Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service pilot.

The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate.

RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed to gather data that will help ICANN decide whether to deploy a more permanent and probably more expensive long-term solution.

The service is essentially a clearinghouse that connects people who want to request private Whois data with the registrars that manage domains of interest.

Tucows said in a blog post:

Given that the RDRS Standing Committee has enough data to complete its report, as well as the customer experience challenges and data privacy concerns we’ve outlined above, Tucows Domains has decided to end our participation in the RDRS.

The move makes Tucows the highest-profile registrar to pull out of the service to date. Across its various brands (such as Ascio, Enom, EPAG, and OpenSRS) it has around 10 million domains under management.

As of the end of January, RDRS had 94 registrars on board, covering 60% of all registered gTLD domains.

Tucows said it will continue to offer its TACO service, which also allows entities such as intellectual property interests to request private Whois data but charges requesters at least $3,000 a year, which it calls a “cost recovery fee”.

The TACO fee can be waived for “single-use and non-commercial requestors”, Tucows noted. It has updated its terms accordingly.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, privacy, rdrs, tucows, whois

Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba is throwing its weight behind its dot-brand gTLD, .toshiba.

The company announced today that from next month it will start to migrate all of its employees to @mail.toshiba email addresses, starting with group parent Toshiba Corp, which currently uses @toshiba.co.jp.

For an unspecified period, mail sent to the current .jp addresses will auto-forward to .toshiba, but this backwards compatibility will be turned off eventually, the company said.

Toshiba said the switch will “prevent unauthorized use of email addresses by phishing emails impersonating people in Toshiba Group and reduce security risks”. This is often pitched as a key benefit of dot-brands.

The company has been using global.toshiba as its primary web site domain for a few years already. It maintains other localized domains in ccTLDs and .com as well.

Apart from global.toshiba and mail.toshiba, .toshiba has no other functioning dot-brand domains.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, toshiba

Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company.

Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it “does not intend to make an offer” because “there has been a material change of circumstances”.

While Verdane did not elaborate, there was a simultaneous announcement from Team Internet that Google’s recently announced changes to AdSense for Domains present a “challenge” that will harm its business faster than it can adapt.

Google said last week that as of March 19 it will start opting its advertisers out of AFD, the service domainers and registrars use to monetize many parked domain names. Advertisers will be able to opt back in, but are not expected to do so en masse.

Team Internet’s Search reporting unit made $72 million of its $91 million net revenue from AFD last year, which it expects to decline following the changes.

The company said it plans to instead monetize its domains using Google’s newer Related Search On Content product, which shows Google search results including paid results on the publishers’ own sites, based on the content of the page.

That presumably means Team Internet is going to have to populate its domains with spammy, low-quality and presumably AI-generated content, in order to trigger the RSOC contextual algorithm. Thanks, Google!

“The market development has been long-anticipated, though the announced acceleration is a challenge,” Team Internet told investors.

“It is anticipated that, during this transition period, contributions from AFD will decline faster than contributions from RSOC appreciate, meaning that the financial performance of Team Internet’s Search segment will see a trough in 2025 before it recovers from 2026 onwards and returns to the long-term pattern,” it added.

It expects adjusted EBITDA to more than halve for the year in its Search segment, from $57 million last year to between $20 million and $25 million this year. The company said its domains business, which includes its registry and registrars, should be unaffected.

But that domains business seems to be still up for sale. Team Internet said it has received “repeated approaches” for the domains unit and is carrying out a “comprehensive review of its asset ownership”.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, adsense, google, parking, team internet, verdane

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, identity digital

Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question.

Speaking to the media yesterday before a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was “inclined” to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands transferred to Mauritius.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, has the popular .io ccTLD, which is managed by a UK shell company belonging to Identity Digital.

The change of control would likely lead to a change of name, which could eventually lead to .io being retired, as I have previously written.

Trump’s opinion on the deal was seen as critical, as Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, is currently home to a strategically important UK-US military base. The proposed treaty would see the UK lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius for at least 99 years.

UK ministers have recently indicated that the US had an effective veto on the treaty, but Trump said yesterday: “They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years actually. That’s a long time, and I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country.”

While it’s not a definite yes, it perhaps shows the direction of travel, and it’s not great news for .io registrants. Any retirement of .io would take five to 10 years from the point the process starts, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

3 Comments Tagged: biot, chagos, identity digital, io

As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

2 Comments Tagged: .cn, .com, cnnic, new gTLDs, verisign

Second new gTLD contention set revealed

The first showdown between new gTLD application consultants D3 Global and Unstoppable Domains has emerged, with the announcement this week of a bid for a cartoons-themed gTLD by a D3 client.

D3 said in a press release it has partnered with outfits called Animecoin Foundation and Azuki to apply to ICANN for .anime, representing the Japanese art form, when the next application round opens a bit over a year from now.

Together, the two D3 partners provide a cryptocurrency designed to enable people to trade digital art NFTs, and the NFTs themselves.

But the expected .anime application is not the first to be publicly announced. Last June, Unstoppable said it’s planning to apply for .manga and .anime with a client called Kintsugi Global.

It’s the second likely contention set between publicly announced applicants. Freename.io and 3DNS have both separately announced bids for .chain, of course intended for blockchain-related usage.

The next application window is scheduled to open April 2026 or thereabouts. There are multiple ways contention sets can be resolved under the current rules, but the main one is expected to be an ICANN-managed auction.

4 Comments Tagged: .anime, .chain, .manga, 3dns, contention, d3, freename.io, ICANN, new gTLDs, unstoppable

UK intros global domain takedown law

The UK government has introduced legislation that would give police the power to order registries and registrars outside the country to take down domain names being used for serious crime.

The new Crime and Policing Bill (pdf), published yesterday, is a sprawling piece of proposed legislation, covering everything from mobile phone theft to antisocial behavior.

But it includes a section that would codify the police’s ability to demand domain names and IP addresses to be suspended for the first time.

The law would allow the police to ask a judge for a “domain name suspension order”, applicable for up to a year, where they believe the domain is being used to commit “serious crime”.

That’s defined as “the use of violence” or conduct that “results in substantial financial gain” or that would reasonably be expected to carry a jail sentence of three years or more.

Today, the UK police have voluntary relationships with local companies on takedowns. Nominet suspends many thousands of domains every year, most related to intellectual property crime, on the advice of police.

But according to the explanatory notes provided by the government, the law will not replace these deals. It says:

The government strongly supports these voluntary arrangements, and they will continue to be the first port of call for any activity in this space.

However, most domain name registries and registrars are situated outside of the UK and require a court order before they will action requests. These orders (an IP address suspension order or a domain name suspension order) will therefore primarily be served internationally, to ensure that any threat originating from outside the UK can be effectively tackled.

If overseas registries/registrars declined to enforce the court order, UK police could use “police-to-police cooperation and Mutual Legal Assistance” to get it done, the notes say.

The bill has to follow the usual parliamentary process before it becomes law.

Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet, police, suspensions, takedowns

No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat

ICANN’s country-code registries have picked their next representative for the ICANN board of directors.

Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA won the seat, which was vacated last September with the abrupt resignation of incumbent Katrina Sataki, who had already been reelected for a second term.

I believe Holland will join the board, after the formality of approval by ccNSO and the ICANN Empowered Community, immediately as Sataki’s replacement, rather that waiting for this year’s AGM as would usually be the case.

Holland comfortably beat Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet, by 73 votes to 30 in a two-horse race described by one candidate as a disappointing choice between “two kind of middle-aged white guys and native English speakers”.

The election of a Canadian to replace a European as ccNSO representative means the ICANN board has topped out its quota of North Americans, which could have an impact on other election/selection processes.

ICANN’s bylaws state that each of the five geographic regions can have no more than five voting directors.

Directors Tripti Sinha, Sarah Deutsch and Miriam Sapiro all hail from North America. Term-limited Becky Burr, also American, is to be replaced later this year, but the shortlist of her replacement options are both also Americans.

This seems to mean that the Nominating Committee, charged this year with replacing term-limited European Maarten Botterman and renewing or replacing Sajid Rahman and Chris Chapman, both from Asia-Pacific, has had its field of candidates limited somewhat.

The Address Supporting Organization is also in election mode for its board seat this year, but neither of the candidates are North American.

2 Comments Tagged: board, ccnso, ICANN

Registries have started shutting down Whois

Nominet seems to have become the first major registry services provider to start to retire Whois across its portfolio, already cutting off service for about 70 top-level domains.

Queries over port 43 to most of Nominet’s former Whois servers are no longer returning responses, and their URLs have been removed from the respective TLDs’ records on the IANA web site.

The move follows the expiration last month of ICANN’s contractual requirements to provide Whois in all gTLDs. Now, registries must use the successor protocol RDAP instead, with Whois optional.

A Nominet spokesperson tells us the shut-off, which affects large dot-brand clients including Amazon, happened after consultation with ICANN and clients on January 29.

TLDs Nominet was supporting under ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program are also affected.

The registry spokesperson said that the gTLDs .broadway, .cymru, .gop, .pharmacy, and .wales are still offering Whois, due to an interoperability issue:

“The sole reason for the retention of these gTLD WHOIS services is for interoperability with the Brand Safety Alliance (BSA) service integration, which does not yet support RDAP,” she said.

The BSA is the GoDaddy-backed project that offers the multi-TLD GlobalBlock trademark-blocking service.

Nominet’s flagship .uk is also still offering Whois, because Nominet discovered that some of its registrars were still using it, rather than EPP, to do domain availability checks.

The fact that a GoDaddy service and some .uk registrars still don’t support RDAP, even after a years-long ICANN transition plan, is perhaps revelatory.

I’ll admit the only reason I noticed Nominet’s Whois coverage was patchy was that I’d neglected to update one of my scripts and it started failing. Apparently I was not alone.

While RDAP can be fairly simple to implement (if I can do it…), actually finding each registry’s RDAP server is a bit more complicated than under the Whois regime.

All gTLD registries were obliged to offer Whois at whois.nic.[tld], and IANA would publish the URLs on its web site, but RDAP URLs are not standardized.

It’s not super obvious, but it seems instead you have to head over to IANA’s “Bootstrap Service” and download a JSON file containing a list of TLDs and their associated base RDAP URLs.

9 Comments Tagged: amazon, ICANN, nominet, rdap, whois