Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock can now be removed

One of Go Daddy’s most unpopular practices – the infamous 60-day domain name transfer lock – has essentially come to an end.
From today, customers will be able to unlock their domains before the period is up, by contacting a special support team, according to director of policy planning James Bladel.
For many years Go Daddy has blocked domains from being transferred to other registrars if changes have been made to the registrant contact information within the last 60 days.
The company alerts users to the lock before they make changes to their Whois data, but that hasn’t stopped the policy bugging the hell out of domainers and regular registrants.
It’s designed to prevent domain hijackings – something Go Daddy says it does very well – but when false positives occur it often looks like a nefarious customer retention strategy.
“It’s a very effective tool for preventing harm, but it does catch out a lot of folks who want to legitimately change registrant data,” Bladel said.
Under the new policy, if Go Daddy blocks a transfer because of the 60-day lock, registrants will be given an email address to contact in order to appeal the block.
According to Bladel, after a human review the locks will be lifted and the Whois data will revert to its original state, unless the Go Daddy support team suspects a hijacking is in progress.
“The bad guys are not going to call and ask us to take a second look at this,” he said. “The bad guys want it to happen under the radar.”
The changes come thanks largely to a new revision of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which came into effect today and specifies that transferring registrants need to be given a way to remove the locks on their domains within five days.
But Bladel said the way the policy is written gave Go Daddy a lot of leeway in how to interpret it – it could have kept the locks in place as before – but it decided to revise its policy to improve the customer experience.

Blacknight now .co accredited

Irish registrar Blacknight Solutions has been approved as a .co registrar, according to the company.
It’s one of the ongoing second wave of .co registrars following the initial 10 used by .CO Internet at launch.
Judging by .CO’s web site, Blacknight will be the 18th registrar to get approval to sell directly (13th if you don’t count the jointly owned registrars on the list), as well as the smallest.
Previously, the company was like so many others a reseller of My.co, the Colombian channel-oriented registrar.

OpenSRS now offering .jobs and .aero

Tucows has started offering .jobs and .aero domain names through its OpenSRS reseller channel.
According to a blog posting, resellers will have to opt in to offering these gTLDs. Prices are $125/year for .jobs and $50/year for .aero.
It’s potentially good news for both registries, particularly .jobs. Both are restricted, sponsored gTLDs, but .jobs has a much less strict set of entry requirements than .aero.
The OpenSRS network has about 11,000 resellers, according to the company, which is largely responsible for Tucows being the third-largest ICANN-accredited registrar by domain volume.

Chinese DDoS knocks 123-reg offline

Customers of major UK domain registrar 123-reg suffered a couple of hours of downtime this afternoon due to an apparently “massive” denial of service attack.
The attack targeted its DNS servers and originated in China, according to a report in The Register.
Users reported sites offline or with spotty availability, but the company managed to mitigate the effects of the attack fairly quickly. It’s now reporting mostly normal service.
123-reg, part of the Host Europe Group, has hundreds of thousands of domains under management in the gTLD space alone.

Domainmonster joins 123-reg stable

Mesh Digital, owner of the Domainmonster and Domainbox registrars, has been acquired by rival/partner Hosting Europe Group for an undisclosed sum.
Operating mainly in the UK and Germany, the buyer says it is the largest privately owned hosting company in Europe, already the owner of large registrars including 123-reg/Webfusion, a Mesh reseller.
“They’ve been a technology partner of ours for some time with the Domainbox product, so it’s the logical partner for us,” Mesh CEO Matt Mansell said.
“Our focus isn’t on hosting,” he added. “They’ll bring a good range of hosting and software-as-a-service products to our customers and we’ll bring good domain services to their customers.”
Mansell will join Host Europe as head of domain strategy.
The fact that new gTLDs are expected to launch next year was not a particular driver of the deal, he said.
With its new acquisition, Host Europe will have five million domains under management, according to the company.
Mesh, based in Godalming, UK (it’s 30 miles away and I’ve never heard of it either) has 15 employees and turnover of about $5 million, Mansell said.

Even when the domains are free, Irish small businesses prefer .com to .ie

Irish small businesses overwhelmingly chose .com domains over .ie and .eu during the first year of a Blacknight Solutions web presence freebie initiative.
Blacknight said today signed up 10,000 Irish small business customers through Getting Business Online, a partnership with Google and the local postal service, which it launched a year ago.
The scheme, which Google has been promoting with local partners in various territories around the world, gives companies a free domain and basic web hosting for a year.
According to Blacknight managing director Michele Neylon, 61% of sign-ups chose a .com domain, while 21% chose Ireland’s .ie, 13% chose .eu and 4% chose .biz.
“The way .ie is run, you have to go through an extensive validation process, and it’s also restricted what domains you can register,” Neylon, a regular critic of .ie policy, said.
As the initiative is just a year old, it’s not yet clear how many of these 10,000 companies plan to stick around on paid services.

Go Daddy applying for three new gTLDs

Go Daddy reportedly plans to apply for three new generic top-level domains, including the dot-brand .godaddy.
CEO Warren Adelman confirmed the bids to CNet’s Paul Sloan today.
The other two strings were not revealed, presumably because they could still be contested.
Yesterday, Demand Media, owner of Go Daddy’s primary registrar competitor eNom, revealed an $18 million investment in the new gTLD program, suggesting it has more ambitious plans.
Like Demand, Go Daddy subsidiaries have a history of adverse UDRP decisions, which could complicate the background checks ICANN plans to conduct on all applicants.

Five registrars on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has sent breach notices to five domain name registrars, including two owned by Epik and DomainTools, for failing to cooperate with a Whois accuracy audit.
InTrust Domains, Planet Online, Server Plan, Infocom Network and DomainAllies.com did not respond to ICANN’s 2011 Whois Data Reminder Policy audit, according to ICANN.
The WDRP is the longstanding policy that requires all ICANN-accredited registrars to remind their customers to keep their Whois records up to date once a year.
The annual WDRP audit asks registrars to state how many reminders they sent out and how many Whois records were updated as a result, among other things.
The non-compliant registrars, with the exception of Server Plan, are also evidently past due paying their ICANN accreditation fees, according to the breach notices.
All five registrars have been given 15 days to rectify the problems or risk losing their accreditations.
Given that the audit is, I believe, a simple web-based form, I don’t think anyone is going to go out of business as a result of these breaches.
It’s interesting to dig a little bit into who owns these registrars.
DomainAllies.com belongs to DomainTools parent Thought Convergence.
InTrust, which has come in for criticism for shady marketing practices under its previous management, was acquired by Epik last July.
Planet Online, meanwhile, is one of those odd registrars that hides its own contact information behind a Whois privacy service (though its web site does carry a physical address).

ZoneEdit offline for five days

The Dotster-owned DNS service provider ZoneEdit this morning returned from an unexplained five-day outage that has left many users extremely miffed.
The interruption affected only ZoneEdit’s management interface, not its DNS resolution, so it only affected customers who needed to make changes to their zones.
Users first started reporting they couldn’t access their accounts on Friday.
I’ve reported the story for The Register here.

New gTLD filing deadline delayed again

It looks like new gTLD applicants are in for more delays after ICANN announced that it will not reopen its TLD Application System tomorrow as planned.
In a statement tonight, chief operating officer Akram Atallah said that the recently discovered data leakage vulnerability has been fixed, but the fix is still being tested.

We believe that we have fixed the glitch, and we are testing it to make sure.
ICANN is committed to reopening the application system as soon as we can confirm that the problem has been resolved and we have had proper time for testing.
We also want to inform all applicants, before we reopen, whether they have been affected by the glitch. We are still gathering information so we can do that.
Accordingly, the application system will not reopen tomorrow.

ICANN shut down TAS last Thursday, just 12 hours before the new gTLD application filing deadline, after discovering a persistent bug that allowed some applicants to see the names of files uploaded by other applicants.
It had planned to open TAS again tomorrow and close it on Friday. However, that’s looking increasingly unlikely.
Atallah said that ICANN “will provide an update on the timing of the reopening no later than Friday, 20 April at 23.59 UTC.”
While ICANN said yesterday that it was still targeting April 30 for its Big Reveal event, subject to change, that’s now looking like an ambitious goal.