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.

“Lowest Price Guaranteed!” $48 .com registrar canned

ICANN has terminated its second registrar of the week, ending the accreditation of Hong Kong-based 0101 Internet for non-payment of fees and other infractions.

The registrar, not to be confused with the unrelated 101 Domain, will lose its ability to sell gTLD domains January 29, according to a public ICANN termination notice.

The company’s roughly 1,200 gTLD domains will be transferred to another registrar, a procedure complicated by the fact that ICANN also alleges that 0101 Internet has not been escrowing its customers’ registration data as required.

The Compliance notice spells out a timeline of alleged non-responsiveness to ICANN’s emails, phone calls, mail and faxes dating back to March 2003, almost three years ago.

0101 Internet’s web page proudly declares “Lowest Price Guaranteed!”, with .com, .net and .org priced at a measly $47.88 each, which might explain why the company’s DUM has been tumbling for over a decade.

No RDAP? No accreditation

ICANN has terminated its contract with another registrar after the company failed to implement RDAP, the Whois replacement protocol.

US-based Brennercom will be de-accredited January 28, according to a published ICANN Compliance notice.

The headline infraction is the fact that Brennercom failed to migrate to RDAP, but as is often the case the registrar owes ICANN money and has failed to publish some administrative details on its web site.

ICANN will now move Brennercom’s registered domains to a different registrar under its usual transition process.

That shouldn’t take long. While Brennercom’s web site claims to have handled customers with thousands of domains in their portfolios, my records show it has never had more than 133 domains under management. Right now, it has about 40.

Half of registrar’s domains are abusive, ICANN says

A fast-growing registrar seems to be experiencing its growth spurt due to extremely high levels of DNS abuse, including phishing, according to the latest public breach notice from ICANN Compliance.

More than half of Bulgarian registrar MainReg’s domains under management are abusive, judging by the notice, which alleges MainReg’s unwillingness to investigate abuse reports in violation of its accreditation contract.

The notice is the first I can recall seeing that cites data from Domain Metrica, an ICANN service that aggregates abuse data from third-party block-lists. An unspecified third-party reporter (hands up in the comments if it was you!) is also cited.

“ICANN Domain Metrica data indicates that in November 2025 approximately 48% of MainReg’s DUMs were reported for phishing, with the figure at 45% as of 5 January 2026,” the notice says.

“The complaining party stated that its own independent analysis identified an even higher proportion of the Registrar’s DUMs engaged in scam‑related activity,” it adds.

MainReg isn’t a huge registrar, but transaction reports show that its DUM tripled between September 2024 and September 2025, from about 10,000 names to about 30,000. The company registered its first name in 2015. Almost all of its names are in .com, .net and .org.

The notice alleges other breaches, such as failing to migrate from Whois to RDAP, and gives MainReg until January 28 to come in compliance or risk termination.

Noss to leave Tucows corner office

Tucows CEO Elliot Noss has stepped down after over a quarter century in the role.

He will be replaced by David Woroch, currently CEO of the Tucows Domains business, reflecting the company’s newly revealed plan to sell off its Ting ISP business.

Noss will continue as a consultant for Ting as it seeks a buyer, though the company revealed it will quite possibly sell the unit at a loss.

He has been leading Tucows since its early days as a free software download site to becoming an ICANN-accredited registrar in the first wave in the late 1999.

“We created wholesale domain registration out of whole cloth which fundamentally changed the way domain names were distributed,” Noss told analysts last week.

Woroch will continue to run the domains business. Ivan Ivanov, CFO, will also be CEO of Ting.

GoDaddy launches “ultra-premium” domain marketplace

If you’re going to launch a marketplace for “ultra-premium” domain names, you couldn’t pick a better domain to launch it on than DomainNames.com, and that’s what GoDaddy has done.

Via its Afternic secondary market business, the site was officially announced today. GoDaddy is reaching out to investors who own a “category-defining .com, a rare two-letter gem, a single-word .com or .ai, or a numeric masterpiece”.

While the company says it’s invitation-only, it it’s also asking investors to submit their names for consideration via a form on the new site, so that’s probably only half-accurate.

It’s looking for names it reckons could fetch six-figure asking prices and above.

If you want to know what GoDaddy thinks is “ultra-premium”, consider that the 110 domain names listed at launch are almost exclusively one–English-word or two-character .com names, with a handful of one-word .ai domains thrown in.

Domains will be actively marketed by the service and sellers have to sign an exclusivity agreement with GoDaddy.

That said, the domains don’t seem to have custom landers. Visitors to the listed names are greeted with a variety of Afternic/GoDaddy parking pages, some of which even have buy-it-now prices listed.