Bob Parsons worth $1.5bn, ranked 293 on Forbes 400

Go Daddy executive chairman Bob Parsons is the 293rd wealthiest person in America, with a self-made fortune of $1.5 billion, according to the latest Forbes 400 rich list.
In its annual league table, published yesterday, Forbes ranks Parsons tied with tech investors such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Groupon co-founder Evan Lefkofsky.
Parsons, Go Daddy’s founder and erstwhile CEO, is a debutant on the list following his sale of a majority stake in the company to a group of institutional investors.
KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures collectively bought out more than half of Go Daddy in a deal announced in July, reportedly worth north of $2 billion.

Melbourne IT makes three senior hires

Aussie domain registrar Melbourne IT has recruited three senior executives from elsewhere in the industry to bulk up its Digital Brand Services business.
SSL evangelist Tim Callan, formerly with VeriSign, has been appointed chief marketing officer. He moved to Symantec after the VeriSign security business changed hands, but left in May.
Lena Carlsson, Melbourne’s new VP of domain strategy, is a former Swedish civil servant and former vice-chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
Rob Holmes has also been recruited from brand management rival Corporation Services Company as the new global director of brand protection services.
The hires all appear to have been made over the last few months and were announced in a press release today.

Go Daddy’s 60-day domain lockdown loophole

Perhaps the most common complaint of the many leveled at Go Daddy over the years is that it refuses to allow customers to transfer domains to another registrar for 60 days after an ownership change.
The latest person to fire this criticism at the company is tech blogger Scott Raymond, who published a lengthy tirade against Go Daddy and its policy on ZDNet today.
Raymond points out that Go Daddy seems to be in violation of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which explicitly prohibits the rejection of a transfer request due to a recent Whois change.
He’s not alone. Even Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire, hardly Go Daddy’s fiercest critic, said as recently as May that he thinks the company is in violation of the IRTP.
With good reason – this April 2008 ICANN advisory seemed to be specifically written with a ban on Go Daddy’s 60-day policy in mind.
But is the company non-compliant? ICANN doesn’t seem to think so.
I’ve tracked down this November 2009 email from David Giza, then ICANN’s head of compliance, in which he describes what seems to amount to a loophole Go Daddy and other registrars exploit.
Giza explains that the 2008 advisory “only addresses mandatory updates to Whois contact information, not a transfer or assignment to a new registrant”.
Registrants are obliged to keep their Whois data up-to-date; that’s what he means by “mandatory”.
Giza’s email adds:

the transfer policy does not prohibit registrars from requiring registrants to agree to the blocking of transfer requests as a condition for registrar facilitation of optional services such as the transfer of a registration to a new registrant.
We understand GoDaddy.com’s 60-day lock is a voluntary opt-in process where registrants are made aware of and agree to the restriction that the domain name is not to be transferred for 60-days following the completion of transfer. As such, this practice is not prohibited by the transfer policy.

In other words, there are “Whois Changes” and there are “Registrant Changes”, and registrars are only allowed to trigger a lock-down in the latter case, according to Giza.
And according to DNW’s reporting on the subject, that’s exactly what Go Daddy continues to do — locking the domain if certain fields in the registrant record are changed.
So the 60-day lock appears to be kosher, at least in the opinion of ICANN’s erstwhile compliance chief. Whether that could change under the department’s new management is unknown.
As it happens, the subject was raised by a recent working group that was looking into revising the IRTP, but it was so contentious that consensus could not be found.
The problem has been bounced down the road. The most recent mention came in this ICANN issue report (pdf, page 14-15).
Anyway, if I lost you several paragraphs ago, the net result of all this seems to be that Go Daddy probably isn’t breaking the rules, but that nobody can agree whether that’s a good thing or not.
The fact that one has to do this much digging into ICANN esoterica just to figure out whether Go Daddy is screwing its customers over isn’t very reassuring, is it?

Another registrar on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has threatened to terminate the accreditation of Samjung Data Service, a South Korean domain name registrar.
The threat, the 13th ICANN’s compliance department has issued to a registrar this year, is notable because it’s a rare example where money does not appear to be an issue.
Samjung’s failing, according to ICANN’s termination letter, is its inability to escrow registrant data with Iron Mountain on the agreed schedule and in the required format.
The tiny registrar has also failed to make the technical contacts in its customers’ Whois records available online, and has been apparently ignoring ICANN’s calls and emails.
What ICANN does not do is accuse Samjung of not paying its accreditation fees, which in the past has been a notable feature of compliance actions.
Delinquent payments tend to alert ICANN that there may be other problems at a registrar, but this has led to criticisms that the organization is only concerned about its revenue.
Could the Samjung case be another example of the newly staffed-up ICANN compliance department taking the more proactive stance that was promised?

MelbourneIT talks to 270 .brand applicants

The Australian domain registrar MelbourneIT said it has talked to 270 companies and signed contracts with 17 that want to apply for “.brand” top-level domains.
The news came in the company’s “disappointing” first-half financial results announcement yesterday.
According to its official report (pdf), MelbourneIT has received 230 expressions of interest and has inked deals with 14, but managing director Theo Hnarkis reportedly told analysts the higher numbers.
The company is charging clients between AUD 45,000 ($47,000) and AUD 75,000 ($79,000) to handle the ICANN application process.
MelbourneIT’s preferred partner for back-end registry services is VeriSign, so the clients it signs are likely to become recurring revenue streams for VeriSign if their applications are successful.

Go Daddy confirms .xxx pricing, will host porn sites

Go Daddy has revealed its pricing scheme for .xxx domain names and confirmed that it will indeed host the porn sites that use them.
When .xxx goes into general availability in December, Go Daddy will charge $100 per name per year.
That’s surprisingly high – a $40 markup on the $60 ICM Registry fee – for a registrar generally known for its reasonable prices.
I know of at least two registrars planning to sell .xxx more cheaply – the UK’s DomainMonster ($75 if bought in bulk) and Spain’s DinaHosting ($67). There may be others I haven’t come across yet.
Sunrise period pricing at Go Daddy is $210 for applications from the adult entertainment industry and $200 for trademark holders from outside the industry. Landrush prices will be $200 too.
Those fees represent some of the better deals I’ve seen for .xxx’s pre-launch phases.
The prices have not yet been published on the Go Daddy web site, but a company spokesperson confirmed that some of its larger customers have been privately notified.
That apparently includes Mike Berkens, who broke the news last week.
Go Daddy also confirmed that it will host .xxx porn sites, though only on its paid-for hosting accounts.
I’ve always been a little confused by Go Daddy’s hosting terms of service. By my reading, porn was outright banned. Apparently I was dead wrong.
The company’s general counsel, Christine Jones, said in a statement:

Go Daddy’s Web hosting agreement does not currently prohibit pornography, except in the case of ad-supported hosting. Those terms will continue for all TLDs, including .xxx, unless otherwise prohibited by our agreements with the various registry operators.

I know I’m not the only person out there who was confused by the ToS, but I can’t think of a better person to clarify the situation than the company’s top lawyer.

It’s official: South Sudan to get .ss

The new African nation of South Sudan has officially been given the two-letter country code SS, meaning it is likely just months away from getting the top-level domain .ss.
The SS string appeared on the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code list this week, following a request by the government of the country.
The 3166 list is the standard by which ICANN judges a territory’s eligibility to be delegated a country-code top-level domain.
South Sudan does not yet appear on IANA’s list of ccTLDs, but it’s likely to be added soon.
The last three nations to form, following the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles last October, already have ccTLD records in the IANA database, although none have yet been officially delegated to a registry or added to the DNS root system.
The delegation of a new ccTLDs is usually a much more straightforward proposition than the redelegation of an existing ccTLD to a new manager, which can take many years.
South Sudan declared independence July 9 this year and was officially recognized by the United Nations five days later.
It’s one of the world’s poorest and unhealthiest nations: it is estimated that 11% of its children die before their fifth birthday and that 2% of mothers die in childbirth.
Getting a ccTLD is probably quite low on the nation’s list of priorities.
According to reports, the South Sudan government was well aware of the connection “SS” has to the Nazis in Europe when it asked for the string.
It’s pretty tenuous connection, and I doubt anyone reasonable would take offense, but the incoming registry may want to add a few well-chosen strings to its reserved list just in case.

Together at last: NetSol merges with Register.com

The first-ever .com domain name registrar and its first-ever competitor are to merge as part of Web.com’s strategy to scale up and better compete with Go Daddy.
Web.com, which bought Register.com a little over a year ago, has now turned its attention to bigger fish. It’s agreed to buy Network Solutions for $561 million in cash and stock.
The combined company will have three million customers, revenue of over $450 million, and over nine million domains under management.
By my reckoning, this means Web.com becomes the fourth-largest registrar by domain count, a position already held by NetSol, a couple of million domains behind Tucows.
NetSol was of course the original .com registrar/registry and Register.com was the first competitor to start selling domains after ICANN introduced competition to the market.
Both registrars were briefly public companies in their own right, before being re-privatized around the same time it became apparent Go Daddy and the other discount registrars were eating their lunch.
This shared history is still evident today – both companies still sell domain names for 1999 prices, and they’re both still losing customers as a result.
CEO David Brown said on a conference call announcing the deal that Register.com is currently losing 13,000 subscribers, net, per quarter.
This is not as bad as the 20,000 per quarter at the time of the acquisition, but it’s still over 140 customers jumping ship, on average, every day.
Brown said that NetSol’s churn is similar; its customer base is “declining very slowly”, albeit from a stronger starting position.
When VeriSign sold NetSol in 2003, it said the unit had about four million customers. Today, according to Web.com’s announcement, it’s closer to two million.
The NetSol deal will enable Web.com to expand its focus from small businesses, Register.com’s core market, to medium-sized businesses too, Brown said.
“This is a unique chance for Web.com to quickly gain major scale in our sweet spot – the small and mid-size business market,” he told analysts.
The larger scale will also enable the company to ramp up its marketing efforts, he said, helping it to gain mindshare from “another company” (cough–Go Daddy–cough).
Both the NetSol and Register.com brands will stay, but the primary brand in its advertising campaigns will be Web.com
Both NetSol and Register.com still operate at very much the high-end of the pricing spectrum, having stubbornly resisted pricing pressures for the last decade.
Register.com currently sells .com domain names for $38 a year, NetSol sells them for $35.
However, on the analysts’ call, Brown discussed the success of a recent marketing campaign at Register.com, which offered domains at cheaper prices than usual.
“We discovered marketing a lower-price domain name was driving a total order value that was more than ten times higher due to additional offerings,” he said.
I wonder where they got that idea from.

Tucows expands into 200 TLDs with $2.5m deal

Tucows has acquired EPAG Domainservices, a Bonn, Germany-based domain name registrar, for $2.5 million.
The deal is notable for the size of EPAG’s top-level domain catalog – it offers registrations in 200 TLDs compared to Tucows’ current 33.
Tucows hopes to offer all 200 to its 12,000-strong reseller channel before the end of the year, according to a press release.
CEO Elliot Noss said: “We expect that the deep expertise in registry integration we gain from EPAG will add invaluable bench-strength to our team as we prepare for ICANN’s roll-out of new TLDs.”
EPAG was previously owned by QSC, one of Germany’s largest ISPs.
The registrar has a portfolio of 400,000 customer domains under management, which Tucows is getting its hands on for an average of $6.25 per domain.
Tucows’ OpenSRS channel currently accounts for about 11 million domains, making it the third-largest registrar after Go Daddy and eNom.
More than half of EPAG’s registrations appear to be in ccTLDs. Webhosting.info puts its share of the ICANN gTLD market at 160,623 domains.

Go Daddy dominant in .co domains

Go Daddy is responsible for more than one third of all .co domain name registrations, according to new research from HosterStats.
HosterStats has managed to track down 616,227 .co domains, and found in its first .co report that 32.69% of them point to domaincontrol.com, Go Daddy’s primary name server doman.
Another two Go Daddy domains, secureserver.net and cashparking.com, handle 3.89% and 3.42% of known .co domains, the report says.
The registry, .CO Internet, does not publish its zone files, so HosterStats does not have stats covering the over one million .co domains that have been registered.
Still, it’s a pretty decent sample size, and probably a reasonably reliable guide for estimating Go Daddy’s .co market share.
It’s pretty much in line with Go Daddy’s overall market share, and comes as little surprise given joint marketing initiatves such as this year’s Super Bowl commercial.
Sedo’s sedoparking.com was the second-largest .co host, with 5.21% of the names.
Tallying up percentages from name servers exclusively associated with parking services, it appears that at least 10% of .co is parked.
I suspect the real number to be much larger.