GoDaddy domains revenue crosses half a billion

GoDaddy sold more than half a billion dollars of domain names in the third quarter even as volumes slightly decreased, according to its latest earnings release.

The company had domains revenue of $508.2 million in Q3, compared to $494 million a year ago and $492.7 in the second quarter, according to regulatory filings. The aftermarket revenue component was down 2% at $107 million.

It had 84 million domains under management at the end of the quarter, compared to 84.2 million at the end of June. About three quarters of GoDaddy’s DUM are in gTLDs and about 60% are in .com, according to registry reports.

Overall, GoDaddy’s revenue was up 3.5% compared to a year ago at $1.07 billion. Net income was $131 million compared to $100 million a year ago.

Freenom spanked for holding Olympics domain hostage

Freenom has been hit by its third ICANN contract-breach notice in under a month, this time because the organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics could not transfer a domain out to another registrar.

The registrar, formally OpenTLD, failed to take off the ClientTransferProhibited status from the domain club2024.tickets, preventing the registrant from transferring it, ICANN claims.

Digging through my database and Whois records, it looks like the organizing committee of Paris 2024 used Freenom to defensively register 10 .tickets domain names related to its Le Club Paris 2024 marketing initiative in July 2020.

They were the only .tickets domains Freenon has ever sold.

When they came up for renewal last year, the Paris committee instead transferred nine of them out to local registrar Gandi, where they remain. The 10th domain was not transferred for some reason.

ICANN says Freenom is in violation of the Transfer Policy by failing to unlock the domain without a good reason. Additionally, the domain doesn’t show up in Whois queries on Freenom’s web site, despite still being in the zone file.

Compliance has given the registrar until November 7 to come back into compliance or risk losing its accreditation.

Freenom is already working under two active breach notices, which ICANN said it has not yet responded to. The deadline on the earlier, September 20 notice has already passed, so ICANN could escalate any day.

Freenom gets yet another ICANN breach notice

ICANN Compliance is really up in Freenom’s face now, filing yet another contract-breach notice against its registrar arm barely a week after the last one.

The September 29 notice adds three new tickets to the 12 in the September 20 notice I wrote about last month. It’s the sixth notice OpenTLD has received since 2015.

The cases are similar to those in the previous missive. ICANN wants proof that the registrar has been complying with the Transfer Policy and the Expired Registration Recovery Policy.

It seems some Freenom customers have had difficulty transferring their names out of the company’s control, and have been unable to restore their domains after accidentally allowing them to expire.

It still also owes ICANN past-due fees, the notice reiterates.

The notice covers complaints from June and July. The company has until October 20 to comply or risk losing its accreditation. The claims in the earlier notice give it until October 11.

Freenom is the company that runs a dwindling collection of free-to-register ccTLDs, notably .tk. It has not allowed registrations on its site all year, blaming technical issues. It’s also being sued by Facebook owner Meta over alleged cybersquatting.

Epik drops another 50,000 domains after scandal

Epik lost almost 50,000 domains under management in June, dropping below half a million domains for the first time since 2019, according to just-published registry transaction reports.

The registrar ended the month with 461,822 DUM, down from 511,028 in May and an August 2022 peak of 808,160.

The transfer exodus continued in the month, which was the first month Epik was operating under new management, having paid off most of its debts following its financial scandal.

The company saw a net transfer figure of -24,789 domains, with only 667 inbound transfers.

Newly registered domains recovered slightly, moving back into four figures after a couple of months, ending June at 3,391, still a long way off pre-scandal levels.

Ancient registrar gets ICANN breach notice over UDRP

A thirty-year-old registrar — practically prehistoric by internet standards — has been hit with an ICANN breach notice after apparently failing to transfer a domain lost in a UDRP and not paying its fees.

ICANN has told Texas-based GKG.net that it failed to implement a July UDRP decision (pdf) over the domain top-rx-market.com, which was won by generic pharmaceuticals firm TopRX.

That domain is using GKG’s Whois privacy service and suspended-domains.net as its name servers but still resolves to an active pharma storefront from where I’m sitting. The UDRP says the domain was registered to a Russian, who did not respond to the UDRP.

While the UDRP-related alleged breach is pretty recent, it looks like ICANN has been chasing GKG for a couple of years.

Compliance first notified the registrar that it was past due on its quarterly fees back in February 2022.

Since March, it also has been looking at alleged failures to handle abuse reports for pharma-related domains including canadianpharmstore.net, usapharmacymall.com, good-pills.com, and 1-pharm.com, which all resolve to the same discount medicines site.

ICANN says all of its attempts to call, email and fax GKG have fallen on deaf ears.

GKG isn’t tiny. It had over 83,000 gTLD domains under management in May, though it appears to have been shrinking by hundreds of domains per month for over a decade.

The company was accredited by ICANN with IANA number 93, which means it’s among the first wave of registrars accredited over two decades ago — it’s older than GoDaddy.

GKG has until October 13 to clean up its act or face suspension and termination.

Freenom hit by FIFTH ICANN action after litany of screw-ups

Is time up for Freenom? After being sued by Facebook and losing its contracts to operate ccTLDs for at least two countries, now it also has ICANN Compliance to deal with.

Its registrar arm, Netherlands-based OpenTLD, has been hit with a lengthy ICANN breach notice that alleges the company failed to allow its customers to renew and/or transfer their domains, in violation of the registrar contract.

It’s the fifth time OpenTLD has been targeted by Compliance, following breach notices in 2020, 2017 and 2015 and a notice of suspension later in 2015. ICANN says this notice is for the same sorts of failures as in 2020 and 2017.

The latest notice covers a dozen separate cases, probably the largest number in a single breach notice to date. Some of them ICANN has been investigating as far back as January 2022.

The notice says that OpenTLD failed to allow some registrants of expired domains to recover their names under the Expired Registration Recovery Policy and that some registrants were not provided with the AuthInfo codes they need to transfer their domains to other registrars upon request, which registrars have to do under the Transfer Policy.

It goes on to describe a situation where the registrar habitually did not respond to Compliance’s calls, emails or faxes.

OpenTLD apparently has not filed its 2022 Compliance Certificate with ICANN either, which it was supposed to do before January 20 this year.

The company had almost 19,000 gTLD domain names under management at the end of May, down from a 2019 peak of almost 45,000, but it’s probably better known for being Freenom, the registry behind .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq and .tk.

Domains in these five ccTLDs — mostly representing West African nations suffering under military dictatorships or civil war — were offered for free and monetized by the registry upon expiration or suspension.

But Freenom has not offered new regs in these TLD since the start of the year. Its web site blames technical problems, but it’s widely believed to be a result of the cyberquatting lawsuit filed by Facebook owner Meta in late 2022.

Mali and Gabon, of .ml and .ga, have since severed ties with Freenom. It turned out .ga had seven million domains in its zone, most of which presumably belonged to the registry.

OpenTLD has until October 11 to give ICANN evidence that it followed policy with the renewals or transfers of dozens of names domains or risk losing its accreditation.

Namecheap has given away 500,000 free .me domains

A project started in 2014 has seen Namecheap give away 500,000 .me domains to university students in the Anglophone world.

The offer, started in 2014 at nc.me, is for the first year’s registration and is for students to create “online portfolios, resumes, blogs and other personal websites”.

Registrants authenticate themselves by having email addresses associated with universities, such as .edu in the US. Institutions in the UK and Australia are also supported.

Not all of the names registered over the last nine years are still registered, according to a spokesperson, but 500,000 would be a sizable chunk of .me’s total domains under management.

The registry, Domen, does not regularly publish its reg numbers but it hadn’t yet crossed the one million mark as of 2018, according to its web site.

The Namecheap spokesperson said that the registry provide the first-year regs for free under the partnership.

Epik had another terrible month in May

Registrants continued to abandon Epik in droves in the wake of its financial mismanagement scandal in May, the latest gTLD registry transaction reports show.

Total domains under management dropped by 46,624 to end the month at 511,028, compared to its peak of 808,160 in August 2022, before the news of the crisis first started to emerge.

Net transfers were -32,149 in the month, with 32,320 outbound transfers. That’s not as bad as April, when the net transfers number was -34,492.

Adds — newly sold domains — were also up a bit, from 411 in April to 795 in May. Still a far cry from the 10,000+ new domains Epik sold in a typical month pre-scandal.

May was the final month of Epik’s floundering before it sold its assets to a mystery buyer and paid off its debts to customers, registries and ICANN. Next month, we’ll see how that rescue package affected its fortunes.

Epik had worst month ever in April

The fallout from Epik’s financial mismanagement scandal continued to wreak havoc on the company’s registration numbers in April, the latest ICANN registry transaction reports show.

The company had its worse month ever for transfers, with 34,698 domains being moved to rival registrars and only 206 being transferred in.

Epik sold just 411 gTLD domains in April — its worst month for adds in over a decade — having regularly added five figures worth in pre-scandal months.

The registrar’s domains under management number for all gTLDs was 557,652 at the end of the month, down 50,239 compared to the end of March and down 234,902 compared to September, when the scandal began to emerge.

For context, April was the month when news of a customer lawsuit (now settled) seeking $300,000 redress over a botched domain sale first emerged and stories of Epik’s woes started receiving broader attention.

Epik now has a new owner and is awaiting ICANN approval to transfer its accreditation.

Registrar linked to defunct social network terminated

ICANN has terminated a registrar for not paying its fees and other infractions.

ICANN Compliance, in a termination notice effective August 10, said that US-based, Indian-operated Nimzo 98 had failed to provide a Whois service and escrow its registration data.

These secondary breaches seem to be side effects of the fact that the company is no longer operating. It’s been ghosting Compliance since December, according to the notice.

Nimzo, as I blogged in May, seems to have been the in-house registrar of a short-lived social network project name Houm, which offered users a domain name as part of the service bundle.

It peaked at about 21,000 names before it abruptly deleted them all, last October, registry transaction reports show.

At the last count, this March, it had just 270 names under management. ICANN will trigger its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to move whatever remains today into safer hands.