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.

DomainMonster gets .co accreditation

DomainMonster has announced that it’s the first UK-based domain name registrar to get a .co accreditation.
The partnership comes as .CO Internet expands its registrar channel beyond the initial 10 that were approved when it launched a year ago.
The registry announced in April that it would add 20 new registars over the next 12 months.
DomainMonster has been selling .co domains as a reseller of Colombian registrar Domino Amigo for the last year.
The company says did a pretty brisk trade on the first day of .co availability, securing more .co names in the first 10 minutes than any other registrar, with a 90% success rate.
I’ve heard from a few places recently that Go Daddy may have even asked DomainMonster to submit launch-day registrations on its behalf.
The company also has a new reseller platform of its own, DomainBox, which will also make .co domains available to partners.

Confirmed: Go Daddy bought NoDaddy.com

Go Daddy has confirmed that it has acquired the domain name nodaddy.com, which until recently was the address of a gripe site frequented by the registrar’s biggest critics.
“Sometime in July we reached an agreement between Insecure.Com LLC and GoDaddy.com to transfer the domain name NoDaddy.com,” a Go Daddy spokesperson confirmed.
I’ve reported on the deal for The Register, here.
I should probably offer apologies to Toby Harris for disbelieving him, without doing my own checking, when he speculated that Go Daddy had bought out the site’s original owner.

Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons set for Forbes rich list

Go Daddy founder and executive chairman Bob Parsons is likely to be included on the next Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes reporter Luisa Kroll.
Kroll estimates that Parsons will be worth at least $1.5 billion following the closure of its recent reported $2.25 billion investment with KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Partners.
That valuation would place Parsons at #269 on the current Forbes rich list.
He would rank higher than former AOL CEO Steve Case, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, former eBay chief Meg Whitman and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang.
Parsons, whose public image is largely that of a regular guy fulfilling the American dream, reluctantly admitted that he may belong on the list, although he does not consider himself a billionaire, Kroll blogged.
“I am going to give most of the proceeds to a foundation,” Parsons reportedly said.

Russian firm fined millions over domain land-grab

RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar, will have to repay 240 million rubles ($8.6 million) for grabbing thousands of domain names and auctioning them during the .РФ landrush.
The company could also be fined up to 75% of its 2009 revenues for breaking competition law, according to a statement from the country’s Federal Antimonopoly Service.
When .РФ was launched by the .ru registry launched last November, it offered domain names on a first-come first-served basis, without the premium landrush period offered by other TLDs.
RU-Center took this opportunity to register 60,000 domains in its own name and sell them off to the highest bidder, essentially bringing the landrush to the registrar level.
Some ccTLD Coordination Center council members, responsible for setting the launch policies, had ownership interests in RU-Center either directly or through family members, according to FAS.
The registrar is currently being acquired by a company called RBC.

Shakeup at Go Daddy

Go Daddy has a new boss and new ownership following a deal reportedly worth $2.25 billion.
For the first time in its 14-year history, Bob Parsons will be neither the majority shareholder nor the CEO.
It appears that seasoned technology investment firms KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures will own, between them, more than half of the domain name registrar.
Very little about the “partnership” was disclosed, including the financial terms. Various media sources valued the deal at $2.25 billion.
It was left to Domain Name Wire to uncover the news that Parsons will actually step aside as CEO to allow COO Warren Adelman to take over.
Parsons will become executive chairman.
A Go Daddy spokesperson said: “Mr. Parsons has said he will be very active in the business, especially in the areas he is most interested, such as marketing.”
She added that “very little will change”.
The spokesperson confirmed that after the deal closes Parsons will no longer be the majority shareholder. He currently owns 78% of Go Daddy, with the remaining 22% allocated to employee stock options.
As DNW reported, 36 employees will cash out for over $1 million each.
I wonder if we’ll see a mini wave of new domain name companies springing up in the Scottsdale area, as a result of newly minted Go Daddy millionaires leaving to launch their own start-ups.

Go Daddy gripe site to shut down

NoDaddy.com, a gripe site dedicated to discussing customer and employee grievances with Go Daddy, is to be shut down by its administrators.
The shutdown coincides with an ownership shakeup at the registrar, which will see Warren Adelman take over as CEO and three big new investors come on board.
NoDaddy administrator “Rohan” wrote:

What started to document the improper suspension of SecLists.Org grew to cover dozens of other GoDaddy scandals including shill bidding on their own domain auctions, improperly blocking users from transferring domains to other registrars, sexual harassment, constant objectification of women, killing elephants for promotional purposes, etc. We’re hopeful that GoDaddy’s new owners will stop these shenanigans.
While our opinions of GoDaddy haven’t changed, we (NoDaddy admins) have decided to move on to focus on our other pursuits. Accordingly, we’ll be shutting down the main site and the forums on July 8. The site had a great run, and we appreciate your participation over the last 4 years!

In recent months, the vast majority of the posts on the forum have been made by a single disgruntled former Go Daddy employee who is currently suing the company for alleged “wage theft”.
The thread about the class action rambles on to some 147 pages and over 2,100 posts, most of which were made by this individual, going by the handle EmployeeClassAction.
Unsurprisingly, this user suspects the administrators were paid off.