GoDaddy takes over .health

GoDaddy Registry has added .health to its growing stable of TLDs.

According to ICANN records, the company has taken over the contract from original registry DotHealth.

GoDaddy was already the back-end registry services provider for the gTLD, and as registrar is responsible for roughly half of the roughly 35,000 domains registered there.

Judging by ICANN documentation, GoDaddy has also acquired DotHealth.

Red Cross gets takedown powers over .org domains

Public Interest Registry has inked a first-of-its kind domain takedown partnership with the American Red Cross.

The deal gives the Red Cross a “trusted notifier” status, meaning it will have a special channel to report fraudulent fundraising sites with domains, which PIR can then suspend at the registry level.

It’s designed mainly to quickly tackle fraud sites that spring up to exploit people’s good will in the aftermath of natural disasters to which the Red Cross would typically respond to.

It’s particularly relevant not only due to the size of PIR’s flagship .org, but also due to its recent takeovers of gTLDs including .charity and .giving.

PIR said the partnership is only for such cases, and would not permit the Red Cross to take down criticism or satire. It also said there’s an appeals process for registrants whose names are suspended.

Trusted notifier schemes are not uncommon among the larger registries, but they typically focus on Big Copyright and organizations that fight child sexual abuse material online.

Domain universe grew 1% in Q1

There was a 1% increase in domain names under management worldwide in the first quarter, compared to Q4 2022 and Q1 2022, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The period ended with 354 million names across all TLDs, according to the report, an increase of 3.5 million, the report says.

ccTLDs did most of the heavy lifting, up by 2.6 million names or 2% sequentially to 135.7 million at the end of the first quarter. The growth figures correct for an error in the Q4 report.

Verisign has its own .com recovering, having dipped last year, now up by 1.1 million names sequentially to 161.6 million. Sister TLD .net was flat on 13.2 million.

New gTLDs dipped by 200,000 names to 27.3 million, a 0.6% decrease quarter-over-quarter, but were up by 900,000 or 3.6% compared to a year earlier, the DNIB states.

New gTLD registry gets second ICANN breach notice

A new gTLD registry has become the second to receive a second ICANN breach notice from ICANN.

Asia Green IT System, based in Turkey, hasn’t been paying its fees on four of its TLDs, ICANN says in its notice, and isn’t displaying Whois data in the required format.

The gTLDs concerned are .nowruz (Iranian New Year), .pars (refers to Persia/Iran), .shia (a branch of Islam), and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd, appears to mean something like “comrade” in Persian).

ICANN has given the company until July 5 to pay up or risk having its contracts terminated.

No domains would be at risk if that were to happen — none of the four TLDs has launched. Each has a single domain in its zone file, despite being in the root for several years.

Asia Green was hit with a similar notice in 2019, which it ultimately resolved.

Millions of domains to be deleted as Freenom loses its first TLD

Controversial free-domains registry Freenom has lost its deal with the government of Gabon after years of abuse. The government has retaken its ccTLD and will delete as many as seven million .ga domains.

That’s according to the French ccTLD registry, AFNIC (pdf), which says it has been helping migrate the TLD from Freenom to Gabonese government entity ANINF for the last year.

The technical handover will begin today and run until June 7, this coming Wednesday, according to ANINF.

AFNIC said the migration is happening due to “the failure of the company Freenom, which has managed the .ga TLD up until now, to provide the Internet community with a satisfactory service.”

ANINF said it wants to: “Put an end to abusive practices, through the will and support of the Gabonese State, which have had a negative impact on the image of the country and its influence on the Internet.”

Freenom’s business model is to allow people to register domains for free, then bring them in-house and monetize them when they expire or are suspended for abuse such as spam and phishing — something that happens rather a lot.

Security blogger Brian Krebs reported last week that abuse levels originating from ccTLD domains have plummeted since Freenom’s troubles began earlier this year.

ANINF reckons there are currently over seven million domains in .ga, and says most of those will be deleted.

That would make .ga the seventh-largest TLD overall and fourth-largest ccTLD after China, Germany and the UK. But Gabon has a population of just 2.3 million with a relatively low internet penetration of 62%.

Could it be the beginning of the end for Freenom?

Presumably most of the domains Gabon will delete are owned and currently monetized by Freenom, so it will be losing a large parking network when ANINF swings the ban hammer.

There’s also reason to believe .ga will not be the last ccTLD it loses. The tech contact in the IANA record for Mali’s .ml switched from Freenom’s Netherlands-based subsidiary to a Mali government agency back in March, suggesting a takeover is also imminent there.

Then of course there’s the lawsuit by Facebook owner Meta, filed earlier this year, which accuses Freenom of cybersquatting and seeks a ruinous amount in damages.

Freenom has not allowed anyone to register domains in any of its managed TLDs — .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq and .tk — since at least January 1 this year.

I asked Freenom to explain this a few weeks ago and the company declined to comment.

ANINF says the migration this week will cause disruptions, but says it’s been reaching out to registrars with legit registrations to minimize the turbulence for their customers.

UAE boasts rapid domain growth in 2022

The United Arab Emirates reckons its ccTLD saw growth of 20% last year, crossing a landmark in the first quarter this year.

Local regulator Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) said that .ae grew by 46,000 domains in 2022 and broke through the 300,000 mark in Q1 2023.

Not the largest TLD out there, but it compares well against some countries with similar-sized populations, especially taking into account that the large majority of the UAE’s 9.2 million residents are non-citizen immigrant workers.

In the nine-million-souls ballpark, Israel has around 284,000 .il domains, Belarus has about 160,000, but Hungary has about 860,000 and Austria has over 1.5 million.

.ae is an unrestricted ccTLD in a wealthy, business-friendly country, with no local presence requirements.

Three more straggler new gTLDs coming soon

Three more new gTLDs from three different registries are set to launch this (northern hemisphere) summer.

Identity Digital is gearing up to launch .watches in June, while newcomer Digity will launch .case in July and Intercap will launch .box in August, according to ICANN records.

.watches was bought from luxury goods maker Richemont, which hadn’t used it, in 2020. It’s currently in sunrise and will go to general availability June 7.

Digity, which is affiliated with the registrar Sav, bought .case from CentralNic, which in turn bought it from industrial machinery maker CNH Industrial. It was a dot-brand, but will be repurposed as an open generic targeting the legal field.

Intercap is planning to start .box’s sunrise August 9 and go to general availability the following month, September 13. The gTLD was originally bought for $3 million before Intercap acquired it in 2020.

Three more dot-brands realize the futility of existence

A big bank and a big retailer have ditched their dot-brand gTLDs.

Northwestern Mutual has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .mutual and .northwesternmutual, while iconic jewelry store operator Tiffany said it doesn’t want .tiffany any more.

Neither gTLD has been used. The Northwestern registry pages contain a notice, apparently from 2017, about how it expected to publish launch plans “over the coming months”.

Northwestern’s gTLDs are on GoDaddy’s back-end. Tiffany is on Verisign. All three were managed by Fairwinds Partners.

CentralNic starts returning cash to shareholders as revenue grows

CentralNic has started paying a dividend and has announced another share buyback as it focuses less on aggressive M&A and more on organic growth.

The company, which makes about a quarter of its revenue from domains, said it will spend £4 million of its cash reserves buying back shares between now and August and will pay a £0.01 dividend a month from now.

The news came as CentralNic confirmed its top line grew by 24% in the first quarter, to $194.9 million, driven largely by its traffic arbitrage business, which it calls Online Marketing.

Its revenue from Online Presence — domains and such — was up 14% at $45.2 million, and its number of domain-years processed was up 2% at 12.4 million. The company sells both as registry, registrar and back-end.

Overall, adjusted EBITDA was up 15% at $21.3 million.

Newly launched .zip already looks dodgy

A trawl through the latest zone file for Google’s newly launched .zip gTLD reveals that it is likely to be used in malware and phishing attacks.

.zip is of course also a filename extension used by the ZIP archive format, often used to compress and email multiple files at once, and many domains registered in the .zip gTLD in the last few days seem ready to capitalize on that potential for confusion.

I counted 3,286 domains in the May 14 zone file, and a great many of them appear to relate to email attachments, financial documents, software updates and employment information.

I found 133 instances of the word “update”, with sub-strings such as “attach”, “statement”, “download” and “install” also quite common.

Some domains are named after US tax and SEC forms, and some appear to be targeting employees at their first day of work.

I don’t know the intent of any of these registrants, of course. It’s perfectly possible some of their domains could be put to benign use or have been registered defensively by those with security concerns. But my gut says at least some of these names are dodgy.

Google went into general availability with eight new TLDs last Wednesday, and as of yesterday .zip was the only one to rack up more than a thousand names in its zone file.

The others were .dad (913 domains), .prof (264), .phd (605), .mov (463), .esq (979), .foo (665) and .nexus (330).