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.

Seven registrars get terminated

ICANN has terminated the accreditations of seven registrars for not paying their fees.

Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem — all under common ownership in the US — have all been given their marching orders, effective April 17.

While Compliance said it will transfer the registrars’ domains to another registrar, in practice it seems that none of them actually have any remaining domains under management.

As I previously blogged, the seven all appear to have sacrificed their DUM when they lost their .com accreditations in late 2024. That’s about the same time as ICANN stopped receiving its fees.

GoDaddy launches DomainMaxxing to optimize your domains

GoDaddy has unveiled a suite of new premium product features designed to help its customers realize the full value of their domains in increasingly competitive marketplaces.

DomainMaxxing was developed on the premise that domains aren’t merely technical assets anymore, they’re performative status objects, the company explained in a press release.

The subscription-based service adds several string-optimization techniques to the registration path, including semantic resonance analysis, geo-cultural prestige calibration and Alpha-syllable dominance enforcement, the company said.

The basic $9.99-a-month DomainMaxxing tier includes a premium serif pack, a typographic enhancement layer that renders serifs at the DNS level, as well as kerning optimization, for improved cognitive flow in the browser address bar.

“While sans-serif domains resolve 12% faster, they also convert 62% worse in enterprise contexts,” GoDaddy vice president Nick Eldime told DI.

The tier also bundles an “Awareness Pack”, also available at $1.99 a month separately, in which GoDaddy will remind registrants when their domains are about to auto-renew.

A new character integrity verification option ensures your domain “continues to contain the same letters over time”, the company said.

Pricier DomainMaxxing tiers automatically subscribe domain investors into a broker-assisted offer normalization service, built on an adaptive negotiation tone engine, to maximize domain resale value via strategic buyer discouragement.

This may include mild ridicule, disbelief, and in some cases, personalised remarks about the buyer’s net worth, social status, or spouse, Eldime explained.

Also included at the top end is a new “valet” domain parking service, where your domains are professionally escorted to their nameservers by an obsequious, white-gloved AI agent.

“Domains enrolled in DomainMaxxing are no longer merely delegated, but presented,” Eldime said.

Early beta users reported a 47% increase in inbound offers and a noticeable improvement in jawline definition, he said.

Existing GoDaddy customers will be automatically enrolled in DomainMaxxing starting April 1.

Unstoppable focuses on proper domains, admits crypto was “craze”

Unstoppable Domains is steering away from so-called “Web 3” blockchain-based naming to focus on the consensus DNS, according to a social media post from the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould tweeted on Twitter last week that the names were “part of the crypto craze in 2021” that “did not cross the chasm into mainstream usage”. Unstoppable will increase its focus on traditional domains, he wrote.

DNS domains now compose 90%+ of our business, and as we move to get several of our TLDs also listed in ICANN over the next few years our focus will continue to grow on the DNS and traditional internet market. We expect that 2-3 years from now DNS and the traditional web will be…

— Matthew Gould (@mattgould) March 16, 2026

The company’s web site now comes across like a traditional registrar. Blockchain names — once front-and-center — are still sold there, but as a non-default option in the storefront’s search results that describes such names as “wallet identifiers”.

Unstoppable says it has sold over four million blockchain names since it launched, in extensions such as .nft, .crypto and .wallet. Twitter users responding to Gould’s tweet wondered whether Unstoppable could now be described as a “grift”, “rug-pull” or “scam”.

The company has increasingly been moving towards real domains for some time, becoming accredited as an ICANN registrar in August 2024 and just last month receiving approval to act as a registry service provider in the new gTLD program.

Namecheap abandons fight for .org price caps

Namecheap seems to have thrown in the towel in its long-running fight to get ICANN to cap the prices of .org and .info domain names.

The registrar terminated its Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN back in November, with the IRP panel formally closing the case December 16, according to documents ICANN published last week.

Namecheap said it “has decided to terminate these proceedings without prejudice”, meaning it would be free to re-file the IRP at a later date. The company and ICANN have agreed to pay their own costs.

It was the second Namecheap IRP related to ICANN’s decision to remove price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts when it renewed them in 2019, bringing the two gTLDs into line with almost all other registries.

Namecheap filed its first IRP in February 2020, and scored a stonking win in 2023, with the panel ruling that ICANN had breached its bylaws and behaved in an overly secretive manner when it approved the contract renewals.

But the panel offered up remedies that gave ICANN a lot of interpretative leeway and important did not mandate the reintroduction of price caps. The second, now-defunct IRP saw Namecheap trying to force ICANN to undo its price caps decision.

It also sued ICANN in Los Angeles two years ago for essentially the same purpose, but it lost the case last July.

Since the price caps were lifted, non-profit Public Interest Registry has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.

Seven dead registrars on the out

When a registrar stops paying its registry partners, they tend to be cut off relatively quickly. ICANN takes a bit longer.

That seems to be what’s happening to a collection of accredited registrars under the same ownership, which have been given just a few weeks to pay over a year’s worth of overdue ICANN fees or lose their ability to sell names.

ICANN Compliance is gunning for Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem for non-payment of fees going back at least to September 2024.

Probably not coincidentally, that’s the same month that all seven registrars abruptly lost all of their domains under management — not much more than 1,000 per registrar — and apparently lost its .com accreditation.

According to the ICANN notice, Compliance spent the last few months of 2024 unsuccessfully attempting to get in touch with the registrars, before ignoring the case for the whole of 2025 and only returning to it this month.

The registrar web sites are all simple placeholders, with broken SSL certs, doing the bare minimum to stay in compliance with the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement without actually attempting to sell any domains.

While almost all ICANN Compliance breach notices contain an allegation of unpaid fees, this is a rare instance where the allegations stop there; there’s no claim of any other breach.