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.

Sales and profits dip at Team Internet

Having been one of the industry’s notable growth stories over the last decade, Team Internet saw its revenue and profit go down in 2024, according to its latest earnings report.

The company is also predicting a miserable 2025 as it tries to work around Google’s decision to turn off advertising on parked domains by default for its customers, a key source of Team Internet’s revenue.

Revenue was down 4.1% to $802.8 million, the company said, and adjusted EBITDA was down 4.7% to $91.9 million.

The domains part of its business seemed to fare better than its search unit, recording revenue up 7.4% at $202.7 million. But this division also includes some non-domains software businesses, so we can’t really break its performance out any more granularly.

Team Internet said the current analyst consensus for adjusted EBITDA this year is between $60 million and $62 million, a huge drop on 2024, with double-digit growth returning next year.

CEO Michael Riedl said in a statement: “The Search segment’s difficult reset in 2025 in response to recent market developments is the acceleration of a long-anticipated pivot, not, the board believes, a permanent setback.”

He also seemed to confirm that the company will rely on AI-generated content to populate its domains, enabling it to use Google’s contextual advertising.

Four deadbeat registrars get terminated

ICANN has terminated the contracts of four registrars that haven’t paid their accreditation fees in years.

US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology have all been canned, following public breach notices in January.

Judging by the termination notices, the registrars all stopped paying their quarterly fees between 2022 and early 2024. None of them had implemented recent ICANN policies such as RDAP adoption, the notices added.

It’s not a huge problem, as none of the four companies had ever sold a single gTLD domain name, so there are no customers to be affected.

Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service pilot.

The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate.

RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed to gather data that will help ICANN decide whether to deploy a more permanent and probably more expensive long-term solution.

The service is essentially a clearinghouse that connects people who want to request private Whois data with the registrars that manage domains of interest.

Tucows said in a blog post:

Given that the RDRS Standing Committee has enough data to complete its report, as well as the customer experience challenges and data privacy concerns we’ve outlined above, Tucows Domains has decided to end our participation in the RDRS.

The move makes Tucows the highest-profile registrar to pull out of the service to date. Across its various brands (such as Ascio, Enom, EPAG, and OpenSRS) it has around 10 million domains under management.

As of the end of January, RDRS had 94 registrars on board, covering 60% of all registered gTLD domains.

Tucows said it will continue to offer its TACO service, which also allows entities such as intellectual property interests to request private Whois data but charges requesters at least $3,000 a year, which it calls a “cost recovery fee”.

The TACO fee can be waived for “single-use and non-commercial requestors”, Tucows noted. It has updated its terms accordingly.

LA wildfire victims get domain deletes delay

Victims of the recent wildfires in the Los Angeles area have been offered special relief from renewing their expiring domains, according to an ICANN note to registrars.

Registrars were told last week that they “will be permitted to temporarily forebear from canceling domain registrations that are unable to be renewed because of the impact of the fires in Los Angeles, California, on domain name registrants.”

The LA fires reportedly destroyed or damaged 18,000 buildings, killed 29 people, and turned 200,000 into evacuees.

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement gives ICANN the discretion to allow its registrars to keep domains alive beyond their usual lifespan due to “extenuating circumstances”.

That’s been taken to mean natural disasters including hurricanes Maria, Helene and Milton, the earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria in 2023, the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The idea is to help victims of disasters keep their domains — and therefore often their livelihoods — after the usual renewal date if their credit cards are buried under a pile of rubble and they have more important things on their minds.

Los Angeles is the home of ICANN’s corporate headquarters.

Registrar terminated after ignoring Whois transition

A registrar has lost its right to sell gTLD domains in part due to its failure to migrate from Whois to RDAP.

Spain-based Abansys & Hostytec has had its ICANN registrar contract terminated over a litany of alleged breaches dating back to 2023, and its meager collection of domains will now be given to another registrar.

ICANN said in its termination notice that the company had failed to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol, the successor to Whois that this week became the new industry standard for domain ownership lookups.

The registrar was also past due on its fees, hadn’t given ICANN evidence the was still in good standing, hadn’t had an employee attend compliance training and was not publishing masked contact addresses in Whois results, among other things.

While its accreditation dates back to the noughties, Abansys has never had more than 600 gTLD domains under management and it seems very unlikely that it was making enough money from those domains to cover the cost of compliance.

ICANN said the termination became effective January 26, but it still wants its past-due fees paid.

Separately, Compliance has also sent breach notices to four other registrars — US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology — that cite RDAP failures as an area of non-compliance but appear to be primarily based on non-payment of fees.

All four registrars appear to have got accredited between 2019 and 2021 and stopped paying their fees not long afterwards. None of them has sold a single gTLD domain, ever, and two of their web sites suggest the companies are no longer around.

They’ve all got until February 12 to magically rectify their compliance problems or face execution.

GoDaddy ordered to stop lying about crappy security

GoDaddy has agreed to roll out some pretty basic security measures and has been told to stop lying about how secure its hosting is, under an agreement with US regulators.

It turns out that the company, while claiming that security “was at the core of everything we do”, was failing to do some pretty basic stuff like installing software patches, retiring end-of-life servers, or securing internet-facing APIs.

Its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission finds that GoDaddy engaged in “false or misleading” advertising and orders that it “must not misrepresent in any manner” its security profile in future.

The FTC complaint (pdf), filed in 2023 after reports of mass hacking incidents, states:

Despite its representations, GoDaddy was blind to vulnerabilities and threats in its hosting environment. Since 2018, GoDaddy has violated Section 5 of the FTC Act by failing to implement standard security tools and practices to protect the environment where it hosts customers’ websites and data, and to monitor it for security threats.

The complaint says that GoDaddy had a slack patching regime that was left up to individual product teams to execute, with no centralized management.

This meant thousands of boxes in its Shared Hosting environment were subject to critical vulnerabilities that allowed bad guys to get in and steal data such as user credentials and credit card info for months.

The complaint also describes a custom internet-facing API designed to enable customer support staff to access details about managed WordPress users, such as login credentials.

This API was apparently open to the internet, unfirewalled, used plaintext for credentials, and had no multi-factor authentication in place, again enabling hackers to steal data.

One or more “threat actors” abused this lax security to pwn tens of thousands of servers between October 2019 and December 2022, according to the complaint.

The settlement (pdf), in which GoDaddy does not admit or deny any wrongdoing, does not come with an associated fine.

Instead, GoDaddy has agreed to a fairly extensive list of requirements designed to increase the security of its hosting services.

Antisemitic remarks cost registrar dearly

A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder’s televised antisemitic comments.

Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN’s then-CEO described Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s remarks on Jordanian TV as “beyond offensive or objectionable”.

Abu-Ghazaleh had deployed some pretty clear-cut antisemitic tropes and seemed to try to justify the Holocaust in a news interview related to the war in Gaza, causing outrage from at least one Jewish ICANN community member.

After Costerton’s published chastisement, AGIP’s DUM fell from 1,371 to 930 over the space of a month. It was the first substantial decline on record, with its DUM having been on a fairly steady but slow upward trajectory.

In August, the last month for which we have records, its gTLD DUM had gone down to 695, about half its peak.

AGIP is a boutique intellectual property management registrar, likely with higher margins than your typical domain retailer. A decline of a few hundred domains could represent the loss of just a few customers.

The registrar still has its ICANN accreditation. It’s also still contracted with ICANN to run an instance of the L-root DNS root server in Amman, despite a call for it to lose that deal.

But, as Domain Name Wire noted on Friday, it’s no longer listed as providing UDRP services for ICANN. This change seems to have occurred in mid-September, judging by Archive.org records.