Aussie registrar guilty of $6 million slamming campaign

Domain seller Domain Register Pty Ltd has reportedly been found guilty of scamming thousands of Australians out of a total of $6 million with bogus domain renewal notices.
The Herald Sun reports today that a Federal court ruled that the company’s sales tactics were “misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive in breach of state and federal laws”.
The company, at one time a TPP Wholesale reseller but apparently never ICANN-accredited itself, was notorious for being a leading Aussie practitioner of the old “domain slamming” scam popularized by the Brandon Gray gang through fronts such as Domain Registry of America.
It sent paper invoices that appeared to the casual reader to be renewal notices for .com.au names, but were in fact solicitations to buy matching .com names for an outrageous $249 ($195) per year.
So convincing were the notices that the hit rate was one out of every 14 organizations targeted, the Herald Sun reported. Over 21,000 suckers in total.
According to the newspaper, the court was told that Domain Register made AUD 7.7 million ($6 million) from 31,000 registrations and renewals from January 1, 2011, to May 30, 2014.
The lawsuit was filed by Australian state government watchdog Consumer Affairs Victoria a year ago, but the domain industry was warning punters about the scam as far back as 2011.
Domain Register’s punishment has yet to be determined, but the agency had been seeking refunds for victims along with punitive penalties.

Brazil loses its only registrar as UOL bows out

There are now no ICANN-accredited registrars in Brazil, following the termination of Universo Online’s contract this week.
I understand the agreement was ended at UOL’s request. It’s not a case of it breaching its contract.
UOL is a big deal in Brazil, getting beaten in the eyeballs stakes only by the likes of Google and Facebook, but as a registrar it wasn’t in the top 100 globally.
It had a little over 100,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count, with a peak over the last five years of roughly 200,000
I hear that these remaining domains will be transferred to Tucows’ accreditation.
Brazil has had at least four registrars, including UOL, over the years.
Countries roughly the same size as Brazil by population (over 200 million) include Nigeria and Pakistan, each of which still have one active registrar.
There are 10 contracted registries, managing nine 2012-round new gTLDs, in Brazil.

GoDaddy renewal revamp “unrelated” to domainer auction outrage

GoDaddy has made some big changes to how it handles expired domain names, but denied the changes are related to domainer outrage today about “fake” auctions.
The market-leading registrar today said that it has reduced the period post-expiration during which registrants can recover their names from 42 days to 30. After day 30, registrants will no longer be able to renew or transfer affected names.
GoDaddy is also going to start cutting off customers’ MX records five days after expiry. This way, if they’re only using their domain for email, they will notice the interruption. Previously, the company did not cut off MX records.
The changes were first reported at DomainInvesting.com and subsequently confirmed by a GoDaddy spokesperson.
One impact of this will be to reduce confusion when GoDaddy puts expired domains up for auction when it’s still possible for the original registrant reclaim them, which has been the cause of complaints from prominent domain investors this week.
As DomaingGang reported yesterday, self-proclaimed “Domain King” Rick Schwartz bought the domain GoDaddyBlows.com in order to register his disgust with the practice.
Konstantinos Zournas of OnlineDomain followed up with a critique of his own today.
But the GoDaddy spokesperson denied the changes are being made in response to this week’s flak.
“This is unrelated to any events in the aftermarket,” he said. “We’ve been working on this policy for more than a year.”
He said the changes are a case of GoDaddy “optimizing our systems and processes”. The company ran an audit of when customers were renewing and found that fewer than 1% of names were renewed between days 30 and 42 following expiration, he said.
GoDaddy renews about 2.5 million domains per month in just the gTLDs it carries, according to my records, so a full 1% would equal roughly 25,000 names per month or 300,000 per year. But the company spokesperson said the actual number “quite a bit less” than that.
How many of these renewals are genuinely forgetful registrants and how many are people attempting to exploit the auction system is not known.
The changes will come into effect December 4. The news broke today because GoDaddy has started notifying its high-volume customers.

ICANN terminates 450 drop-catch registrars

Almost 450 registrars have lost their ICANN accreditations in recent days, fulfilling predictions of a downturn in the domain name drop-catch market.
By my reckoning, 448 registrars have been terminated in the last week, all of them apparently shells operated by Pheenix, one of the big three drop-catching firms.
Basically, Pheenix has dumped about 90% of its portfolio of accreditations, about 300 of which are less than a year old.
It also means ICANN has lost about 15% of its fee-paying registrars.
Pheenix has saved itself at least $1.2 million in ICANN’s fixed accreditation fees, not including the variable and transaction-based fees.
It has about 50 registrars left in its stable.
The terminated registrars are all either numbered LLCs — “Everest [1-100] LLC” for example — or named after random historical or fictional characters or magic swords.
The move is not unexpected. ICANN predicted it would lose 750 registrars when it compiled its fiscal 2018 budget.
VP Cyrus Namazi said back in July that the drop-catching market is not big enough to support the many hundreds of shell registrars that Pheenix, along with rivals SnapNames/Namejet and DropCatch.com, have created over the last few years.
The downturn, Namazi said back then, is material to ICANN’s budget. I estimated at the time that roughly two thirds of ICANN’s accredited registrar base belonged to the three main drop-catch firms.
Another theory doing the rounds, after Domain Name Wire spotted a Verisign patent filing covering a system for detecting and mitigating “registrar collusion” in the space, is that Verisign is due to shake up the .com drop-catch market with some kind of centralized service.
ICANN reckoned it would start losing registrars in October at a rate of about 250 per quarter, which seems to be playing out as predicted, so the purge has likely only just begun.

Hammock swings from Rightside to MarkMonitor

Statton Hammock has joined brand protection registrar MarkMonitor as its new vice president of global policy and industry development.
He was most recently VP of business and legal affairs at Rightside, the portfolio gTLD registry that got acquired by Donuts in July. He spent four years there.
The new gig sounds like a broad brief. In a press release, MarkMonitor said Hammock will oversee “the development and execution of MarkMonitor’s global policy, thought leadership, business development and awareness strategy”.
MarkMonitor nowadays is a business of Clarivate Analytics under president Chris Veator, who started at the company in July.

After slow launch, .africa looks to add hundreds of resellers

ZA Central Registry is opening up .africa and its South African city gTLDs to potentially hundreds of new registrars via a new proxy program.
The company today announced that its new registrar AF Proxy Services has received ICANN accreditation, which should open up .africa, .joburg, .capetown and .durban to its existing .za channel.
ZACR is the ccTLD registry for South Africa and as such it already has almost 500 partners accredited to sell .za names. But most of these resellers are not also ICANN accredited, so they cannot sell gTLD domains.
The AF Proxy service is intended to give these existing resellers the ability to sell ZACR’s four gTLDs without having to seek out an ICANN accreditation themselves.
“Effectively, all users of the AF Proxy service become resellers of the Proxy Registrar which is an elegant technical solution aimed at boosting new gTLD domain name registrations,” ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said in a press release.
While reseller networks are of course a staple of the industry and registries acting as retail registrars is fairly common nowadays, this new ZACR business model is unusual.
According to ZACR’s web site, it has 489 accredited .za registrars active today, with 52 more in testing and a whopping 792 more in the application process.
Depending on uptake of the proxy service, that could bring the number of potential .africa resellers to over 1,300.
And they’re probably needed.
The .africa gTLD went into general availability in July — after five years of expensive legal and quasi-legal challenges from rival applicant DotConnectAfrica — but has so far managed to put just 8,600 names in its zone file.
That’s no doubt disappointing for TLD serving a population of 1.2 billion and which had been expected to see substantial domain investor activity from overseas, particularly China.

.museum soon could be open to all (no haters please)

The 15-year-old .museum gTLD could soon be open to a great many more potential registrants, following an ICANN contract renewal.
The registry, MuseDoma, has negotiated a new Registry Agreement that rewrites eligibility rules to the extent that soon basically anyone should be able to register a name.
Since the gTLD went live back in 2002, it has been tightly restricted to legitimate museums and museum associations, as well as verifiable museum workers such as curators.
But the new proposed contract expands eligibility to “individuals with an interest or a link with museum profession and/or activity” and “bona fide museum users”.
It’s not at all clear how one proves they are a “bona fide museum user”, but the language suggests to me that the registry is likely to take registrants at their word and enforce some kind of post-registration review of how the domains are being used.
Indeed, the new contract contains the following new restriction:

Registration implies compliance with a fair use that only allows a use harmless to the image of museums and the community. Non-compliance will result in suspension or termination of the domain name.

So if you are fundamentally opposed to the idea of museums and want to set up a .museum web site trashing the entire concept, you probably won’t be allowed to.
Even though .museum was part of the “test-bed” application round from 2000, the proposed new contract has acquired chunks of the standard new gTLD RA from 2012.
As such, MuseDoma has agreed to take on the Uniform Rapid Suspension rights protection mechanism. This may prove somewhat controversial among those opposed to URS being “forced” on legacy gTLD registries before it has been approved as full ICANN policy.
The way ICANN fees are calculated — .museum’s flat fees are much lower — has not changed.
.museum has had a fairly steady 450 to 600 domains under management for the entirety of its existence.
The contract is open for public comment until October 3.

Former MarkMonitor execs join new brand protection registrar

Two former MarkMonitor executives have teamed up with a Fairwinds co-founder to launch a new “next generation” brand protection registrar.
The new company is Brandsight. It was set up by CEO Phil Lodico, who left brand consultancy Fairwinds about a year ago, and was accredited by ICANN earlier this month.
The first two hires are Matt Serlin, who until a couple months ago was VP of client services at MarkMonitor, and Elisa Cooper, who joins after being VP of marketing at the intellectual property management company Lecorpio.
Cooper, who also worked for MarkMonitor in the same position until a couple of years ago, will be Brandsight’s head of marketing and policy. Serlin will head up operations and client services.
The two told me yesterday that Brandsight will attempt to differentiate itself from its alma maters through a combination of better technology, expertise and use of data.
Both have many years experience in the domain industry and ICANN and, one imagines, thick contacts books of potential clients.
The Brandsight site, which went live today, will feature improved workflow via a streamlined user interface, they said.
The company also hopes “better leverage big data to help companies make better decisions and streamline processes around domain management”, Cooper said.
“Legacy registrars haven’t been focused on building new technology, some for almost 10 years,” she said.
It looks like it’s going to be a boutique operation at first — I believe Lodico, Serlin and Cooper are the only three employees right now — but Cooper said the plan is to staff up over the remainder of the year in areas such as sales.
The idea is to be a company that is purely focused on corporate domain services as its core competency, as opposed to what they called the “legacy” larger registrars that have domains as just one service among many, Cooper and Serlin said.
Brandsight is based in New York state and funded by private investors.

GoDaddy’s reason for dumping Uniregistry doesn’t make a lot of sense

GoDaddy, as you may have read, has again decided to dump Uniregistry’s portfolio of TLDs, following wholesale price increases.
But its explanation for the move — trying to provide its customers with a “great product experience” — doesn’t seem to tally with the way it has gone about implementing the change.
The company confirmed this week that it will no longer offer new registrations in Uniregistry’s stable of new gTLDs, but will continue to support existing customers.
The registrar’s EVP of domains, Mike McLaughlin, reportedly explained the move like this:

GoDaddy strives to provide its customers with great product experiences wherever possible. After careful consideration, we decided to stop offering new Uniregistry domain names for sale because their pricing changes caused frustration and uncertainty with our customers.

But the way GoDaddy has gone about this looks like it is set to provide anything other than a great product experience.
For starters, existing registrants of Uniregistry names will find their registrations migrated over to the wholesale registrar Hexonet, for which GoDaddy will act as reseller.
They’ll still be able to manage their names via their GoDaddy control panels, but technically GoDaddy will no longer be the registrar.
This could well add friction to the customer support process, as well as meaning Hexonet will now show up in Whois as the sponsoring registrar.
Accompanying this move is the unexplained removal of Whois privacy services for all affected domains. Registrants will get a refund for their privacy service and will have the opportunity to switch registrars to one that will support privacy.
For those that remain, suddenly their personally identifiable information will become publicly available. This could lead to an increase in complaints and support calls as registrants realize what has happened.
In terms of price, existing registrants will presumably still be affected by Uniregistry’s increases to the same extent as they were previously. Again, their customer experience has not changed.
Overall, the explanation doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I put the above points to GoDaddy and VP of domains Rich Merdinger responded, via a company spokesperson:

After we made the decision to stop supporting Uniregistry domain names, we worked to provide the best possible experience we could to our customers. We wanted them to have a transparent experience. They will log in to the same GoDaddy account and service the domain names the same way they always have. Because of the transfer of the name to a different registrar, privacy had to be removed. While this impacts a small subset of these customers, we have done everything to make this transition as smooth as possible.

It’s true that GoDaddy isn’t a big seller of Uniregistry names. It’s one of Uniregistry’s smaller channel partners and the number of Uniregistry names it’s sold — measured in the thousands — is a drop in the ocean of the over 55 million gTLD names it currently has under management.
The two companies are also competitors, it probably should be noted.
But while Uniregistry’s registrar seems to be have been well-received by customers, and its domain volume has grown rapidly in the last three years, it still only had about 1.5 million domains under management at the last count; hardly an existential threat to the Scottsdale behemoth.
It should also be noted that GoDaddy is not the only registrar to distance itself from Uniregistry.
NameCheap also recently discontinued support for the TLDs that are experiencing the biggest price increases. Tucows announced a similar move in May.
GoDaddy had already said it would drop Uniregistry once before, but changed its mind, before changing it back again.

GoDaddy CEO to retire at 58

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving tonight announced his retirement from the company.
Irving, 58, said he will leave the corner office at the end of 2017, and will stick around on its board of directors until June next year.
He will be replaced by current chief operating officer Scott Wagner, who joined the registrar in 2013 from KKR, one of the three investment companies that owned GoDaddy in its interregnum between founder Bob Parsons and its 2013 initial public offering.
“After more than three decades in technology, I’ve decided it’s time to retire and begin the next phase of my life,” Irving said in a press release.
He added that revenue and profits had doubled under his watch, which commenced in 2013.
Wagner served as interim CEO of GoDaddy in 2012, after Parsons protege Warren Adelman’s short stint in the role.
He was also named president of the company last year.
GoDaddy’s share price has dipped slightly in after-hours trading in the hour or so since the announcement was made.