly revenue came in at $1.2 billion in the second quarter. CFO Mark McCaffrey said the loss will be “immaterial in and of itself” and will not prevent the company hitting its financial targets.

The loss of the .co deal (possibly coupled with the separate recent loss of the .in deal) inspired one analyst to ask executives whether the company has plans to exit the registry business, but McCaffrey said there was “no change in our philosophy”:

This was a one-off situation where we went out to rebid and the profitability metrics that were needed to continue in this relationship just weren’t there for us. So I would say it’s more on the strategy of our profitable growth and making sure we stay disciplined to our framework versus a change in philosophy

Dejargonizing this, it appears GoDaddy is saying “the other guys could do it cheaper”. In the case of .co, the other guys were Team Internet, which will receive 8% of .co’s gross revenue, versus the 19% GoDaddy was getting. (Update: Team Internet says in the comments that GoDaddy bid this time at 9%.)

For the second quarter, GoDaddy reported overall revenue up 8% at $1.2 billion and net income of $199.9 million, up 37% compared to the same quarter last year.

The “Core Platform” reporting segment, which includes domain name sales, saw revenue up 5% year over year to $753.7 million. Vanilla domain sales and aftermarket sales were both up 7%.

Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps

ICANN seems to have won a big victory in its ongoing tussle with Namecheap over price caps for .org and .info domains.

A California court ruled late last week that it cannot force ICANN into pricing talks with the registries for the two gTLDs, denying a motion that Namecheap filed back in April.

The dispute dates back to 2019, when ICANN removed price caps from Public Interest Registry’s .org registry contract, which had limited PIR to 10% annual increases.

Namecheap used ICANN’s own Independent Review Process accountability mechanism to challenge this decision and won, kinda, in 2022.

The IRP panel found ICANN had breached its bylaws and issued “recommendations” such as commissioning an economic report into price caps, deciding if price caps should return, and if so then talking to the registries about bringing them back.

When there’d been little action by early 2024, Namecheap sued to get the backing of the court for the IRP decision. It was successful, with the court ruling this February that the IRP findings were valid.

In the meantime, ICANN had obtained its economist’s report and passed a resolution stating that it should not bring price caps back to the two registry contracts.

But Namecheap had a final crack at getting the court to force ICANN into price cap. In a motion this April, it asked the court to instruct ICANN to “approach the registry operators for .ORG and .INFO to agree to some form of price control”.

The court didn’t buy its arguments, however, last week denying Namecheap’s requests on the grounds that ICANN had in fact considered the IRP panel’s recommendations:

Namecheap provides evidence that ICANN in fact did consider the Panel’s recommendations, and thus Plaintiff admits that ICANN did not reject any of the Panel’s findings, so as correctly stated by ICANN, “there is nothing for this Court to enforce.”

In the six years since the price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.

Registrar shamed for alleged crypto abuse neglect

ICANN has given a warning to Malaysian registrar WebNic, claiming that it has turned a blind eye to abuse reports in breach of new Registrar Accreditation Agreement rules.

ICANN Compliance says the company, a subsidiary of Kuala Lumpur-based Qinetics, failed to take action to resolve abuse reports made against several domains it manages.

Online reports and databases suggest the names in question were used in phishing attacks attempting to steal cryptocurrency wallet credentials.

Compliance said it “has observed a concerning pattern regarding DNS Abuse mitigation”, saying WebNic continually drags its feet on responding to abuse reports, often only taking action after ICANN gets involved.

The breach notice adds:

The Registrar frequently issued repeated requests for evidence to abuse reporters – even when the original reports appeared actionable – and failed to fully consider information or clarifications provided by the abuse reporter, ICANN or otherwise reasonably accessible to the Registrar. In other cases, the Registrar requested evidence from the abuse reporters that did not appear to be relevant to the reported activity, causing additional delays.

WebNic is not a young, fly-by-night registrar. It’s been around a quarter century and has over 800,000 domains under management just in the gTLDs. Its parent also offers registry back-end services.

The company has until August 19 to make Compliance happy or risk termination proceedings.

Registrars agree to higher ICANN fees

Domain registrars have agreed to pay more in ICANN fees, after a supermajority vote.

ICANN said today that registrars representing over two thirds of fees voted in favor of the increases, part of a package which Org reckons will add $4.6 million to its annual budget at first.

The package of increases also comes with an increase of the per-transaction fee, typically added by registrars at the checkout and sometimes called the “ICANN tax”, from $0.18 per domain to $0.20.

But the vote related to the variable fees, which will now go up from $3.42 million to $3.8 million per year. That sum is split equally between registrar accreditations, with a deep two-thirds discount for registrars with under 350,000 domains.

The fixed annual $4,000 per-accreditation fee is not changing.

The increases were proposed last October, along with registry fee increases, to plug budget shortfalls caused by macroeconomic factors such as inflation, lumpy registration patterns, and the post-Covid slump in registered names.

These are the first price increases ICANN has implemented in well over a decade.

Big .gdn registrar at risk

A registrar that exclusively sells .gdn domain names seems to have gone AWOL, and ICANN Compliance is on its case.

Dubai-based Intracom Middle East has been slapped with a breach notice alleging failures to operate a compliant RDAP server, publish the names of its officers, pay its ICANN fees, and escrow its registrant data.

Some of these breaches seem to be due to the fact that the company’s web site is missing in action, today returning NXDOMAIN errors, and has quite possibly been repeatedly hacked.

Archived versions of its site from last year show it was at various times a Polish risotto recipes splog, an Indian burger joint, and a manga cosplay porn site.

It’s Intracom’s second brush with Compliance. Three years ago the case was escalated to a three-month accreditation suspension for pretty much the same infractions.

Unlike most recent Compliance actions, which have been against registrars with essentially no domains under management, this times some domains are actually at risk — over 10,000 of them in fact.

Intracom specializes/d in selling .gdn domains for under a buck apiece. Apart from a few dozen registrations in a few other gTLDs, all of its 10,000 domains were in .gdn. It was once .gdn’s biggest registrar, though that’s no longer the case.

The company has been given to the end of the month to comply or risk termination.

Gname adds another 200 registrars

Singaporean drop-catching registrar Gname has added another 200 shell registrars to its collection, bringing its total to over 500.

The 200 companies are named Gname 301 Inc through Gname 500 Inc. More accreditations means more connections to gTLD registries and a better chance to catch expired domains when they are deleted.

Gname last boosted its portfolio of shells in December 2023, when it doubled its number from 150 to 300.

The latest accreditations will have cost $700,000 in up-front application fees and will add an extra $800,000 to Gname’s costs due to ICANN’s $4,000 flat annual accreditation fee.

This of course has a positive effect on ICANN’s finances. Its fiscal 2025 budget predicted 40 new registrars, and even its high estimate was only for an increase of 57.

It had only accredited 24 new registrars in this fiscal year before Gname’s move.

An extra $1.2 million it wasn’t expecting is almost enough to cover its community volunteers’ hotels bill for a whole year.

Gname’s main accreditation had almost five million domains under management, making it the ninth-largest accreditation of the now over 3,000 on ICANN’s books.

Web.com getting dumped

Registrar group Newfold Digital is killing off the Web.com brand after 18 years as part of its strategy to consolidate its diverse array of brands.

Customers will soon by migrated to the larger and older Network Solutions registrar, but the company said that they should not notice much difference.

“We’re committed to making the transition to Network Solutions seamless and convenient. That means no downtime or interruptions to your existing services. Simply put, you won’t have to do anything,” Web.com said.

Pricing, features, and user credentials will not change, it said.

Web.com had about 818,000 gTLD domains under management at the end of 2024, down from its peak of over 2 million during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but was growing every month last year.

Network Solutions, which was the gTLD monopoly registrar until ICANN came along to introduce competition a quarter century ago, had gTLD DUM of over 5 million at the last count.

Web.com was actually the acquiring party in the original merger, paying over $561 million in cash and stock for NetSol back in 2011.

There’s no word on when or if other ancient Nefold brands, such as Register.com, will be similarly retired.

The retirement raises the intriguing possibility of the web.com domain hitting the market at some point in the (far) future.