GoDaddy may “exit India” over cybersquatting legal battle

GoDaddy has said it may be forced to leave the Indian market if a court ruling forcing it and other registrars to reveal the identities of registrants is not reversed, according to a report.

Reuters has scooped 5,000 pages of documents the company filed as part of its appeal of a December 2025 court ruling, which said that registrars must hand over Whois info to parties with “legitimate interests” within 72 hours.

In its High Court appeal, GoDaddy said it has no way to determine who has a legitimate interest to such data, and that to hand it over would put its customers privacy and security at risk, Reuters reported.

Namecheap and Hosting Concepts (Registrar.eu) have also challenged the ruling, the report said.

The December ruling came as a result of lawsuits filed by 20 companies including Amazon, McDonald’s and Microsoft, which are worried about cybersquatters, phishers and fraudsters impersonation their brands.

ICANN already has policies in place that deal with when registrars have to hand over Whois/RDAP records, but they largely concern DNS abuse like phishing and malware rather than IP infringement and fraud.

Blacknight acquired by Your.Online

Blacknight Solutions, Ireland’s first ICANN-accredited registrar, has been bought by Your.Online for an undisclosed sum.

The registrar joins dozens of brands, mainly but not exclusively in the hosting space, under the Your.Online umbrella.

Your.Online describes itself as a “group of founder-led digital service providers”, and as such Blacknight founders Michele Neylon and Paul Kelly are expected to stick around in their current leadership roles.

Neylon said on social media that the existing staff will also be retained and that customers should not notice anything different due to the transaction.

Other registrar brands in the group include Gandi, Heart Internet, and DI sponsor Realtime Register.

Your.Online formed a few years ago from the merger of Gandi and Total Webhosting Solutions.

“Bulletproof” registrar gets an ICANN bollocking

ICANN has slapped an intensely privacy-focused registrar that compares its stance on takedowns to Elon Musks with a lengthy breach-of-contract notice, claiming that the company is disregarding legitimate abuse reports for no good reason.

Estonia-based Fewmoretaps, which changed its brand to Trustname.com not long after its accreditation was approved in early 2024, has been friendly to malware distributors that use its services, according to ICANN.

The breach notice claims that Trustname, after it had discovered that an abuse report was valid and that one of its customers’ domains was being used to spread malware, did not suspend the domain as required.

Rather, it gave the registrant a three-day headsup to move their domain to another registrar, according to ICANN.

It additionally ignored multiple abuse reports, often for spurious reasons, the notice claims, often only taking action on abusive domains after ICANN Compliance itself got it touch.

Trustname says it is a “registrar built for businesses in competitive niches that often face false or bad-faith abuse reports” and makes hay out of the fact that it offers “bulletproof” privacy by masking registrants details behind two different proxy services located in different jurisdictions.

While the company’s web site claims ad nauseam that its services are not to be used for illegal purposes such as child abuse material and opioid sales, it boldly states that it “disregards” copyright infringement notices.

“Like Elon Musk, we have a strong aversion to individuals who exploit the DMCA, as we believe it lacks legal authority for the vast majority of the world’s population,” the site states.

IP matters are not covered by ICANN contracts, which defined abuse as malware, pharming, phishing and a subset of spam, of course.

Trustname’s site states that it will only take action against domains in “extreme scenarios”.

Such scenarios include “using your website to host illegal content (that we have confirmed after thorough investigations) and getting court orders from all three jurisdictions.”

The three jurisdictions are the US and Saint Kitts & Nevis, where its proxy partners are located, and its home nation of Estonia. Saint Kitts-based Harakiri (Perfect Privacy LLC) was specifically chosen because court orders are hard to come by there.

The company additionally states, in what could be interpreted as an admission of guilt by ICANN Compliance standards:

We will never take any action against a domain name simply because someone filed a complaint – even if your report indicates a violation of our terms. We will only be obligated to take action when we get the relevant court orders.

Trustname, which had fewer than 1,500 gTLD domains under management at the last count, has been given until July 1 to come back into compliance or risk losing its accreditation.

Team Internet says domains business sale imminent

Team Internet expects to be able to announce the sale of its domains business in the next several weeks, coming at the end of a turbulent 2025 that saw revenue, and its share price, tumble.

The company — home to registry and registrar brands including CentralNic, BrandShelter, Moniker and domaindiscount24 — said of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) segment in a recent trading statement:

Discussions continue with selected parties regarding a potential disposal of the DIS segment, which the Board will pursue where it delivers fair value. While there can be no certainty that any transaction will be agreed, or as to its terms, the Board expects the outcome of the strategic review, including any agreement relating to a potential disposal of DIS, to be announced in the first half of Q3. Subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals, the Board expects any resulting transaction to complete during 2026.

That suggests a deal could be announced anywhere from this week to mid-August.

Team Internet got badly burned by Google after the advertising giant changed the way it allows parking companies to monetize domains in early 2025. Its revenue per thousand page views was cut in half, down by 51% to $34 million last year.

The company is now talking about a legal case against Google (which it did not name directly), saying it is “pursuing a substantial damages claim against a major technology company, arising from anti-competitive conduct”.

In its audited 2025 results, announced Friday, the company said its DIS segment was down 4% to $194.6 million, with adjusted EBITDA up 10% at $21.4 million as it pursued a strategy of squeezing more profit out of each customer rather than pushing volume.

The Search segments, most affected by Google’s antics, saw its top line down 59% at $222 million, with EBITDA down 84% at $9 million. Overall, Team Internet saw revenue down 40% at $481.9 million, with EBITDA down 54% at $42.7 million.

The company also disclosed that it has had trouble meeting its financial commitments to its lenders, but that it has come to arrangement to have the banks forgive the transgressions.

It plans to either refinance or use the proceeds from the DIS disposal to service its debts.

Four registrars get terminated

Four companies have had their gTLD accreditations terminated, as ICANN continues to clear up its backlog of long-dormant deadbeat registrars.

The unrelated entities are US-based Domus, Finland-based Globis, Hong Kong-based Overcasts, and Wanyuhulian Technology from China. They’ve all lost their ICANN contracts as of May 29.

No domains are at risk, as none of the registrars had any gTLD names under management. Two of them never sold a single domain.

All of the companies in question were in breach for failing to pay their accreditation fees. One of them inexplicably had its accreditation renewed last year despite already being past due.

Whois about to get even more useless

Trying to get hold of a domain registrant via their Whois record? It could be about to get even more difficult following an ICANN advisory that gives GoDaddy a pass for its current practices.

The advisory could make it harder for domain buyers to contact the owners of domains they are interested in, and easier for registrars to sell their domain brokerage services.

There’s a strict requirement under the current ICANN Registration Data Policy that registrars “MUST Publish an email address or a link to a web form to facilitate email communication” in their RDAP/Whois output.

The web form option is pretty much the de facto standard; the registrant’s email address is publicly redacted, but the registrar offers to forward communications to the address it has on record.

But there’s been some controversy about what “facilitate email communication” means.

If you query a domain sponsored by the likes of Tucows or 101domain, you’ll get a form that allows you to submit free text much like you would with a regular email.

With the likes of Markmonitor or Porkbun, you’ll get the same type of form, but only after you’re verified your own email address. Namecheap provides a proxified email address in its RDAP output, no web form required.

But some registrars, notably GoDaddy and Dynadot among the largest providers, do not give a free text option. You can only select from one of three options — abuse, IP infringement, or a “research” catch-all — and hope the registrant agrees to reach out to you on that very vague basis.

If you’re a domainer, there’s no way to use the GoDaddy form to say “Hey, I like your name, I’ll give you $5k for it.”

ICANN has now clarified that the GoDaddy model is perfectly fine under the policy, which “does not include an explicit requirement that registrars provide a free text option or forwarding capabilities as the means of facilitating the communication”.

What GoDaddy and Dynadot are doing “does not violate current requirements under the Policy”, ICANN stated.

This clarification could mean that other registrars could begin to copy the GoDaddy model, if they believe it will benefit them in some way, such as by making an expensive brokerage service the most efficient way for domainers to contact prospective sellers.

Four more deadbeat registrars face firing squad

ICANN has initiated public compliances proceedings against four unrelated registrars that haven’t paid their fees in a year or more.

US-based Domus, Finland-based Globis, Hong Kong-based Overcasts, and Wanyuhulian Technology from China have all been given until May 27 to cough up or have their accreditation agreements terminated.

None of the registrars currently have any gTLD domains under management. Two of them appear to have never sold a single domain, while Globis and Domus both lost their four-figure DUM almost a year ago.

Wanyuhulian is a particularly interesting case, highlighting some ICANN weirdness.

It was first approved for its Registrar Accreditation Agreement in 2020 and had it renewed in June 2025, but according to ICANN’s breach notice, it was already at least nine months past due with its payments at the time of the renewal.

Not only that, but the notice also claims that Wanyuhulian hadn’t provided the necessary paperwork, known as the Registrar Information Specification, that sets out a registrar’s address, officers and owners:

As part of the RAA renewal process, ICANN requires updated information and documentation from registrars, through which ICANN may verify, for example, current contact information and that the registrar remains established and in good standing.

During the renewal process for Wanyuhulian Technology’s RAA in 2025, the Registrar failed to provide the information requested. To date, ICANN has not received the requested information.

So it appears that ICANN was happy to renew the accreditation of a registrar despite knowing that it was past due with its fees and not knowing for sure who was running it, who owned it, or where it was located.

Bit worrying?

Namecheap saw 116,000 phishing attacks last year

Bad guys used Namecheap to register domains associated with over 116,000 confirmed phishing attacks in 2025, according to data released by the company this week.

Across Namecheap and sister registrar Spaceship there were 432,796 reports of phishing and 116,871 of them were confirmed to be phishing attacks, according to data shared to an ICANN policy mailing list.

The stats refer to the number of tickets in the registrars’ support system, not the number of abusive domains, which logically could be lower due to double-counting or higher due to multiple domains listed in the same ticket.

The numbers are low as a percentage of the company’s domains under management — it has over 27 million DUM across its accreditations — at less than half of one percent, but pretty steep in absolute numbers.

The data was shared as part of early-stage discussions about the next wave of ICANN policy on DNS abuse.

A community working group is working on potential new rules for registrars, forcing them to conduct “Associated Domain Checks”.

That’s the idea that when a registrar confirms a domain is abusive they should check the Bad Guy’s other domains for similar abuse and yank those too, particularly if they were part of a bulk registration.

One of the many factors playing into these policy discussions is the administrative burden, and cost, that this would place on registrars. With 116,000 confirmed cases of abuse, the work-hours for abuse staff (or a potentially unreliable AI) quickly adds up.

Namecheap was named in the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Q4 2025 report as the number one registrar abused in business email compromise attacks, a subset of phishing, with 25% of the total.

Unstoppable buys 10 new registrars

Unstoppable Domains has got 10 new registrar shell companies accredited by ICANN.

According to ICANN records, the companies UnstoppableUS1 LLC through UnstoppableUS10 LLC now have their official accreditations.

Starting off as a seller of strictly blockchain-based names, the company became a registrar of regular domains in 2024 and recently said the vast majority of its business is now in that space.

Buying up shell accreditations gives it more concurrent registry connections and is almost always a way for a registrar to become more competitive in the drop-catching services market.

ICANN cleaning house, cans four more registrars

ICANN has withdrawn the accreditations of four more long-defunct registrars, bringing this month’s terminations so far to 11.

They’re all Chinese, though they do not appear to be under common ownership. They are: Qinghai Yunnet Electronics Technology Co, Shandong Huaimi Network Technology Co, Xiamen Booksir Qiyoutong Technology Co and Xiamen Yuwang Technology Co․

What’s notable is how long it’s taken for ICANN to yank their accreditations. It’s been three or four years since Compliance opened tickets on each of them for non-payment of fees.

None of the four have any gTLD domains under management, and some don’t even seem to own their own original domains any more. One had its former web site turned into a blog in 2022. Another has its domain parked and listed for sale.