ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist

An Independent Review Process panel has thrown out a case filed by a failed new gTLD applicant because the applicant was found to have not existed for almost seven years.

A Bahrain-based company called GCCIX had applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year on the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee because it had no affiliation with the actual GCC, a political grouping of nations in the Middle East.

GCCIX has been challenging the rejection ever since, filing an IRP against ICANN in 2021.

But it turns out GCCIX, which apparently had only one employee, has not legally existed in Bahrain since 2018, when it lost its corporate registration for reasons that still seem a mystery even to the IRP panelist.

This kinda scuppers the former company’s ability to do stuff like signing a contract to operate a top-level part of the internet’s infrastructure. Dismissing the case, the IRP panelist wrote:

The Tribunal determines that GCCIX’s status as company “deleted by law” precludes it from engaging in commercial activity under Bahrani law. Those commercial activities undoubtedly include entering into a Registry Agreement and providing the technical and other services required to operate a gTLD… GCCIX has not had the legal capacity to operate a gTLD since at least 2018 and has not revived its capacity despite having ample time to do so.

The question now is who has to pay for this debacle, which seems to involve somewhere between four and 12 years worth of legal fees and other costs. ICANN says it wants sanctions against GCCIX, too.

The panelist said that a decision on costs would have to be made by a full IRP panel, and it’s asked both parties to have a chat about whether they want one.

Comment Tagged: gccix. gcc. irp, ICANN, new gTLDs

.com could return to growth this quarter

Verisign might have some better news for investors and analysts when it delivers its first-quarter financial results — it looks like .com might have turned a corner and returned to growth.

The TLD has added over 540,000 domains to its zone file between the start of the year and February 20, a little over halfway through the quarter, according to the numbers Verisign posts on its web site.

While Q1 has historically been seasonally strong, in the same period of 2024 .com was down by over 63,000 names. Over the whole of 2024, .com’s zone lost 3.7 million domains.

The company recently introduced some registrar marketing programs that CEO Jim Bidzos earlier this month said he was encouraged by. Several registrars have been spotted selling .com first-years for as much as 50% off the regular wholesale price.

Two big registrars — GoDaddy and Squarespace — kicked off expensive ongoing campaigns advertising their web site building services at the February 9 Super Bowl broadcast in the US.

Since the broadcast, .com is up by 186,000 names.

Verisign is currently predicting its domain name base across .com and .net will shrink by between 2.3% and 0.3% for the full year.

Comment Tagged: .com, verisign

Could Musk’s DOGE kill off D3’s .doge?

The creation of the US Department of Government Efficiency raises the possibility of a government objection to .doge, a gTLD that D3 Global has announced it plans to apply for.

D3, a domain name consultancy that is promising to deliver gTLDs in next year’s application round that connect to identities currently only available on blockchains, has said it it working on a bid for .doge.

But that’s an exact match to DOGE, a not-quite “department” of the US government created by President Trump in the last few weeks and headed by megalomaniac billionaire troll Elon Musk.

DOGE is tasked with cutting government spending, waste and fraud, and the department’s devil-may-care modus operandi seems to spawn fresh controversy on an almost hourly basis.

In the D3 context, the word “doge” rather refers to a social media meme from well over a decade ago — a photo of a dog called Kabosu, now dead, used as the mascot of a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin.

D3’s partner on the bid is Own The Doge, a project of PleasrDAO that says it paid $4,240,000 in 2021 for the non-fungible token (NFT) of the original Kabosu photo.

Own The Doge then broke the NFT up into almost 17 billion pieces, which are traded like other digital assets. It also makes money selling Kabosu merch, licensing the image, and selling ownership of single pixels of the original image.

The silly governmental meaning and the silly crypto meaning are linked. Musk, a known fan of Dogecoin, seems to have first proposed DOGE as the name of the agency he proposed to lead as a kind of in-joke.

His first tweet on that topic came August 20 last year, a few weeks before the .doge bid was announced.

Given the timing, the exact-match spelling, and the crossover in the semantic Venn diagram, it seems a .doge gTLD application could present a pretty big target for a formal objection.

If the US decided to start throwing its weight around on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which has substantial powers to scupper gTLD applications, it’s easy to see how it could horse-trade its way to getting a full consensus GAC objection.

But would a Musk-influenced Trump administration choose to object? Or could its mere existence actually prove beneficial to .doge’s future prospects?

We asked D3, and chief marketing officer Mark Trang told us:

While we’re not going to speculate on whether or not the Department of Government Efficiency will affect a future TLD like .doge, anything the current administration does to raise the visibility of domains, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains we view as a positive for our industry.

It almost certainly is far too early to speculate, but that’s never stopped me before.

Quite apart from the .doge issue, the Trump administration has yet to show its hand on how it will interact with internet governance in general and ICANN and the domain name industry in particular.

It looks today, over a year before the next new gTLD application window is scheduled to open, that this kind of thing is pretty far down the Trump administration’s priority list, if it’s even on the radar at all.

The relatively small National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which supplies the US with its civil service GAC representatives, doesn’t even have its politically appointed leadership yet.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, seen by some as Trump’s playbook for government reform, says nothing about ICANN or domain names in its NTIA section (pdf), and even gets the meaning of the A in the name wrong, calling it the “Agency”.

As for Musk, he’s known to be well across domain names as a concept, though he may be a .com fanboy. When he reacquired x.com from PayPal, before subsequently renaming Twitter around the domain, he said it was for sentimental reasons.

While it was pretty much an open secret that the pre-Musk Twitter planned to apply for a .twitter gTLD, the renaming to X of course means that it cannot be a dot-brand under ICANN rules banning single-character Latin TLDs.

But rules don’t seem to matter too much at this moment in history, when the US seems more than ready to dispose of decades-old conventions and use raw financial power to achieve its goals.

So, yeah, it’s pretty much too early to speculate about what .doge and the domain name universe looks like under the Trump/Musk administration, but it’s probably not too early to be worried, or maybe even a little afraid.

Comment Tagged: .doge, d3, dogecoin, ICANN, musk, own the doge, trump

$2 million Christmas bonus for ICANN

The domain industry performed better than expected in the back half of last year — well, better at least than ICANN had predicted.

The Org today said it took in $2 million more in revenue than it expected in the second half of 2024 — ICANN’s fiscal first half — because the gTLD registries and registrars that primarily fund it processed more transactions than it had planned for.

Registry and registrar transaction fees — paid on registrations, renewals and transfers — were both a million bucks ahead of budget at $29 million and $20 million respectively

Its FY25 takings to the end of December totaled $74 million, ahead of its $72 million estimate but flat on its FY24 budget.

Operating costs were in-line with expectations and down on FY24 numbers due to fewer people having their flights and hotels paid for at ICANN 82 in Istanbul last October.

Comment Tagged: budget, financials, ICANN

Another VW car dot-brand crashes out

Volkswagen’s patchy commitment to dot-brand gTLDs is in evidence again this week, as the company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .bentley.

Bentley is one of VW’s luxury car brands, based in the UK. It’s exercised its option to unilaterally terminate its gTLD registry agreement, with no explanation given.

The gTLD had a single resolving domain, which redirected to a .com.

It’s the first dot-brand to terminate this year, thought the notice seems to have been filed with ICANN in December.

VW’s attitude to its original portfolio of dot-brands has been all over the place.

Its .volkswagen, which one might expect to be the flagship, was terminated four years ago, along with its Chinese version, but .seat and .audi each have thousands of active registrations.

1 Comment Tagged: .bentley, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, termination, volkwagen

Largest back-end switch EVER as GoDaddy loses deal

It’s going to be the largest ever migration of a single TLD between back-end registry service providers, but it was announced without fanfare late last week.

On page four of Tucows CEO Elliot Noss’s prepared fourth-quarter remarks to analysts last week, he revealed the company has beaten GoDaddy to take over the contract to run India’s .in ccTLD:

Tucows Domains was recently selected to be the technical services provider for the .IN country code domain, operated by the National Internet Exchange of India. Our teams are closely collaborating and we are establishing a dedicated team in India to support this initiative

Noss said that the migration involves “approximately 4 million domains” and will take place “later this year”.

While NIXI does not publish its registration numbers, Verisign’s Domain Name industry Brief put .in at 4.1 million names at the end of 2024.

Even accounting for upwards rounding by Noss, 4 million names would make the migration the largest in the history of the DNS.

The current record was set in 2018, when Afilias (now Identity Digital) took over Australia’s .au from Neustar (now GoDaddy. There were 3.1 million names in .au at that time.

When Neustar/GoDaddy took over .in from Afilias/Identity Digital in 2019, it was reportedly because it had bid $0.70 per domain, undercutting the incumbent’s offer of $1.10

But, while the deal is surely worth many millions (maybe $10 million over five years if we guess at a $0.50 bid) to Tucows’ top line, it may not be especially profitable.

Noss said in his remarks to analysts: “The pricing and margin contribution for this piece of business is typical of a large, high volume customer.”

But a demonstrable track record of handling large migrations often comes up in registry RFPs, so the .in deal puts Tucows in a strong position in future contract opportunities.

1 Comment Tagged: .in, back-end, godaddy, migration, nixi, rsps, tucows

Yeah, we got phished, ICANN admits after crypto hack

ICANN has confirmed that a phishing attack was responsible for the hacking of its Twitter account last night.

The Org placed this statement, which suggested that the attack may have been more sophisticated than you might have thought, on its home page earlier this evening:

On 11 February 2025, ICANN became aware of a successful phishing attack on our ICANN X [Twitter] account. We are investigating the root cause of the issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. ICANN uses multi-factor authentication on all social media platforms and has confirmed that none of our other accounts have been impacted.

The hack saw ICANN’s Twitter account tweet several messages promoting a newly created memecoin cryptocurrency called $DNS, presumably to scam would-be investors out of money.

The compromise, which seemed to be timed to close of business in ICANN’s home in California, did not last long and the tweets were swiftly deleted.

Now ICANN seems to have confirmed that one of its staffers was phished to obtain @ICANN’s login credentials, but the fact that the account was protected by multi-factor authentication creates an additional wrinkle.

Twitter offers three MFA methods — codes delivered via SMS, a mobile authenticator app, or a hardware token.

In each case, logging in requires the user to have a physical device in their hand to create the secondary login credential. The victim would have had to provide this time-limited one-time password to the attacker too.

I hope the staffer who got suckered, presumably a member of the comms team, isn’t getting too much of a bollocking today, as these kinds of attacks are increasingly sophisticated and managing online life increasingly complex.

Just a day earlier, the well-known BBC political journalist Nick Robinson, who presents the popular Today show on Radio 4, got phished in what one assumes was a very similar way and for an identical purpose.

This BBC article goes into some detail about the attack on Robinson, including screenshots of the phishing email he fell for, and goes a way to explain how even somebody trained to avoid this kind of stuff can have a moment of vulnerability.

While few of Robinson’s one million Twitter followers could have seriously believed that Today had launched a memecoin, it’s more plausible that somebody familiar with crypto and somewhat aware of ICANN could have believed that ICANN would. The two areas of tech increasingly intersect nowadays.

When the attack proved successful, the bad guy must have thought all of her Christmases had come at once.

ICANN says it is going to post more information to its cybersecurity incident log as its investigation progresses.

If it turns out the phish was successful because somebody didn’t check the domain name of the link they were clicking on, it could be fascinating reading.

2 Comments Tagged: crypto, dns, ICANN, security, twitter

ICANN hacked to promote crypto scam

ICANN’s Twitter account appeared to be hacked briefly last night, and was used to promote what looks like a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scam.

A series of tweets from the official @ICANN account plugged a memecoin named $DNS from around 0200 UTC today, just when ICANN’s California crew would have been clocking off for the day.

“2025: The Internet Gets Its Own Currency. @icann is redefining digital ownership with $DNS – the first memecoin to merge domain governance & Web3 culture,” one of the tweets read, according to a screen capture from domain lawyer John Berryhill.

ICYMI pic.twitter.com/f8R3AzaLaO

— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) February 12, 2025

The posts linked to dnscoin.org, which at the time was a live web site promoting “$DNS. Own the Internet Again. ICANN’s decentralized memecoin for domain governance”, according to what little remains visible in Google’s index.

The domain, which had been registered for years, has already been deleted entirely. Not suspended. It’s just gone.

ICANN seems to have restored control over its Twitter account fairly quickly, but Berryhill’s caps show the scam tweets were viewed by at least a couple thousand of @ICANN’s 104,000 followers.

The apparent scam appears to be either a modern-day pump-and-dump scheme, where investors hype up a crypto coin only to cash out when its value peaks, or what crypto investors call a “rug pull”, which is more akin to straightforward theft.

Either way, it seems possible that some people may have lost some money, and ICANN’s not-great reputation for security has certainly suffered another embarrassing setback.

It seems likely that @ICANN either had a weak password, or somebody with access to the account got their device compromised in some way.

ICANN, no doubt sifting through the evidence this morning, has yet to publish an official statement.

Comment Tagged: crypto, dns, ICANN, memecoin, rugpull, scam, solana

Super Bowl a bit of a dud for .com?

Having two of its largest registrars advertising during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast doesn’t seem to have given Verisign’s declining .com flagship much of a boost.

According to numbers published on the company’s web site, .com has grown by about 30,000 domains in the last two days.

While that’s certainly not to be sniffed it, it’s well within the parameters of a normal day’s operation for .com. The TLD’s zone file shrinks more days than it grows nowadays, but five-figure daily upticks are not uncommon.

GoDaddy and Squarespace both took out 30-second spots during the Super Bowl. Both featured high-profile actors and had high production values, but neither mentioned domain names once.

GoDaddy’s focused on its Airo tool and Squarespace’s… goodness knows what that was all about.

Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos last week told analysts that the two commercials were a sign that its registrar partners are starting to focus more on customer acquisition, which should help .com return to growth.

Comment Tagged: .com, godaddy, squarespace, super bowl, verisign

More gloom predicted for .com

Verisign is predicting more shrinkage at .com and .net in 2025, despite a few notes of optimism from its CEO.

The company said last night that its two flagship gTLDs shrunk by a combined 3.7 million domains in 2024, a 2.1% decrease, as I flagged up a couple weeks ago, and that its growth this year will be between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The quarterly loss was around 500,000 domains. Verisign ended the quarter with 169 million domains under management.

CEO Jim Bidzos again told analysts that the shrinkage was partly due to weakness in China and partly due to American registrars concentrating on profit margins over customer acquisition.

Growth was positive in the EMEA region, he said, without quantifying it.

Bidzos said that marketing programs the company recently launched show early signs of adoption by registrars, and that he expects registrars to refocus on customer acquisition as part of a cyclical trend.

He pointed to the fact that two registrars — presumably GoDaddy and Squarespace — have taken out pricey Super Bowl TV ads this weekend as an encouraging sign.

He said that Verisign is “considering looking at” applying for new gTLDs next year and is “looking at the potential for applications”.

The company reported Q4 net income of $191 million, down from $265 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 3.9% at $395 million.

For the full year, Verisign had net income of $786 million versus $818 million in 2023, on revenue that was up 4.3% at $1.56 billion.

Comment Tagged: .com, .net, earnings, financials, verisign