ICANN un-terminates domain name registrar

In what I believe is an unprecedented move, ICANN has renewed a domain name registrar’s accreditation having already sent it a public notice of non-renewal.
A Technology Company, aka ATECH, was told last month that its accreditation would expire July 12 because it had failed to pay over $5,600 in ICANN fees.
That letter (pdf) suggested that ATECH had been in breach since before April 2009.
On all previous occasions, whenever ICANN has posted a notice of termination or non-renewal on its site, it’s game over for that registrar.
Today, a brief note on ICANN’s web site says simply:

A Technology Company, Inc. cured all outstanding contract breaches as of 30 June 2010. A Technology Company, Inc.’s accreditation was renewed on 13 July 2010.

As I’ve previously noted, ATECH and .xxx registry hopeful ICM Registry share a common founder, although the two companies are no longer affiliated.

Registrar linked to .xxx loses ICANN accreditation

A Technology Company Inc, a registrar previously linked to the .xxx top-level domain application, has lost its ICANN accreditation for non-payment of fees.
The company, which is also known as NameSystem.com or ATECH, was founded by Jason Hendeles, who is also the founder of ICM Registry, the company behind .xxx.
ICANN has informed ATECH (pdf) that its accreditation will expire and not be renewed on July 12 because it has failed to pay $5,639 in ICANN fees.
ATECH was one of the second wave of competitive registrars to go live, applying for its ICANN accreditation all the way back in 1999. It currently has just a few thousand domains under management.
Hendeles, currently ICM’s vice president of strategic business development, was behind ICM’s original .xxx bid, filed in ICANN’s 2000 round of new TLD applications.
ICM was subsequently taken over by British businessman Stuart Lawley, its current chief executive.
I’m told ATECH was sold to Alok Prakash of Oregon a few years ago.
UPDATE 2010-07-14: ATECH has evidently coughed up, and has regained its accreditation.

Aussie registrar trademarks “Whois”

An Australian domain name registrar has secured a trademark on the word “Whois”.
Whois Pty Ltd, which runs whois.com.au, said it has been granted an Australian trademark on the word in the class of “business consulting and information services”.
It looks rather like the company is using the award as a way to promote its own trademark protection services.
I shudder to think what could happen if the firm decided to try to enforce the mark against other registrars.
Or, come to think of it, what would happen if it tried to secure “whois” in a new TLD sunrise period.
I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine that the fact that the word “Whois” has been in use for almost 30 years, pre-dating the creation of the DNS itself, might prove a useful defense.
RFC 812, published in March 1982, is the first use of the word I’m aware of.
It does not appear that there are currently any live US trademarks on the term.

ICANN registrar’s domain listed for sale on Sedo

When selecting a domain name registrar there are often clues you can use to determine broadly whether a firm is entirely reliable, but this one is new to me.
Vivid Domains, a small-time, seven-year-old ICANN-accredited registrar, currently has its primary domain, vividdomains.com, listed for sale on Sedo.
It’s listed as a “domain without content” too, which looks even more peculiar.
According to DotAndCo, the company recently relocated from Florida to Grand Cayman.
WebHosting.info notes that, having chugged along for some time with only a few hundred domains under management, Vivid’s registration base has leapt from about 400 to over 1,900 in the last two weeks.
KnujOn’s registrar audit report (pdf), released at ICANN Brussels last week, notes that the anti-spam company was unable to locate a business registration for Vivid.
I’m not suggesting Vivid is dodgy, but these are the kind of clues I would use when deciding whether to give a registrar a wide berth.

Register.com sold at a $65 million loss

Register.com has been acquired by web hosting company Web.com for $135 million, substantially less than the $200 million Vector Capital paid for it five years ago.
Web.com said the acquisition will help it access new small business customers for lead generation, to cross-sell its existing products.
The company’s customer base will increase by over 400% to more than one million customers, Web.com said. The combined firm will have annual revenue of $180 million.
Register.com was one of the first five ICANN-accredited registrars. It failed as a public company, and after years of financial wrangling was finally taken private by Vector in 2005.
Vector specializes in buying up troubled companies and turning them around, but it doesn’t appear to have increased the value of this particular asset over the last five years.

More WordPress attacks at Go Daddy

The Kneber gang has continued its attacks on Go Daddy this week, again targeting hosting customers running self-managed WordPress installations.
Go Daddy said that several hundred accounts were compromised in order to inject malicious code into the PHP scripts.
“The attack injects websites with a fake-antivirus pop-up ad, claiming the visitor’s computer is infected,” Go Daddy security manager Scott Gerlach blogged.
According to the alarmists-in-chief over at WPSecurityLock, the attacks place a link to a script hosted on cloudisthebestnow.com, a domain registered by “Hilary Kneber”.
The script attempts to install bot software on visitors’ machines.
As I’ve written before, the Kneber botnet has been running since at least December 2009. It generally hosts its malware on domains registered with ICANN-accredited BizCN.com, a Chinese registrar.
Go Daddy said it has contacted the registrar to get the domain yanked. It may have been successfully killed already, but I’m too much of a little girl to check manually.
I must confess, as somebody with a number of WordPress installations on Go Daddy servers, it makes me a little nervous that these attacks are now well into their second month and I still don’t know whether I should be worried or not.

Go Daddy launches paid YouTube clone

Go Daddy has opened the doors of Video.me, a video-hosting service with a difference.
The difference is you have to pay for it.
The company seems to be banking on the idea that users will be happy to hand over $2 per month, rather than use YouTube for free, because Video.me has simpler password protection.
“People want privacy online, it’s obvious from the all of the recent news,” chief executive Bob Parsons said in a press release. “YouTube has been the place for mass-consumption videos, but for sharing more personal items, it’s way too complicated.”
Most of the recent news about online privacy has been focused on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve seen many people complaining about YouTube.
Still, at the very least the service is a high-profile use of a .me domains, which could help Go Daddy as a partner in Domen, the Montenegro-based .me registry.

Google blocks Go Daddy for ‘hosting malware’

(UPDATED) Google is currently blocking Go Daddy’s web site, calling it dangerous, because one of its image-hosting domains has been flagged for hosting malware.
Chrome users visiting pages on godaddy.com, including its storefront, currently see the standard Google alert page: “Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!”
Go Daddy’s main page seems to be affected because it uses images hosted at img5.wsimg.com, a Go Daddy domain.
A bit of a poke around reveals that the whole of wsimg.com is currently considered a malware site by Google’s toolbar on non-Chrome browsers, and also by the Google search engine.
The question is, of course, whether this is a simple false positive or whether bad guys have somehow managed to inject malware onto Go Daddy’s servers.
Go Daddy’s web site takes revenue in the six figures every hour, so if this is a false positive I can only imagine the content of the phone calls between Scottsdale and Mountain View right now.
But Go Daddy has been a target for the bad guys in recent weeks, with attacks against its hosting customers proving an irritant that the company can’t seem to shake off.
The company was also the victim of a phishing attack yesterday. I’d be surprised if the two incidents are connected.
UPDATE: Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief operating officer, just called to say that this was indeed a false positive.
“Google erroneously flagged some of our image servers,” he said. “We need to go into this with Google, but there wasn’t any malware on our end.”
Adelman said Go Daddy has a pretty good idea what happened, but that it proved hard to get hold of the relevant people at Google on a Sunday morning during Memorial Day weekend.
Further details may be forthcoming later this week. For now, Google has apparently unflagged the servers in question, and Adelman expects the situation to be resolved within the hour.

Go Daddy tech support is a cash cow

Go Daddy’s call center support staff make the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in up-sells, according to documents revealed as part of an employee class-action lawsuit.
I covered the lawsuit (PDF), filed by three former Go Daddy employees, for The Register on Friday.
One of the plaintiffs, Toby Harris, was fired after he leaked “confidential” screenshots of the company’s CRM system to his home email address.
I’m not going to get into the details of the lawsuit, which concerns labor practices, here.
But the screenshots, which offer a bit of insight into how much revenue these front-line call center staff make for Go Daddy, are worth looking at.
According to one, Harris delivered over $10,000 in gross sales for the company over nine working days in January, taking about 5% of that for himself in commission.
Not bad for a rookie $12-an-hour support guy, considering how cheap most Go Daddy products are.
Another CRM screen shows the performance of a couple dozen members of Harris’ team, including how much commission they made over a two-week period and how many customer calls they handled.
These 23 employees made between $1,290 and $255 in commissions over the period, averaging $564 each, dealing with on average 31 calls each per day.
If that’s 5% of the gross, over 10 business days, you could try to extrapolate some company-wide data, but the screenshot probably represents too small a sample to make any precise calculations.
Still, it’s pretty clear that that a substantial chunk of Go Daddy’s revenue is generated by call center staff.
Harris told me he was expected to shift $250 to $450 worth of product every day, the equivalent of selling at least one new $8 domain name to every caller.
Domain Name Wire reported last December that the company had 1,600 support staff. At the low end of $250 a day, that would equate to $400,000 a day or $146 million a year from the phones alone.
I guess I found this a little surprising because while I always knew Go Daddy’s web site was a cash machine, I had assumed its call center spent most of its time providing technical support.
As a customer, I often wondered how the company managed to run such a high-quality support service on such a pitifully low-margin loss-leader.
Now I know. Judging by these leaked numbers, those guys more than pay for themselves.

Verizon hires investigator to track down DirectNIC bosses

Verizon has won a delay in its cybersquatting lawsuit against domain registrar DirectNIC, because it can’t seem to track down and serve its CEO, Sigmund Solares.
In its latest filings with the Florida District Court, Verizon says that it had to hire a private detective to track down DirectNIC director Michael Gardner, and ended up serving his wife instead.
But, two months after filing the suit, the company still hasn’t managed to track down Solares.

“Plaintiff continues to diligently attempt to serve the lone remaining Defendant yet to be served, Sigmund Solares… Plaintiffs continue to diligently try to locate and serve this Defendant.”

DirectNIC, previously known as Intercosmos Media Group, relocated to the Cayman Islands from New Orleans in 2008, which may explain some of Verizon’s difficulty.
Indeed, when Verizon turned up to serve the company in New Orleans, it found its old office (from where employees attracted global attention for live-blogging Hurricane Katrina) closed.
Verizon sued DirectNIC, along with several directors and alleged aliases, in March, claiming they had squatted on at least 288 domains that included Verizon trademarks.
The case is of note because Verizon alleges that DirectNIC broke US cybersquatting laws when it parked expired domains that contained Verizon trademarks.
Parking pre-delete expired names is a common practice among registrars, which makes the lawsuit puzzling.
But Verizon does appear to be digging for something else, its complaint suggesting a connection between DirectNIC and its nominal registrants that may not be entirely kosher.
Without legal discovery, its hunches could go nowhere. And before Solares is served, it cannot proceed to discovery.
The court has granted an extension until late August, or 30 days after Solares is served, for the first case management meeting.