Demand Media to spin off domains business as Rightside

Demand Media has confirmed its plan to spin off its domain name business into a separate company.
The new firm will be called Rightside. As the (rather good) name suggests, it will include the company’s interests in over 100 new gTLD applications and registries.
As well as United TLD, it will also include eNom, Name.com and Demand’s stake in NameJet.
Rightside will be based in Kirkland, Washington, and headed by new appointed CEO Taryn Naidu, who’s been running Demand’s domain unit internally for the last couple of years.

NetSol hit by DNS downtime

Network Solutions is having some DNS glitches right now that seem to be affecting a lot of its hosting customers.
The registrar, part of Web.com, posted on Twitter an hour ago:

Service Alert: We are aware that some Customers are experiencing issues with websites. Our Team is working on the issue. Please stand by.

— Network Solutions (@netsolcares) October 22, 2013

Tweets from irate NetSol customers are currently coming in at several per second. It looks like a great many users are having difficulty accessing their NetSol-hosted web sites.
The company’s own web site, networksolutions.com, also appears to be down.
All of its customer support lines are reportedly busy.
More info when we get it.
UTC 1841 UPDATE: NetSol just posted the following update to Twitter. Meanwhile, many users are reporting their sites a slowly and intermittently returning online. It appears the problem is being sorted.

Service Update: We’ve experienced an incident on Network Solutions DNS, and we’re in the process of restoring services. Thx 4 your patience.

— Network Solutions (@netsolcares) October 22, 2013

CEO Rosenblatt quits Demand Media

Demand Media CEO and co-founder Richard Rosenblatt has resigned and will be replaced by co-founder Shawn Colo, the company has announced.
In a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today, no reason was given for his departure.
Colo will take the CEO spot at the end of the month, while director James Quandt takes over as chairman immediately.
The company also said last night that it is still planning to spin off its domain name business, but “is currently in the process of evaluating the timing for completing the separation.”
This implies the plan, which was announced in February, has been delayed.
Demand Media’s domains business includes eNom, dozens of smaller registrars, and United TLD, which has applied for a portfolio of new gTLDs.

Registrars given access to Trademark Clearinghouse

Accredited registrars on older contracts can now get access to the Trademark Clearinghouse for testing purposes, ICANN announced last night.
Previously, ICANN was only handing out credentials to registrars on the new 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but many registrars complained that this didn’t give them time to evaluate the TMCH and the RAA at the same time.
ICANN had originally argued that the restriction made sense because the TMCH is used only for new gTLDs, and registrars must have signed the 2013 RAA to sell new gTLD domains.
But feedback from registrars has helped it change its mind. ICANN said:

all ICANN accredited Registrars, not just those that have signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), will be able to request registration tokens and start testing their systems with the Trademark Clearinghouse database before it must begin its authenticating and verifying services for trademark data.

Instruction for signing up for TMCH testing can be found here.

Go Daddy buys Afternic

Go Daddy has strengthened its already pretty strong hand in the domain name aftermarket by acquiring Afternic from NameMedia for an undisclosed sum.
Afternic provides a centralized platform for listing domains for sale. About 100 registrars, including Go Daddy, carry its six million listings.
Go Daddy also offers its own customers a Premium Listings service. Integrating the two platforms will happen “over the coming months”, Go Daddy said.
Afternic usually reports about a million dollars of domain sales via its platform every week, but those figures don’t include private sales. It already has deals in place to sell premium names for several new gTLDs.
Some of Go Daddy’s biggest competitors — existing Afternic partners — appear to be happy about the move. Go Daddy’s press release quotes Tucows and Web.com executives giving the deal the thumbs-up.
Afternic did once belong to Register.com, one of Web.com’s registrars, but for the last six years it has been owned by NameMedia.
The deal also includes SmartName, NameMedia’s parking service, but not BuyDomains, where NameMedia sells its own portfolio of names. Go Daddy will take on Afternic’s Boston-based staff.

ICANN smacks Cheapies with the ban hammer

ICANN for only the second time has suspended an accredited registrar’s ability to sell domain names.
Cheapies.com, which has roughly 12,000 gTLD domain names under management, will not be able to create new domains or accept inbound transfers until January 2, 2014, according to ICANN.
The 90-day suspension of its accreditation, longer by two months than the 30 days Alantron received last year, comes because it’s the third time this year Cheapies has been sent an ICANN breach notice.
The latest breach concerns the domain ebookvortex.com. Apparently Cheapies did not provide the registrant with the required authorization information when he initiated a transfer request.
In January, the company received breach notices related to its records-keeping and another instance of failing to abide by ICANN’s inter-registrar transfers policy.
It’s also being spanked for consistently ignoring or stonewalling ICANN’s attempts to resolve the situation.
Cheapies has the opportunity to rectify its problems to avoid losing its accreditation entirely. In the meantime, it also has to display the following notice “prominently” on its web site:

No new registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 4 October 2013 through 2 January 2014.

There’s a clear takeaway for fly-by-night registrars here: ignore ICANN Compliance at your peril.

Register.com hit by breach notice over 62,232 domains

Register.com, a Web.com business that is one of the top ten registrars by domains under management, has been hit by an ICANN compliance notice covering 62,232 domain names.
It’s a weird one.
ICANN says that the company has failed to provide records documenting the ownership trail of the domains in question, which all currently belong to Register.com itself.
The notice names 000123.net, 0011pp.com, 00h4.com, 010fang.net, 01rabota.com, 02071988.com and 020tong.com, but it seems that these are merely the first in a alphabetical list that is much, much longer.
Judging by DomainTools’ Whois history, these domains all appear to have been originally registered at various times by individuals in China and India, then allowed to expire, then registered by Register.com to itself.
The only common link appears to be that they were kept by Register.com after they expired, for whatever reasons registrars usually hoard their customers’ expired domains.
According to the compliance notice, ICANN wants the registrar to:

Provide a detailed explanation to ICANN how 62,232 domains in which Register.com itself is the registrant are used for the purposes of Registrar Services, as defined by Section 1.11 of the RAA;

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement says registrars have to keep registrant agreement records, except for a limited class of cases where the domain is owned by the registrar itself and used for registrar-related stuff.
Register.com, one of the original five oldest competitive registrars, has been given until October 2 to come up with the requested information for face losing its accreditation.
The registrar has almost three million gTLD domains under management. Combined with its Web.com sister registrars, which include Network Solutions, the number is closer to 10 million.

Domain.com owner files for $400m IPO, to spend $110m buying Directi

Endurance International, owner of Domain.com and HostGator, plans to raise up to $400 million in a Nasdaq IPO, and said it will spend up to $110 million of that buying Directi, India’s largest domain registrar.
As part of the proposed acquisition, Endurance has also agreed to bankroll Directi’s new gTLD auctions to the tune of $62 million.
The acquisition is not final, and appears to depend on a number of targets related to the IPO and Directi’s revenue performance. Endurance’s S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission reads:

In August 2013, we entered into a master share purchase agreement to acquire all of the outstanding capital stock of Directi from Directi Holdings, the seller, for an amount we estimate will be between $100 million and $110 million in cash or, at the election of the seller, a combination of cash and shares of our common stock, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of specified customary closing conditions and the achievement of specified financial targets.

The acquisition would close in the fourth quarter this year.
As well as running a top-ten registrar (and a few dozen others), Directi subsdiary Radix Registry has 29 active new gTLD applications, 26 of which are contested.
Endurance proposes to help Radix win these contention sets. On new gTLD auctions, the S-1 says:

in connection with our proposed acquisition of Directi, we entered into agreements with entities affiliated with Directi Holdings related to participation in the auction of new top level domain extensions and domain monetization activities, pursuant to which, among other things, we may be obligated to make aggregate cash payments of up to a maximum of approximately $62 million, subject to specified terms, conditions and operational contingencies.

Endurance is a complicated company. Its most familiar brands include Domain.com, iPage, FatCow, Homestead, Bluehost, HostGator, A Small Orange, iPower and Dotster.
But since December 2011 it has been controlled and majority owned by Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs, which paid a reported $975 million.
Its annual revenue for the last three calendar years has been $87.8 million, $190.3 million and $292.2 million. It’s currently not profitable, recording a net loss of $139.2 million in 2012.
It has seven million domains under management and had 3.4 million customers at the end of June 2013.
Judging by the S-1, the company has over a billion dollars of debt. Directi acquisition excluded, most of its IPO proceeds would go towards paying off some of that debt.

Go Daddy selling domains door-to-door in India

Door-to-door sales have helped Go Daddy grow its Indian business by 86%, according to a company press release.
The market-leading registrar said today that the remarkable growth has come since it launched a customer support center in Hyderabad a year ago.
It’s taken 250,000 calls since then, Go Daddy said.
The company also pointed to some unconventional sales techniques:

Since launching on the ground in India, GoDaddy has connected with customers in a very personal way. A prime example is the recent “Cup of Coffee” campaign that demystified the process of leveraging the Internet by providing actual door-to-door demonstrations to show small businesses exactly how to get online. Professionally trained GoDaddy experts and GoDaddy Resellers engaged with prospective clients to demonstrate how beautiful websites can be built quickly. These personalized initiatives have helped fuel GoDaddy’s unprecedented growth.

Go Daddy’s reseller network in India has grown 88% since last year, the company added.

Registrar rapped for failing to transfer UDRP domain

The domain name registrar Gal Comm has been warned by ICANN that it risks losing its accreditation for failing to transfer a cybersquatted name to Home Depot.
The compliance notice (pdf) concerns the domain name homedpeot.com, which was lost in a UDRP filed in early March and decided on April 21.
According to ICANN, Gal Comm, which has about 30,000 gTLD domains under management, failed to transfer the domain within 10 days of finding out about the decision, as required under the policy.
Whois records compiled by DomainTools show that the domain was instead deleted at in early April, and subsequently re-registered with a different registrar, where it’s currently under dubious-looking privacy.
According to the ICANN compliance notice, Gal Comm says that it deleted the domain because it received a Whois inaccuracy complaint about it.
Assuming that’s correct (and the Whois back in March was blatantly false) we have an interesting tension between policies that seems to have caused a slip-up at the registrar.
But registrars are supposed to lock domains they manage after they become aware of UDRP actions, so allowing the domain to delete seems to be a breach of the policy.
ICANN has given Gal Comm until September 10 to produce its records relating to the domain — and pay past-due accreditation fees — or face possible de-accreditation.
It’s very rare for ICANN to send compliance notices to registrars related to UDRP implementation.