Another six dot-brands self-terminate (two are very strange)

Three companies have asked ICANN to turn off a total of six dot-brand gTLDs. Two each.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings no longer wants to run .cityeats and .frontdoor, Paramount-owned CBS Domains wants out of .cbs and .showtime, and chocolate maker Ferrero wants rid of .kinder and .rocher.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lifestyle Domains is done with .cityeats and .frontdoor, given that they were never used. What is surprising is that the brands themselves have been defunct for many, many years.

The registry was a part of Scripps Networks, an American cable TV company that owned HGTV and the Food Network. It’s now part of Warner Bros Discovery. CityEats.com and FrontDoor.com were part of its online empire.

But both sites were sold off to third parties in 2015 — the same year Lifestyle signed its two registry agreements with ICANN. In the case of .cityeats, the brand seems to have been sold off months before the contract was signed.

The registry appears to have been paying ICANN $50,000 a year for two TLDs is has absolutely no need for — it owned the dot-brands but not the matching brands. Very weird.

The case of CBS is little more typical. The company has three active domains in .cbs — one just a redirect to a privacy policy — and none in .showtime. It’s a case of not knowing what to do with the TLDs.

The Ferrero case is similar — the domains were not used and the company doesn’t want them any more.

I’ll give the chocolatier honesty points for the message on both nic. sites, which basically admits they were defensive registrations: “This domain is registered and protected by BARBERO & Associates Ltd”.

As both of these strings are non-English dictionary words, they could come up for grabs in the next round. “Kinder” is German for “children”, so it’s not impossible someone might want it as kid-focused generic.

Four more years for Identity Digital in Oz

Identity Digital has won another fours years as .au registry back-end provider.

Australian ccTLD manager auDA said the reappointment was decided after an open Request for Tender process that started in May.

It’s not clear how many other registries responded, but there’s a limited pool of companies that have a proven track record of handling such a large zone.

When .au moved from Neustar (now part of GoDaddy) to Afilias (now part of Identity Digital) in 2018 it was the largest back-end migration in the history of the DNS.

Back then, .au had 3.1 million domains under management. Now, following the release of second-level names last year, it’s closer to 4.3 million. Another migration would have been another record-breaker.

auDA said dentity Digital’s next four-year contract begins July 1 next year, with a two-year extension option.

Ukrainian domains slide as war becomes the new normal

Ukraine’s ccTLD is starting to see a decline in its total domains under management as emergency policies related to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 are relaxed.

According to local registry Hostmaster, .ua’s total was down 1.5% at the end of the first quarter at 612,778 domains, due to the fact that expiring domains that were frozen in 2022 have now started to drop.

Hostmaster said the effect will become more noticeable in coming quarters. Stats show a decline of about a thousand domains since the end of June.

When the war started, .ua had about 558,000 domains. It peaked at around 614,000 in early June.

Early in the conflict, Hostmaster had said that expired domains would be held in a redemption period status. Many registrants were assumed to have been drafted into the military or refugees.

Since then, the registry says a “significant number” of expired domains have been restored.

However, the policy was rolled back this June; expired domains now have the antebellum standard 30 days to be restored. Domains that were not renewed in 2022 still have a November deletion date, Hostmaster said.

Meanwhile, WIPO has recently restarted its UDRP services for Ukraine, having paused them in May 2022 in response to the war. Decisions that were paused in early 2022 have now been executed and published.

Huge telco dumps gTLDs after rebrand

e&, a major telecoms company in the Middle East, has told ICANN to scrap its two dot-brand gTLDs following a partial corporate rebrand last year.

The Abu Dhabi-based company, which operates in 16 countries and has turnover of over $7 billion, said it no longer wishes to operate .etisalat and its Arabic equivalent, اتصالات. (.xn--mgbaakc7dvf). It’s never used the domains.

The company last year said it was rebranding as e&, the ampersand perhaps demonstrating that its marketing folk have little interest in intuitive domain names. “Etisalat by e&” is still used in some territories.

The firm uses eand.com as its primary web site domain.

As dot-brands with no domains and no customers, ICANN will quietly drop them from the root in due course.

A second new gTLD has FAILED and will be sold off

A second commercial, non-branded new gTLD has thrown in the towel after failing to sell many domains and ICANN will seek out a new registry operator to take over.

Desi Networks has told ICANN it wants to unilaterally terminate its contract to run .desi, which as of the end of March had 1,425 domains under management after almost a decade in the root. It peaked at 4,330 domains in December 2018.

ICANN said it will invoke its Registry Transition Process to find a new registry operator. That’s essentially an auction, though if Desi Networks has so far failed to find a buyer privately one wonders how much attention it will attract.

The term “desi” broadly refers to people of South Asian residence or descent, usually Indians and the Indian diaspora. With over 1.5 billion potential registrants, on paper it looks like a winner.

But a Google search for .desi sites reveals just a handful of active domains, all related to porn sites.

The registry seems to have given up on approving zone file requests some time last year, so I have no insight into the kinds of domains currently registered, but ICANN says they are registered to third parties.

None of the registry’s own web sites, save nic.desi, appear to be working, and its Twitter account has been dormant since 2018.

The failure of the business doesn’t appear to be from a lack of channel opportunities. The gTLD is available through most of the major registrars, according to transaction reports, and runs on CentralNic’s back-end.

ICANN said it may transition .desi to an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator while it sorts everything out.

The Registry Transition Process has been invoked just once before, in 2021, after Atrgon’s .wed failed. That gTLD has been using an EBERO, Nominet, for six years.

Most registries that have terminated their gTLD contracts have been dot-brands with no third-party registrants. ICANN just removes those from the root.

.web hit by second ICANN complaint

Altanovo Domains, the Afilias spin-off that is fighting Verisign for control of the .web gTLD, has filed a second Independent Review Process complaint with ICANN.

The filing could add years to Verisign’s launch runway for .web, which it won via secret proxy Nu Dot Co at auction in 2016.

ICANN has not yet published the IRP complaint — presumably it’s being redacted to remove commercially confidential information — but documentation shows Altanovo has “filed” an IRP.

Altanovo and ICANN has been in a Cooperative Engagement Process — a form of negotiation designed to avoid an IRP — since May 3, but a document published July 19 shows that the CEP is now over.

It was quite a brisk process. Other CEPs have been known to last many months.

When the CEP first emerged in May, Verisign was pretty brutal in its reaction, accusing Altanovo of “delay for delay’s sake”.

As the second-place bidder, Altanovo could stand to take control of .web if Verisign’s bid was found to be outside the rules. That was the focus of the first IRP case, which lasted almost four years.

The first IRP panel ruled that ICANN broke its bylaws by failing to consider whether Verisign secretly bidding via NDC broke the new gTLD program rules. But ICANN a couple months ago finally bit the bullet and ruled that Verisign did no wrong.

ICANN decided not to rule on whether Altanovo, then Afilias, broke the auction rules by communicating with NDC during a comms blackout period.

The specific allegations in the new IRP are not yet known. The IRP is only for complaints about ICANN’s actions or inaction breaking its own bylaws and other foundational documents.

Registering .cv domains might become easier

The ccTLD for Cape Verde has a new technical manager and might be about to liberalize and standardize its registration process to make it more accessible to foreign registrants.

ARME, the local government regulator and .cv’s sponsor, said it has signed a five-year-contract with WhoGoHost, a Nigerian hosting company and ICANN-accredited registrar, to manage the TLD.

From the announcement, machine-translated from Portuguese, it appears that WhoGoHost will migrate .cv to a new registration system and manage the domain as part of the government’s digital globalization strategy.

CV of course stands for “curriculum vitae” in Anglophone countries, so there could be a market for .cv domains elsewhere in the world.

.cv domains currently cost the Cape Verdean Escudo equivalent of about $10 a year from the current registry, but registrars selling internationally typically charge over $150 due to it being a largely manual process.

The registry and registrars say that the TLD is currently limited to trademark owners. The registration process can take days to months. It’s believed to have only a few thousand domains under management.

The smart thing to do, to increase visibility and accessibility internationally, would be to dump the reg restrictions and switch to a standardized EPP back-end, enabling registrars to plug in relatively simply.

Cape Verde is a former Portuguese island colony off the coast of West Africa. It has a population of about half a million.

Nominet admits membership fees mistake

Nominet has told DI it made an honest mistake when it made claims about its historical membership fees, after a pressure campaign accused the .uk registry of “misleading” its members.

The company is currently holding a public consultation on sweeping revisions to its Articles of Association, but the WeightedVoting.uk campaign, led by lawyer Jim Davies, reckons that Nominet has been violating its current Articles for years.

WeightedVoting supporters believe Nominet has been unlawfully receiving millions of pounds of membership fees for the last 25 years. This week, Davies accused the company’s leadership of either being ignorant of Nominet’s own history or “deliberately misleading” members by claiming it “has always had a flat membership fee for all Members”.

Today, about 2,500 members pay a £500 joining fee and annual renewals of £100. Their voting rights are calculated based on how many domains under management they have, using a formula so complex even Nominet sometimes gets it wrong.

The system, while it caps the amount of influence any one member may have, means that the larger registrars such as GoDaddy and Tucows have more votes when it comes to things like electing directors.

Last year, Davies, with the backing of a KC and other members, claimed that this system was not envisaged under Nominet’s Articles of Association, which date back to 1996, and that collecting a flat membership fee was therefore illegal, which Nominet has denied.

WeightedVoting claims Nominet is instead supposed to have a tiered membership system where members get more votes by paying higher membership fees. An archived page from Nominet’s web site seems to support this, but Nominet chair Andy Green allegedly told members recently that this system was never actually implememnted.

“Tiered subscriptions were clearly intended by those who established Nominet and that is reflected in the Articles,” Davies wrote yesterday. “Those Articles have not been followed since 1997. Nominet is breaking the law by doing so. It also has no power to charge subscriptions at present”

Now Davies says members have found an old Usenet* post from 1996 in which a member of the fledgling registry explains how his company, pioneering dial-up ISP Demon Internet, had just paid the maximum £5,000 for 10 votes.

Presented with this new evidence, a Nominet spokesperson told DI:

Members pointed out that we made a mistake in a document supporting the consultation to update our articles of association, as we bring them in line with current practice.

We initially believed that tiered membership fees had never been implemented by Nominet. It has been our long-standing practice to charge a flat fee for all members regardless of their size. Having been made aware that some members paid more in the very early days – from incorporation in 1996 to 1997 – we are correcting the document. Our data retention policies mean that we do not have records of invoices from so long ago. This was an error, and not an attempt to mislead anybody.

We recognise our articles of association are complex and in need of updating, hence the very process to get members involved in this consultation.

Iain Mitchell KC, who wrote a legal opinion for WeightedVoting, reckons Nominet could be on the hook for £1.5 million if it is forced to refund fees, with statutes of limitations limiting liability to the last six years.

(*For the kids… Usenet is a decentralized system of text discussion groups that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Think Reddit, but made of glowing green text on monochrome Unix terminals like in The Matrix or something. It still exists, but the learning curve required to use it probably isn’t worth the effort.)

Freenom is losing another ccTLD after collecting military emails

Controversial free domains provider is reportedly losing its contract to manage Mali’s ccTLD, its second loss in as many months.

The Financial Times quoted Freenom CEO Joost Zuurbier as saying a 10-year-deal with Mali’s government to run .ml was due to expire yesterday. I reported last month that the deal looked like it was ending.

Gabon has also cancelled its contract with Freenom, saying it was bringing the country into disrepute due to the high levels of spam and abuse associated with .ga domains.

And now it seems that along with running a stable of spam-friendly ccTLDs for a decade, Freenom has also vacuumed up over a hundred thousand emails destined for the US military, which uses the highly restricted .mil TLD.

Zuurbier told the FT that he set up email accounts at navy.ml and army.ml domains shortly after taking over .ml in 2013, and quickly started receiving emails intended for American military personnel, before shutting the accounts down.

While he said nothing was marked confidential, the extensive list of documents he reportedly received, according to the FT, appears to frequently include things you wouldn’t want your enemy to read, such as medical data and financial records.

Now that .ml is reverting to Mali government control, there’s a risk this kind of information could fall into enemy hands, the FT reported. Mali is allied to Russia, which at this point in history is no friend of the US.

Zuurbier said he’s been pestering the US government and military for the last 10 years to get them to do something about the problem. The military told the FT it blocks outgoing emails to .ml domains from its own network. There’s presumably little it can do about emails sent from other domains.

Freenom got its ICANN registrar accreditation suspended in 2015 for cybersquatting its competitors. The company is also being sued for cybersquatting by Facebook owner Meta.

It’s not been possible to register new domains in any of the company’s ccTLD since last year.

ICANN takes over country’s ccTLD after Hall of Famer’s death

ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years.

IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the “caretaker” sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday.

The Org replaces the American University in Beirut, which as the name suggests is an American-owned university in Beirut, as sponsor and Lebanese Domain Registry as the admin.

It appears that AUB has not been involved with running .lb for a few years, having terminated its relationship with LBDR in 2020, and has told IANA that it is no longer the ccTLD’s sponsor.

AUB’s disassociation with LBDR, which appears to have been quite acrimonious, forced the registry to move onto CoCCA’s managed registry platform, where it still sits today.

Nabil Bukhalid, LBDR’s founder and a member of ISOC’s Internet Hall of Fame, had been trying to secure a permanent home for .lb for years, according to a history of the domain on the registry’s web site.

But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while on vacation in January this year, leaving Lebanon’s domain in a bit of a limbo.

Kim Davies, head of IANA, revealed in a letter posted today (pdf) that .lb has been managed by Bukhalid’s “associates” for the last six months.

He said ICANN has approved a new “caretaker” role for IANA, and that the designation “will signal that there is an extraordinary and temporary operational situation”.

“IANA will continue to work with Bukhalid’s known associates to ensure the ongoing operation of the domain, until such time as a qualified successor is identified through a normal ccTLD transfer request process, at which time the caretaker designation will be removed,” he wrote.

.lb is believed to have fewer than 5,000 domains under management.

Bukhalid’s struggle to secure a successor played out against the backdrop of a Lebanese government that has far more important things to worry about. The country has been in a deep financial crisis since 2019, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a revolution, and one of the largest accidental non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The economic crisis was such that Bukhalid was forced to incorporate LBDR in Delaware a couple years back.

“We are establishing this designation out of an operational necessity. There appear to be no specific policies that govern a situation where the existing designated ccTLD manager no longer performs its role but there is no obvious successor,” Davies wrote.

He suggested that the ccNSO may want to consider creating a policy for this kind of scenario.

Similar situations could occur in future, I reckon, if increasingly grey and wrinkly Postel-era “Just Some Guy” ccTLD sponsors don’t make arrangements for their heirs.

Davies said in his letter that the “caretaker” designation has been used once before, for Libya’s .ly in 2004. But it’s the first time IANA has been a caretaker, and the Libya experiment went spectacularly badly.