New Pope’s .com domain was registered the day Francis died

A domainer snapped up the .com matching the new Pope’s name on the day the last Pope died.

Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected this evening and took the name Pope Leo XIV.

PopeLeoXIV.com was registered on the afternoon of April 21, a few hours after the news of Pope Francis’ death was announced and after I tweeted on Twitter:

Pope's dead. Let the domain speculation begin.

— Kevin Murphy (@DomainIncite) April 21, 2025

The name was highlighted by DomainGang the following day as a likely candidate for the next Pope’s name. But by then of course the domain had already been registered.

It’s currently parked, with no BIN price listed.

PopeLeo.com has been registered since 2002. LeoXIV.com was registered in 2005, on the day Pope John Paul II died.

.blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There

Hilariously named .blog registry operator Knock Knock Whois There has been ordered to change its name to “Knock Knock RDAP There” or risk the wrath of ICANN Compliance.

The company has been told it has 30 days to file papers requesting the name change with the California Secretary of State, or ICANN will initiate termination proceedings against it, putting about 300,000 .blog domains at risk.

The surprising move comes a couple of months after ICANN’s contracted parties finished their mandatory migration from the old Whois protocol to the newer Registration Data Access Protocol.

ICANN Compliance is taking the migration deadline incredibly seriously, according to a KKWT source.

“They started calling us up almost immediately,” she said. “When we got the first warning fax, we thought it was a joke so we just ignored it. But then we started getting menacing voicemails every day, then every hour. It’s gotten really frightening.”

“They even somehow found out my 90-year-old mom’s cell number and started calling her at her retirement home, telling her ‘the kid complies, or we escalate’,” the source said. “She has no idea what that means and she’s terrified.”

Compliance’s increasing belligerence is believed to be linked to boredom. The department, having successfully eliminated all DNS abuse, is now scrounging around for other things to enforce.

“Damn right we’ll escalate,” Compliance chief Ronnie Smanks told us. “Those Knock Knock wankers better get their house in order, or I’ll send the boys around.”

That’s believed to be a reference to ICANN’s recently created Physical Compliance department, a collection of rough lads often seen loitering around ICANN headquarters brandishing tire irons, pickaxe handles, and bicycle chains.

But KKWT says it will not be cowed, and is seeking out legal advice. It’s also recruited a creative agency to try to come up with a new company name that is just as funny as the original, which is, as everyone agrees, very, very funny indeed.

Dead terrorist domains for sale, just without the hyphens

People are trying to make a quick buck flogging domains matching the names of suspects in recent terrorist atrocities, but they’re stopping short of including the hyphens.

The 2024 Christmas-New Year period was marked by two vehicular terrorist incidents on either side of the Atlantic: the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany on December 20 and the Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans, Louisiana in the early hours of January 1.

In both cases, domains (almost) matching the names of the alleged attackers were registered within minutes of their identities being revealed.

The suspect in the New Orleans ramming attack, who was shot dead by police, has been named by authorities as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and the .com matching his name was registered even before it was officially announced.

It seems reporters at NOLA.com were the first to reveal his identity, at around 1700 UTC yesterday, and shamsuddinjabbar.com was registered at 1720 UTC, some time before the news conference where he was officially named.

The more correct spelling, shamsud-dinjabbar.com, has not been registered. Apparently, attempting to make money from an attack that killed 15 people is okay, but registering a domain containing a hyphen is a step too far.

The domain that was registered leads to a Dynadot sales lander with a $7,038.94 buy-it-now price. This converts to a round €6,800, suggesting the owner is based in the Eurozone.

The matching .net has also been registered and currently leads to a GoDaddy parking page.

The suspect in the Magdeburg attack , currently in police custody and charged with five counts of murder, was named by German authorities as Taleb A., abbreviated due to German privacy laws, just a few hours after the fact, but his full name has been widely reported as Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen.

The .com matching (almost) his name, talebalabdulmohsen.com, was registered shortly before 0500 UTC on December 21, hours before it had been reported by major news outlets’ live blogs. It’s currently parked with GoDaddy.

Again, the hyphenated version was not registered and is still available. The matching .de has not been registered.

Professional domain investors consider registering such domains for profit not only pointless but unethical. The Internet Commerce Association, which represents domainers, has in its code of conduct:

Respect for Human Suffering and Victims of Tragedy. A [ICA] member shall be respectful of persons and communities involved in tragedy. A member shall not register domains with the intent to profit from a recent tragedy.

The ICA has no policy on hyphens, to my knowledge.

Company accidentally puts porn domain on kids’ toys

Toy-maker Mattel has had to apologize after accidentally printing the domain name of a porn site on the packaging of dolls designed for little girls.

The company mistakenly plugged the domain name wicked.com on boxes containing dolls of characters from the movie Wicked, which is based on the musical of the same name and set in the same world as The Wizard of Oz.

This domain leads to a (actually pretty tame) porn site, where you have to click through an age verification page before you see anything even vaguely suggestive. The movie’s actual web site is at wickedmovie.com.

“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this,” Mattel reportedly said in a statement. It advised parents to throw out the box and not visit the web site.

The toys themselves have reportedly been yanked from retailers. There seems to be little doubt that not paying attention to its domain is going to cost Mattel money as Christmas and the film’s release date approach.

The domain wicked.movie has been registered since January to a third party who has listed it for sale at $4,000.

eBay’s new slogan looks like a $75,000 domain it doesn’t own

eBay has launched a television and radio advertising campaign featuring a slogan that looks very much like a domain name that the company does not actually own.

The campaign, reportedly eBay’s first global branding campaign in a decade, targets Gen Z customers looking for vintage and second-hand clothing and other goods.

The new slogan is “Things.People.Love”.

While the dots are not vocalized, it sure looks like a domain name.

The domain things.people.love does not currently resolve, but .love is a real TLD and people.love is registered to a domain investor.

It belongs to TopDomains, a portfolio of premium domain names mostly for sale with buy-it-now or lease-to-own prices.

The domain people.love has a BIN of $75,000, peanuts for a company with a market cap of $30 billion.

ICANN fixes embarrassing “What is a Domain Name?” mistake

Good news, everyone! ICANN knows what a domain name is!

The Org has quietly corrected a slide deck, designed as a high-level introduction to the new gTLD program’s Next Round, that seemed to mislabel the components of a domain name.

When it was first published in early September, the offending slide looked like this:

When I saw it, for a few moments I was genuinely worried I’d had another stroke or, worse, been wrong for a quarter century. Surely ICANN, the organization that oversees the global DNS, knew more about this stuff than I do?

Rather than call an ambulance immediately, I tweeted a screengrab on Twitter to get the reassurance of the four people still on that platform that I had not lost my mind.

Now, in the same ICANN deck (pdf), apparently updated September 19, the slide looks like this:

The deck is part of a “Champions Toolkit”, a bunch of freebie marketing materials made available for people who want to market the Next Round, particularly in under-served regions, on ICANN’s behalf.

Go.Compare now redirecting to the .com

Go.Compare seems to have backpedaled a little on its high-profile rebranding to a new gTLD domain name.

The domain go.compare is now bouncing visitors to the insurance comparison site’s original domain, gocompare.com.

When the company announced its rebranding from GoCompare to Go.Compare last September, there was no redirect in place.

The firm seems otherwise entirely committed to the new branding, even putting it on Welsh rugby shirts as part of a sponsorship deal recently.

The only change appears to be the new redirect — visitors will see the .com in the address bar rather than the .compare domain.

My article announcing the rebrand always seemed to get an unusually high amount of traffic on Saturday nights when Go.Compare was advertising its new name prominently on prime-time Saturday night TV, which makes me wonder whether the company was suffering from leakage related to the switch.

.compare is a GoDaddy gTLD and the go.compare domain was purchased by Go.Compare’s registrar, Lexsynergy.

Musk prematurely announces Twitter is now X

Elon Musk has declared that Twitter is rebranding as X, using x.com, apparently as the latest stage of his ongoing mission to destroy the company he acquired last year for lulz.

At 1744 UTC yesterday, Musk tweeted:

https://t.co/bOUOek5Cvy now points to https://t.co/AYBszklpkE.

Interim X logo goes live later today.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023

The logo on the Twitter web site has now changed to a minimalist X, which was later projected onto the walls of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

For me, and others around the world, x.com still resolves to a standard GoDaddy parking page, advertising sofas. Others have reported experiencing the redirect to twitter.com as intended.

It can theoretically take a day or more for name server changes to propagate throughout the entire DNS, due to caching and time-to-live settings, but in my experience with GoDaddy it has never taken more than a few minutes.

Still, it would be smart to make sure your new domain is actually working before announcing a rebranding.

Musk first owned x.com — one of a handful of single-letter .com names available — in the 1990s, when it was the original brand of the company that became PayPal. After he sold PayPal, the domain went with the company to eBay. But Musk reacquired the domain for an undisclosed sum in 2017.

He seems to have an obsession with the letter. His space flight company is called SpaceX. Tesla has a model X. He even named his kid X.

I’m reminded of another eccentric tech entrepreneur who obsessed over a single-letter domain, to the extent that it ultimately harmed his company.

Costerton drops rap album to attract Gen Z to ICANN

ICANN interim CEO Sally Costerton will today release an album of rap music, in an effort to attract more young people to the ICANN community.

Costerton told DI today that it’s become obvious in recent years that ICANN’s community is aging rapidly, and that attracting new, younger talent is vital to ensuring the Org’s longevity.

“Going to ICANN meetings used to be like walking into Rick’s Café, mingling with an international crowd of beautiful young rebels and dashing political hunks,” she said. “Now, it looks more like the Mos Eisley cantina.”

The solution is to modernize ICANN to embrace popular culture, making it more appealing to younger participants, she said.

“Rap is a new form of music from the streets of America, where performers speak over the music,” Costerton, who is releasing 13 all-new tracks and covers under the stage name “Lil Sally C”, explained. “They speak over the music.”

“We’re hoping that with this drop of dope joints, we can draw in the Gen Z chads and thots that we so desperately need,” she said. “We can explain boring ICANN policy concepts in a way that the kids can relate to.”

For example, C said, rather than explain the complex acronym “EBERO”, ICANN could simply direct a newcomer to stream the track “Baby Got Emergency Back-End Registry Operator”.

She expects other tracks, such as “Straight Outta Marina Del Rey”, “I Got 99 Problems (But Adhering To Our Bylaws Commitments To Openness And Transparency Ain’t One)”, and “My Name Is [redacted due to GDPR]”, to be popular singles.

Other tracks on the album include a cover of “Sucker For Pain”, which features guest vocals by DJ Jazzy John Jeffrey.

C lists her influences as Cardi B, NWA, A2M, and Vanilla Ice, but insists her sound is unique and “on fleek af”.

Fellow long-term community members and directors agree.

“She da OG Senior Advisor to President and SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement & Interim President and CEO,” said board chair Tripti Sinha. “Fo’ shizzle!”

But the release has not been without controversy. C defended her decision to use the n-word 38 times on the album, explaining she’s “keepin’ it real.”

“There’s an apostrophe instead of the letter G in keepin’,” she said.

Lil Sally C’s album, entitled “Drop Da C-Bomb!”, is available to download today, April 1, via Napster and Yahoo! Music.

In pictures: from tuk-tuks to cheese wheels, every ICANN national stereotype 2016-2022

What’s the one thing that ICANN most associates with your country?

For the The Netherlands, it seems to be cheese. For Puerto Rico, rum. For Morocco, um… camels.

ICANN ships about 12 metric tons (10 tonnes) of gear to its meeting locations three times a year, and a few weeks after the meeting concludes it issues a “By The Numbers” report, containing a treasure trove of data about the meeting.

The reports include data on how much equipment — servers, routers, mics, headsets etc — was shipped, along with a lighthearted “that’s the equivalent of” comparison.

It started in 2016 with elephants and cars, but from round about the third report, the ICANN 57 meeting in Hyderabad, India, ICANN started picking a comparison with a local connection.

I thought it might be fun to collect all these images in one place for easy reference.

ICANN 55, Marrakech, Morocco

3.5 African elephants. I’m not convinced this one was connected to the host. Probably just representative of “a heavy thing”.

ICANN 56, Helsinki, Finland

12.2 mid-sized cars. Again, this might just be “a heavy thing”. Finland isn’t really known for its cars. Maybe ICANN thought it was in Sweden.

ICANN 57, Hyderabad, India

77 tuk-tuks. This cheap form of private-hire transport is as ubiquitous in India as it is in many parts of Asia.

ICANN 58, Copenhagen, Denmark

1,365 bicycles. Copenhagen is reportedly one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. I recall walking pretty much the full distance from the airport to the venue along a cycle path when I arrived for ICANN 58.

ICANN 59, Johannesburg, South Africa

8 giraffes. South Africa is known for its tourist safaris.

ICANN 60, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

6,517 falcons. Falconry is a popular pass-time and tourist attraction in the UAE.

ICANN 61, San Jose, Puerto Rico

34 barrels of rum. I had to google this one to be honest, but it turns out the Puerto Rico government calls the US territory the “Rum Capital of the World”. It even has a .gov web site to promote the product.

ICANN 62, Panama City, Panama

145 sacks of coffee beans. Panama isn’t exactly internationally renowned for its coffee exports, but I guess it’s difficult to weigh stuff in terms of canals.

ICANN 63, Barcelona, Spain

6,849 Spanish guitars. It has the word “Spanish” in it, do you see?

ICANN 64, Kobe, Japan

17 cows. Kobe is known for its beef, if you’re into that kind of thing.

ICANN 65, Marrakech, Morocco

23 camels.

ICANN 66, Montreal, Canada

38 barrels of maple syrup. A gimme… the leaf is right there on the flag.

ICANN 74, The Hague, Netherlands

1,191 cheese wheels. Who doesn’t love a bit of Dutch cheese?