Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!

Rob Monster and Brian Royce are no longer involved in the management or ownership of the registrar Epik, according to both Epik and ICANN.

Epik announced tonight that ICANN had completed its due diligence on the new company and approved the transfer of Epik Inc’s registrar accreditation to Epik LLC, following an acquisition in June last year.

Not only that, but it added that the two guys in charge of the Inc during its descent into disgrace in late 2022 and early 2023 are no longer involved with the company.

“No previous owners, including Epik Inc founder Rob Monster and late stage CEO Brian Royce, are involved in Epik LLC in any capacity, including ownership interest in the business,” Epik said (emphasis in original).

I’ve received a confirmation from ICANN. Vice president Russ Weinstein said in a statement:

ICANN has completed its thorough review of the assignment request and of the Assignee, and has determined that the new entity (Epik, LLC) meets the established registrar criteria. Epik, LLC is a recently formed entity that is completely independent of Epik, Inc., its leadership, and shareholders.

ICANN has updated its registrar records to remove the name of Bryce Myrvang as Epik’s primary contact to the generic “Domain Support”. Its phone number has changed from one in Idaho to one in Austin, Texas. Its email address has also changed.

Myrvang, who appeared in ICANN records following the June acquisition, works for a company called Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in anonymous company formations. It was not clear before whether Registered Agents had bought Epik LLC or was just a proxy to hide the true owner.

There had been speculation online that Epik founder Monster or subsequent CEO Royce might have been still secretly controlling Epik, exacerbated last week when the person in charge of Epik’s Twitter account appeared to go nuts, in keeping with both former CEOs’ previous social media behavior.

Who is running Epik, and who owns it, is currently unknown.

Epik fell from grace in late 2022 after a financial mismanagement scandal that saw it withhold money from domain buyers for months. It lost hundreds of thousands of domains as a result.

1 Comment Tagged: epik, ICANN

Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services

Nominet has opened a public consultation on its plans to modernize the .uk domain registry, which will involve increased standardization around international norms and turning off some older services.

It’s an extensive consultation — 37 proposals and 92 questions spread over more than 50 pages — aimed mainly at the registrars that will have to update their systems to integrate with the new registry. But registrants will also be affected.

The plans would see changes to Nominet’s underlying registry platform that would alter how renewals, proxy registrations, grace periods and transfers between registrants and registrars are handled, and the retirement of the current Whois system, among many other items.

Nominet reckons its proposals will help it save money on ongoing maintenance and software licensing as well as eventually simplifying things for its member registrars.

The company currently runs two registry platforms in parallel: the old UK registry and the newer EPP registry, which is based on the latest technical standards and compliant with ICANN requirements.

It runs its gTLDs, such as .wales and .cymru, as well as its dozens of back-end clients, on the newer system. The plan is to shift .uk over to the newer RSP platform too.

The proposal also calls for Nominet to align with ICANN’s plans to stop requiring registrars to operate Whois services a year from now, replacing them with the newer RDAP standard, which provides the same functionality.

Other older, less-used services, such as the Domain Availability Checker, would either be retired or replaced with EPP-based equivalents.

There’s a lot to absorb in the consultation documents, but at first glance it strikes me that large international registrars that already integrate with dozens of registries probably don’t have much to worry about; smaller, .uk-focused registrars with fewer resources may show some resistance due to the amount of development work likely to be required.

But Nominet says that it is taking this into account with its timetable, saying: “If the changes go ahead, we will give considerable advance notice to Registrars to allow time for development activities”.

The consultation is open for the next three months, punctuated by five explanatory webinars.

4 Comments Tagged: .uk, nominet

Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime

Another ccTLD has blamed DNSSEC after seeing hours of downtime affecting its country’s biggest web services yesterday.

This time it’s Russia’s ccTLD.ru, which confirmed today that it was responsible for the widely reported outages on Tuesday, which had sparked speculation that a cyber-attack related to the war in Ukraine might be the culprit.

It was rather a DNSSEC failure that affected both .ru and the Cyrillic .рф domains, the registry said. It was related to a cryptograpghic key rollover, the registry indicated.

“After the failure was detected, the updated keys were revoked, and the functionality of the .RU zone was fully restored, which took about two hours, including the distribution of data through the DNS system,” the registry said on its web site.

“The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing, but it is already clear that the main cause of the failure was the imperfection of the software used to create the encryption keys,” it added.

The explanation was echoed by Russian government officials on social media, and it’s sadly rather plausible. DNSSEC failures at ccTLDs, and to a lesser extent gTLDs, usually related to fluffed key rollovers, are rather common.

There have been similar outages reported in the last few years in Australia (twice), Namibia, Fiji, and Sweden. And those are just the ones reported on this blog. People who track this kind of thing more closely have recorded hundreds of incidents.

Comment Tagged: .ru, cctld.ru, DNSSEC, outages

Team Internet says revenue beat estimates

Team Internet gave a preview of its 2023 earnings report this morning, saying that revenue grew faster than its own targets and analysts’ estimates.

The company, formerly CentraNic, expects to post revenue around $835 million, up 15% on 2022, and profit up 12% at $96 million for the year.

The firm’s Online Presence segment, which includes the domains business, had revenue up 16% at $179 million, while the far larger Online Marketing segment saw revenue up 14% at $656 million.

Team Internet will report its full results on March 18.

1 Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials, team internet

Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction

The Government of Anguilla has put its latest batch of expired .ai domains up for auction, including a handful of single-word names and a great many three-character strings. There are 1,878 domains on the list.

At least two of the domains being auctioned off were reported sold earlier this month at the last .ai expired names auction — insure.ai, which fetched a winning bid of $24,700, and dog.ai, which reached $21,311.

They were the third and fourth most-expensive domains in the earlier auction. The domains’ Whois show the registry is still the current registrant, so the winning bidder(s) presumably didn’t pay up.

Other English dictionary-word domains that caught my eye include technological.ai, bucharest.ai, fulfilled.ai, annotated.ai, sponsorship.ai, forged.ai, crowded.ai, springboard.ai and queer.ai.

The list is notable for the number of times the word “meta” appears — well over 100 times. This is presumably due to these three facts: 1) .ai has a two-year minimum registration term, 2) it takes 90 days for expired names to make it to auction, and 3) Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in October 2021.

For any masochists among you, some obvious cybersquats are also listed for sale, including facebookmeta.ai, facebookmetaverse.ai and facebook-metaverse.ai. Remember, .ai uses the UDRP too.

The auction ends February 5.

Comment Tagged: ai, auction, expired

.ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says

The number of cybersquatting cases filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization increased 7% in 2023, WIPO said this week.

The total UDRP filings, 6,192, includes national ccTLD variations that WIPO handles but not UDRP filings with other providers.

WIPO said that 82% of cases resulted in the domain being transferred to the complainant, with the complaint being denied in just 3% of cases.

The organization does not publish data on Reverse Domain Name Hijacking findings, but RDNH.com, which tracks these things, shows 31 RDNH finding at WIPO in 2023.

.com accounted for 80% of complaints. WIPO said that the most complained-about ccTLDs were .co (Colombia), .cn (China), .mx (Mexico), .au (Australia) and .ai (Anguilla).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its rapid growth in registrations, Anguilla’s .ai saw a sharp uptick in UDRP filings last year, up from just four in 2022 to 43 in 2023, according to the WIPO web site.

Comment Tagged: ai, cybersquatting, trademarks, udrp, wipo

Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination

French registrar Gandi will be the beneficiary of Freenom’s ignominious collapse last year, it has emerged.

ICANN records updated today show that Freenom’s gTLD domains will be transferred to Gandi following the termination of Freenom’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement last November.

Freenom, legally OpenTLD, had been ignoring customers transfer and renewal requests, leading to domains being lost, according to ICANN Compliance, which flicked the off switch after three rapid-fire breach notices.

Freenom had just 14,546 gTLD domains under management at the end of September, mostly in .com and .net, down quite a lot from its October 2019 peak of 44,774.

The domains are being moved under ICANN’s De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure, which does not apply to any domains registered in any of the ccTLDs Freenom was managing under its much-abused free-to-register model, notably Tokelau’s .tk.

Freenom has not been accepting new registrations in any of these ccTLDs for over a year. It has reportedly lost its contracts to run .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq and .tk is looking for the exit.

Comment Tagged: freenom. gandi, ICANN, opentld

.ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite

Russia’s ccTLD has posted very impressive growth in registrations for 2023, attributable largely to sanctions related to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

ccTLD.ru, the registry for .ru and .рф, reported that it ended 2023 with 5,439,137 .ru domains, an increase of 506,024 or 10.3% over the year. It said 85% of the names were registered by Russians.

It said 1,709,718 new domains were registered in .ru, with over 200,000 being registered per month by December.

For comparison with fellow top-10 ccTLDs, Germany’s .de grew by 201,000 names last year, and Brazil’s .br grew by 220,000. The UK’s .uk shrank and the Netherlands’ .nl was basically flat.

In the smaller Cyrllic .рф, the growth rate was even greater — 13.7%, with 768,883 domains in total at the end of the year, up 92,769 names, the registry said.

Despite the rapid growth, .ru is still a bit off its 2017 peak of around 5.53 million domains, according to my database.

In a press release, ccTLD.ru director Andrey Vorobyev admitted that one of the “main drivers” of the growth were Russians transferring their sites to Russia “under the pressure of sanctions”.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many domain registries and registrars in the West unilaterally decided to stop doing business with Russian citizens and organizations, despite US government sanctions specifically not applying to domains.

GoDaddy cut off Russians and .ru while Namecheap, which has many support staff in Ukraine, cut off Russian customers and continues to prominently fund-raise for Ukraine on its storefront. Other companies announcing boycotts included 101domain, IONOS and Nominet.

Ukraine’s ccTLD, .ua, has fared less well during the crisis. Its total domain count shrank by about 77,000 to 514,000 in 2023, according to my database. The local registry, Hostmaster, had frozen deletions for a period to give people who had been displaced or mobilized more time to renew, but started releasing those domains last year.

Hostmaster has reported adoption of certain third-level geographic .ua domains that use Latin transliterations of Ukrainian place names, rather than Russian — .kyiv.ua versus .kiev.ua for example — as citizens seek to “de-Russify” their holdings.

2 Comments Tagged: .ru, .ua, cctld.ru, hostmaster ua, russia, sanctions, ukraine, war

ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court

After foot-dragging for a decade, ICANN has finally approved a slate of a dozen jurists to act as its de facto Supreme Court.

Its board of directors voted at the weekend to create the first-ever Independent Review Process Standing Panel, a pool of legal experts from which panels in future IRP proceedings — the final appeals process for ICANN decisions under its bylaws — will be drawn.

ICANN has not named the 12 people yet. The names are redacted from the published resolution, presumably because they haven’t signed contracts yet. ICANN said they are “well-qualified” and “represent a diverse breadth of experience and geography”.

The names were put forward by a cross-community working group called the IRP Community Representatives Group, which looked after the application and interview process. A thirteenth CRG pick was deemed “ineligible” by ICANN for undisclosed reasons.

The Standing Panel is intended to make IRPs faster and cheaper by drawing the three-person panel in each case from an established pool of experienced professionals. The panelists will be contracted for staggered terms of service.

The ICANN bylaws have called for the establishment of such a panel for over a decade, but its timely creation was another victim of the lethargy that consumed ICANN for years. The lack of a Standing Panel has been raised by claimants in multiple IRPs, some of which are ongoing.

Elsewhere in IRP policy-making, a separate staff/community working group called the IRP Implementation Oversight Team expects to shortly publish certain revisions to the IRP rules for public comment, but the fact that the legal language of the rules is to be written by the law firm Jones Day, which represents defendant ICANN in IRP cases, has raised some eyebrows.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, irp, irp-crg, irp-iot, jones day, standing panel

Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover

ICANN’s board of directors has voted to redelegate Lebanon’s ccTLD to the country’s local Internet Society chapter, six months after the Org took it over as an emergency caretaker.

The resolution, passed at the weekend, as usual with ccTLD redelegations does not get into any depth about the switch, other than to note IANA has ticked all the requisition procedural boxes. IANA will publish a report at a later date.

ICANN took over the ccTLD, .lb, last July after the former registry was left in limbo following the sudden death of its founder and manager. It was only the second time ICANN had made itself a ccTLD’s “caretaker”.

The board also voted at the weekend to redelegate Cameroon’s .cm, best-known in the Anglophone world for enabling .com typos purely by existing, to Agence Nationale des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication, the local technology ministry.

Comment Tagged: .cm, .lb, iana, ICANN, redelegation