Blockchain naming firm gets ICANN accreditation

A company heavily involved in promoting blockchain-based domain name alternatives has received its ICANN registrar accreditation, allowing it to sell real domains as well.

Switzerland-based Freename’s London subsidiary seems to have obtained the accreditation in the last week or so. Accreditation means it gets the right to sell gTLD domains from any registry that it can sign a contract with.

Freename currently sells names in thousands of “TLDs”, some of which look very similar to existing ICANN gTLDs albeit with the addition of emojis, and which of course only work with special client software installed.

ICANN does not accept gTLD applications including emojis, so there’s no risk of collisions at the technical level, even if the text portion of the Freename suffix matches a DNS TLD.

Fellow blockchain naming company Unstoppable Domains already sells real .com domains, but I believe that’s as a reseller rather than a full-fat ICANN registrar.

Last year, it emerged that ICANN had turned down an offer of sponsorship from Freename.

This article was updated July 15, 2024 with additional information about Freename’s use of emojis.

PorkBun hits two million domain milestone

PorkBun has announced its passed the two million domains under management milestone, having added a net million names in two years.

The nine-year-old company is not especially .com-heavy, according to registry transaction reports, with about 611,000 .coms in its care.

It also does a pretty brisk trade in niche gTLDs such as .lat, where it’s the largest registrar, owning about half the market.

PorkBun was the 12th fastest-growing gTLD registrar in February and is the 25th largest overall, with over 1.6 million names.

Crawford returns to industry to head up Com Laude

If you can’t buy ’em, join ’em?

Ben Crawford, who was CEO of Team Internet back when it was CentralNic, has returned to the industry after a couple years away as a consultant/director to become the new CEO of corporate registrar Com Laude, a company he said he once tried to buy.

Crawford said he has also become an investor in the company and joined its board. He replaces Glenn Hayward, who is leaving the company after six years in the corner office.

“Com Laude was the first corporate domain name management firm I attempted to acquire, back in 2017,” he said on social media. “Sadly, we weren’t able to afford it back then.”

Company co-founder Nick Wood is also returning to sit on the board, having left in April after Com Laude announced new investors.

Alibaba off the naughty step

Chinese registrar Alibaba is no longer at risk of losing one of its ICANN accreditations, according to a notice on the Org’s web site.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and missed ICANN payments, according to its March breach notice.

But the company has now provided ICANN with documents sufficient to bring it back into compliance with its contract, according to the notice.

Alibaba has over six million domains under management across its three active accreditations, making it one of the largest registrars to come under the scrutiny of ICANN Compliance.

Bob Parsons publishes autobiography

GoDaddy founder and former CEO Bob Parsons has published his rags-to-riches autobiography, Fire in the Hole!

Subtitled The Untold Story of My Traumatic Life and Explosive Success, the book is co-written with jobbing celebrity biographer Laura Morton, who’s previously worked with GoDaddy-sponsored racing driver Danica Patrick.

It promises to detail “the exploits of his youth, his hellish days at the mercy of Catholic school nuns, his harrowing tour of combat duty in Vietnam as a US Marine, his pioneering contributions to the software and internet industries, and his latest ventures in power sports, golf, real estate, and marketing.”

“This is a story of how I started with absolutely nothing and made over $3 billion,” Parsons said in a press release.

Published yesterday by Forefront Books, it’s already ranked #1 in Golf Biographies on Amazon.

I’m going to wait for the paperback, so I can’t speak to its contents, but cover quotes reveal that Jada Pinkett-Smith, Rob Lowe and Nick Jonas all enjoyed it.

GoDaddy price increases lead to revenue growth

GoDaddy last night reported domains revenue ahead of forecasts after it raised its prices and sold more higher-priced domains on the aftermarket.

The company’s Core Platform segment, which includes domains and hosting, reported first-quarter revenue up 4% compared to a year ago at $725 million, with domains revenue driving growth, up 7% percent to $532 million.

Domains under management was 84.6 million at the end of March 31.

“Our growth was driven by strong demand for domains in the primary and secondary market, increased pricing in the primary market and a higher average transaction value in the secondary market,” CFO Mark McCaffrey said in prepared remarks.

Aftermarket revenue was up 12% to an unspecified amount.

Including the company’s other revenue streams, GoDaddy reported net income of $401.5 million on revenue up 7% at $1.1 billion.

Verisign, the .com registry, last week reported stagnating .com growth that it blamed in part on US registrars raising their retail prices, leading to lower first-year sales and renewals.

Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins

Eleven registrars representing millions of domain names signed up to support ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service last month. One registrar dropped out.

One of Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s registrars was among the additions. Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing), which has 2.6 million names under management, is a notable addition given that one of its sister registrars was recently hit with an ICANN Compliance action due to alleged abuse inaction.

Also opting in to the Whois band-aid service were Identity Digital’s Name.com (2.2 million names), three of its sister companies, and Newfold Digital’s Register.com (1.5 million names). Nominalia, P.A Vietnam, and Ubilibet also signed up.

Realtime Register dropped out of the voluntary service, the third registrar to opt out since RDRS launched in Novemeber.

ICANN says its coverage is now 57% of the total gTLD domains out there, up from 55% in February. It has 86 registrars on-board in total, including most of the largest.

RDRS is a two-year pilot that offers people who want access to private Whois records, largely intellectual property interests and law enforcement, a simpler way to connect with the registrars holding that data.

Alibaba hit with ICANN breach notice

One of the companies in the Alibaba Group, China’s biggest registrar and one of the largest technology companies in the world, has been handed a breach notice, containing a long list of complaints including abuse failures and non-payment of fees, by ICANN Compliance.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four accredited registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and failed to respond to ICANN’s requests for information about its failure to respond to abuse reports, the notice claims.

The breach notice will likely to be the last to be sent out for claims under the current version of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. In two days, April 5, stricter domain takedown rules approved earlier this year will become effective on all registrars.

The abuse claims seem to cover four domains in .com and .vip that look like typos that could have been used in phishing attacks.

ICANN Compliance says that Alibaba also hasn’t published the names of its officers or its redemption fees, as the RAA also requires. It says the registrar also owes it an unspecified amount of past-due fees.

The chronologies reported in the notice claim Alibaba has been giving Compliance the run-around, failing to respond to calls and emails, since early November.

All four registrars in the Alibaba Group have the same published email and phone details, but it’s not clear whether the same ones are listed in ICANN’s internal directory.

Alibaba.com Singapore is one of four accredited registrars owned by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. The parent is not short of a bob or two, reporting revenue equivalent to $126 billion last year. It can afford to pay its ICANN fees.

Of the three Alibaba registrars that have domains the “Singapore” one is the smallest, with about 660,000 domains under management. The other two have 3.2 million and 2.6 million domains to their accreditations.

The company has been told it has until April 17 to come back into compliance or risk getting terminated.

Founders out as Com Laude gets equity injection

Corporate registrar Com Laude is losing four company founders as part of a new investment from the private equity firm PX3 Partners.

The company said last week that founders Nick Wood and Lorna Gradden will exit the firm, along with Penny Hearn and Andrew Lothian, who founded Demys, which Com Laude acquired in 2018. Wood will stick around to consult for a while.

The privately held, London-based registrar did not disclose the size of the investment or the new ownership structure, but it did say that former investor Vespa Capital is also out.

Com Laude focuses on the corporate market and brand protection services and has over 211,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count.

CEO Glenn Hayward said in a blog post that PX3 was picked for its “deep network of international relationships and experience in helping companies scale and internationalise”.

Epik backtracks on Kiwi Farms claim after legal threat

Epik has retracted a claim it made on social media that former customer Kiwi Farms was hosting child sexual abuse material on its web site.

The troubled registrar had said on Twitter in January that it had received a complaint about a “doxxing” post on the Kiwi Farms troll forum that contained naked photographs of an individual Epik said it believed was “underaged”.

Kiwi Farms supporters counter-claimed that the person in question was a 19-year-old adult and the web site’s owner, known as Null, threatened Epik with legal action.

Today, Epik tweeted:

Epik retracts its statement in regards to the Kiwi Farms @KiwiFarmsDotNet having child sexual abuse material on its website. While Epik may not agree with content that may be on its website, Epik has no direct knowledge of child sexual abuse material on the Kiwi Farms’ website.

In the last couple of month, Epik has sought to rebrand itself as a responsible registrar focused on entrepreneurs rather than controversial anchor tenants. It updated its abuse policy last year and kicked out customers such as Kiwi Farms and Gab.

The company is now owned by Registered Agents, a company formation company.