Uzbekistan gets its first ICANN registrar

A registrar in Uzbekistan has become the first in the country to receive its official ICANN accreditation, according to the latest records.

Tashkent-based Suvan.net, which does business as @host.uz (ahost.uz), currently specializes in the local .uz ccTLD, where it appears to be the leading registrar by some margin.

The company already sells gTLD domains too, albeit as a reseller. It claims to have over 30,000 customers.

Unstoppable gets ICANN accreditation

Unstoppable Domains has become the second blockchain alt-root naming service to get its ICANN accreditation.

The company said today it intends to carry the “the vast majority of generic top-level domains”. It had already been selling .com names, alongside its suite of blockchain extensions, as a reseller.

It also said it intends to sell ccTLD domains, although ICANN accreditation is of course not required for most of those.

It’s the second purveyor of blockchain names to move into the domain name industry after Freename, which got its accreditation last month.

Unstoppable is also working with several blockchain technology companies to prepare applications for new gTLDs when ICANN opens its next application window in 2026.

Revealed: who’s really running Epik

Scandal-rocked registrar Epik promised to turn over a new leaf when it got acquired last year, and now the guy in charge of the domains business — a familiar face to many– has broken cover and talked to DI about the company’s recent woes and turnaround plans.

That guy is director of domains Christopher Ambler, a thirty-year veteran of the industry, who came out of stealth mode today to talk about how he wants to kill Epik’s reputation as a refuge for far-right hate and regain the trust of its customers.

Ambler is perhaps best-known as the founder and CEO of Image Online Design, the company that offered a .web gTLD in an alt-root in the 1990s. More recently, until 2021 he also spent seven years as principal software architect at GoDaddy.

Ambler says he joined Epik’s new owner, Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in company formation services, in November 2022, with a remit to scratch-build a registrar to offer the company’s clients online presence services.

“The basic story is boring as hell,” Ambler said. “Registered Agents does business formations… the company just decided it made sense to be a registrar. They brought me on a year and a half ago with the idea to just build this thing from scratch.”

About six or seven months into this project, in June 2023, Registered Agents decided it could cut a couple of years of development time by simply acquiring the assets of an existing registrar, Ambler said, and Epik’s were up for grabs.

At the time, Epik was on the ropes, rocked by a financial mismanagement scandal under then-CEO Rob Monster that had led to registries disconnecting it for non-payment and an ICANN probe that put it at risk of losing its accreditation and going out of business.

Registered Agents paid $5 million for the registrar and set about paying off the registries and getting the ICANN accreditation transferred to the new owners, from Monster’s Epik Inc to the new Epik LLC.

Due to the nature of Registered Agents’ business — it sets up companies for people, often anonymously and not always to nice people — theories abounded, notably on the Namepros discussion forum, that the new owner was just a front for Monster.

“I totally get the whole ‘We think this is Rob Monster pulling another shady deal’ thing, and I don’t know this for a fact but if I were ICANN I would have thought that was entirely a possibility,” Ambler said. “But they went over it with a fine toothed comb and a microscope.”

Quite apart from the business mismanagement, Epik came with a tonne of reputational baggage. It had long been known as a safe haven for far-right bullies, with the likes of Gab.com, The Daily Stormer, InfoWars and Kiwi Farms among its customer base.

Ambler, who describes himself as “kind of a hippy”, culturally Jewish with spiritual leanings toward Buddhism, was not comfortable with this legacy.

While the new Epik did not publicly disassociate itself from these customers until early 2024, Ambler said the decision was made much sooner.

“When the deal was signed to buy Epik we knew on that day we were no longer the ‘free speech registrar’, we were not the right-wing registrar,” he said. “That’s what the old Epik did, I personally don’t agree with that.”

He compared the gear-shift to the day he interviewed at GoDaddy over a decade ago and made it clear he wasn’t happy working for the company if it was still running the “sexist” TV ads it was famed for in the noughties, which by then it had discontinued.

“When I was told we’re looking at buying [Epik’s] assets, the first thing I said was ‘Okay, but there is some dumpster fire involved here, we’re not going to keep that, right?’ and everybody said ‘No’,” Ambler said. “Absolutely everybody was completely on-board.”

The company then set about “politely inviting” its more controversial customers to take their business elsewhere and shutting down any customers involved in outright illegality, such as unlicensed pharmacies, publishing child sexual abuse material or hate speech that crossed the line into incitement to violence.

“I wouldn’t say it was a significant portion of the business, but it was certainly non-zero,” Ambler said. Hundreds of customers were “shown the door”, he said.

“One of things that angsts me is when you look at the online talk about Epik a lot of people still to this day think Epik is the right-wing registrar, because there’s so much stuff out there from years and years ago,” he said.

“People think Epik is the refuge of the white supremacists,” he said. “I really want to combat that message.”

Ambler said he also oversaw a security review of Epik’s code, following a major breach in 2021.

“We went nuts on security for the first couple months, just making sure everything was safe,” he said.

Was it?

“It is now,” he said.

Since the takeover, Epik has lost hundreds of thousands of domains as customers, fed up with its earlier antics and/or suspicious of the new owners, transferred to other registrars.

At its peak in August 2022, the company had 808,160 gTLD domains under management. By March 2024, the most recent month for which we have records, that number had dropped to 265,845, a loss of over half a million names.

“I daresay we’ve bottomed out at this point and actually have net positives on a number of metrics, but we kind of expected that,” Ambler said.

“Keep in mind that the peak of Epik was mostly accomplished by Rob Monster selling domains at a huge loss to create more appearance of growth,” he added. “That was his goal. He wanted to show that Epik was growing by leaps and bounds, but the company was taking losses left and right.”

Looking forward, Epik is focusing less on being the “be-all and end-all” to domain investors and more on being a solid “world class” retail registrar and selling to Registered Agents’ million-plus existing customers.

Ambler’s final messages to DI readers?

“First, we’re not the right-wing registrar, so please don’t confuse us with the old Epik,” he said, “Second, I’m terribly sorry it’s more boring than a lot of people seemed to think.”

“I’d love to get out there and tell people we’re the good guys now,” he said.

Blockchain naming firm gets ICANN accreditation

A company heavily involved in promoting blockchain-based domain name alternatives has received its ICANN registrar accreditation, allowing it to sell real domains as well.

Switzerland-based Freename’s London subsidiary seems to have obtained the accreditation in the last week or so. Accreditation means it gets the right to sell gTLD domains from any registry that it can sign a contract with.

Freename currently sells names in thousands of “TLDs”, some of which look very similar to existing ICANN gTLDs albeit with the addition of emojis, and which of course only work with special client software installed.

ICANN does not accept gTLD applications including emojis, so there’s no risk of collisions at the technical level, even if the text portion of the Freename suffix matches a DNS TLD.

Fellow blockchain naming company Unstoppable Domains already sells real .com domains, but I believe that’s as a reseller rather than a full-fat ICANN registrar.

Last year, it emerged that ICANN had turned down an offer of sponsorship from Freename.

This article was updated July 15, 2024 with additional information about Freename’s use of emojis.

PorkBun hits two million domain milestone

PorkBun has announced its passed the two million domains under management milestone, having added a net million names in two years.

The nine-year-old company is not especially .com-heavy, according to registry transaction reports, with about 611,000 .coms in its care.

It also does a pretty brisk trade in niche gTLDs such as .lat, where it’s the largest registrar, owning about half the market.

PorkBun was the 12th fastest-growing gTLD registrar in February and is the 25th largest overall, with over 1.6 million names.

Crawford returns to industry to head up Com Laude

If you can’t buy ’em, join ’em?

Ben Crawford, who was CEO of Team Internet back when it was CentralNic, has returned to the industry after a couple years away as a consultant/director to become the new CEO of corporate registrar Com Laude, a company he said he once tried to buy.

Crawford said he has also become an investor in the company and joined its board. He replaces Glenn Hayward, who is leaving the company after six years in the corner office.

“Com Laude was the first corporate domain name management firm I attempted to acquire, back in 2017,” he said on social media. “Sadly, we weren’t able to afford it back then.”

Company co-founder Nick Wood is also returning to sit on the board, having left in April after Com Laude announced new investors.

Alibaba off the naughty step

Chinese registrar Alibaba is no longer at risk of losing one of its ICANN accreditations, according to a notice on the Org’s web site.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and missed ICANN payments, according to its March breach notice.

But the company has now provided ICANN with documents sufficient to bring it back into compliance with its contract, according to the notice.

Alibaba has over six million domains under management across its three active accreditations, making it one of the largest registrars to come under the scrutiny of ICANN Compliance.

Bob Parsons publishes autobiography

GoDaddy founder and former CEO Bob Parsons has published his rags-to-riches autobiography, Fire in the Hole!

Subtitled The Untold Story of My Traumatic Life and Explosive Success, the book is co-written with jobbing celebrity biographer Laura Morton, who’s previously worked with GoDaddy-sponsored racing driver Danica Patrick.

It promises to detail “the exploits of his youth, his hellish days at the mercy of Catholic school nuns, his harrowing tour of combat duty in Vietnam as a US Marine, his pioneering contributions to the software and internet industries, and his latest ventures in power sports, golf, real estate, and marketing.”

“This is a story of how I started with absolutely nothing and made over $3 billion,” Parsons said in a press release.

Published yesterday by Forefront Books, it’s already ranked #1 in Golf Biographies on Amazon.

I’m going to wait for the paperback, so I can’t speak to its contents, but cover quotes reveal that Jada Pinkett-Smith, Rob Lowe and Nick Jonas all enjoyed it.

GoDaddy price increases lead to revenue growth

GoDaddy last night reported domains revenue ahead of forecasts after it raised its prices and sold more higher-priced domains on the aftermarket.

The company’s Core Platform segment, which includes domains and hosting, reported first-quarter revenue up 4% compared to a year ago at $725 million, with domains revenue driving growth, up 7% percent to $532 million.

Domains under management was 84.6 million at the end of March 31.

“Our growth was driven by strong demand for domains in the primary and secondary market, increased pricing in the primary market and a higher average transaction value in the secondary market,” CFO Mark McCaffrey said in prepared remarks.

Aftermarket revenue was up 12% to an unspecified amount.

Including the company’s other revenue streams, GoDaddy reported net income of $401.5 million on revenue up 7% at $1.1 billion.

Verisign, the .com registry, last week reported stagnating .com growth that it blamed in part on US registrars raising their retail prices, leading to lower first-year sales and renewals.

Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins

Eleven registrars representing millions of domain names signed up to support ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service last month. One registrar dropped out.

One of Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s registrars was among the additions. Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing), which has 2.6 million names under management, is a notable addition given that one of its sister registrars was recently hit with an ICANN Compliance action due to alleged abuse inaction.

Also opting in to the Whois band-aid service were Identity Digital’s Name.com (2.2 million names), three of its sister companies, and Newfold Digital’s Register.com (1.5 million names). Nominalia, P.A Vietnam, and Ubilibet also signed up.

Realtime Register dropped out of the voluntary service, the third registrar to opt out since RDRS launched in Novemeber.

ICANN says its coverage is now 57% of the total gTLD domains out there, up from 55% in February. It has 86 registrars on-board in total, including most of the largest.

RDRS is a two-year pilot that offers people who want access to private Whois records, largely intellectual property interests and law enforcement, a simpler way to connect with the registrars holding that data.