After more racist shootings, take one guess which registrar 8chan just switched to

Controversial web forum 8chan has moved its domain name to a new registrar after it was linked to at least one of the two mass shootings that occurred in the US over the weekend.
According to Whois records, it’s just jumped to racist-friendly Epik, having been registered at Tucows since 2003.
The switch appears to have happened in the last few hours. At time of writing, you’re going to get different results depending which Whois server you ping.
Some servers continue to report Tucows as the registrar of record, perhaps using cached data, but Epik’s result looks like this:

8chan is an image/discussion board that describes itself as “the Darkest Reaches of the Internet”. It’s reportedly heavily used by racists, extremists and those with an interest in child pornography.
It was widely linked by the media to the shooting in the border town of El Paso, Texas on Saturday, which claimed the lives of 20 people and left 26 more injured.
The suspect in the case reportedly posted to 8chan a 2,300-word racist “manifesto”, in which he ranted against Latino immigration, just 20 minutes before launching the attack.
This morning, Cloudflare announced that it would no longer provide denial-of-service attack protection for the web site, saying:

The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

Google removed the site from its index a few years ago, due to allegations about child abuse material.
At this point, it’s not clear whether Tucows also ejected 8chan, or whether its owners decided to jump ship, perhaps sensing which way the wind is blowing.
Its new home, Epik, calls itself the “Swiss bank” of domain registrars, and has actively courted sites that enable far-right political views.
The registrar openly sought the business of Gab.com, the Twitter clone used largely by those who have been banned by Twitter, after GoDaddy suspended the site’s domain last November.
In March this year, Epik CEO Rob Monster came under fire for publicly doubting the veracity of the video of the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 people.
8chan was also frequented by the perpetrator of that attack, among others.
Epik is described as “cornering the market on websites where hate speech is thriving”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-racist group.
Monster has said that he does not support the views of extremists, but merely wants to provide a platform where registrants can exercise their rights to free speech.

4 Comments Tagged: 8chan, censorship, cloudflare, epik, free speech, racism, terrorism, tucows

Radix releases huge amount of premium domain data

Radix made $1,360,865 from premium domain names in its portfolio of new gTLDs in the first half of the year, according to the company’s latest report.
The company said that $522,365 of that came from new registrations — there were 619 in total — with the balance of $838,500 coming from renewals.
Radix is one of the registries that charges a premium fee every year over the life of the registration.
Because of this, its first-year renewal rates for premiums are not fantastic — just 54% of names registered in the first half of 2018 were renewed a year later.
But older premiums renewed at a more-than-respectable 78%, comparable to peak-.com, according to the Radix report.
.store and .online accounted for about half of renewal revenue.
.online and .tech accounted for more than half of new registration revenue.
GoDaddy sold 41.6% of all the names moved in the half.
For Radix, a premium domain is anything priced at $100 or above. That’s lower than some gTLDs’ base non-premium fee.
It sold three names at $10,000 during the period.

Comment Tagged: .online, .store, .tech, new gTLDs, premiums, radix, renewals

ICANN dumps the “Whois” in new Whois tool

Of all the jargon regularly deployed in the domain name industry and ICANN community, “Whois” is probably the one requiring the least explanation.
It’s self-explanatory, historically doing exactly what it says on the tin. But it’s on its way out, to be replaced by the far less user-friendly “RDAP”.
The latest piece of evidence of this transition: ICANN has pushed its old Whois query tool aside in favor of a new, primarily RDAP-based service that no longer uses the word “Whois”.
RDAP is the Registration Data Access Protocol, the IETF’s standardized Whois replacement to which gTLD registries and registrars are contractually obliged to migrate their registrant data.
Thankfully, ICANN isn’t branding the service on this rather opaque acronym. Rather, it’s using the word “Lookup” instead.
The longstanding whois.icann.org web site has been deprecated, replaced with lookup.icann.org. Visitors to the old page will be bounced to the new one.
The old site looked like this:

The new site looks like this:

It’s pretty much useless for most domains, if you want to find out who actually owns them.
If you query a .com or .net domain, you’ll only receive Verisign’s “thin” output. This does not included any registrant information.
That’s unlike most commercial Whois services, which also ping the relevant registrar for the full thick record.
For non-Verisign gTLDs, ICANN will return the registry’s thick record, but it will be very likely be mostly redacted, as required under ICANN’s post-GDPR privacy policy.
While contracted parties are still transitioning away from Whois to RDAP, the ICANN tool will fail over to the old Whois output if it receives no RDAP data.
Under current ICANN Whois policy, registries and registrars have until August 26 to deploy RDAP services to run alongside their existing Whois services.

10 Comments Tagged: ICANN, rdap, whois

Now auDA loses its CEO too

The CEO of Australian ccTLD registry auDA has quit, just weeks after the organization’s chair resigned.
Cameron Boardman submitted his resignation yesterday, according to a statement.
Former chair Chris Leptos also quit last month, reportedly after a disagreement with Boardman.
Boardman said he wants “to seek new challenges”.
His functions will be carried out by other members of the executive team while a replacement is sought by the board.
Boardman joined as CEO in March 2016, after 16-year veteran Chris Disspain was fired.
For much his tenure, auDA has been beset by controversy, with fights between the board and members leading to government review, several board resignations, police investigation, and a seemingly endless series of tit-for-tat allegations.
Boardman was among four auDA directors who survived a no-confidence vote brought by domain investors last year.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, cctlds

Porn blocks could be worth millions to MMX

Minds + Machines could find itself making millions of dollars a year out of non-resolving defensive registrations in its recently acquired portfolio of porn-themed gTLDs.
The company recently announced the launch of AdultBlock and AdultBlock Plus, which will enable trademark owners to prevent anyone else registering their marks, and variants thereof, for up to 10 years.
Running the numbers, and taking into account MMX’s already substantial established client base for such services, AdultBlock could bring in as much as $11 million a year. But it’s almost certainly going to be much less than that.
The company won’t disclose it’s exact pricing for AdultBlock, or its revenue estimates, but it’s possible to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations and come to some ball-park guesses.
MMX has said that it’s pricing the service such that customers should be able to see a 35% saving compared to the cost of registering a single string across all four of its porn TLDs
The company acquired .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex when it bought ICM Registry last year.
The wholesale fee for each of the four is believed to be about $68 a year. From this, we can calculate that the wholesale price of AdultBlock may well be around the $175-a-year mark.
There’s some room for error here, as MMX hasn’t revealed precisely how it came to its 35% number, but I think we can safely say we’re looking at $150 to $200 a year. For the purposes of this envelope, let’s split the difference and assume it’s $175.
It’s quite a high number, a bit like a recurring sunrise fee for a domain that you don’t even get to use.
But how many domains can MMX expect to be blocked?
A low-ball estimate could be modeled on the .porn/.adult/.sex sunrise periods.
.porn launched in 2015 and gathered 2,091 sunrise registrations, according to ICANN records, making it one of the largest new gTLD sunrise periods. The other two TLDs weren’t far behind.
If that’s a good guide for AdultBlock uptake, we’re talking about a piddling $360,000-a-year business.
But MMX has a secret weapon that it inherited from .xxx.
When .xxx launched back in 2011, it kicked off with two sunrise periods. Sunrise A was for trademark owners in the porn business who wanted to use their .xxx names. Sunrise B was for everyone else, who didn’t.
In Sunrise B, brand owners paid $162 (plus their registrar’s markup) to block their domains for a flat period of 10 years.
Customers couldn’t use their domains. They were registered to ICM and used specially designated ICM name servers to resolve to a standard, non-monetized placeholder page stating “This domain has been reserved from registration.”
There are over 80,000 domains using these name servers, but about 15,000 of those represent names of celebrities, cities, and religiously and culturally sensitive terms that ICM culled from Wikipedia and unilaterally reserved to help avoid a tabloid crucifixion if mileycyrus.xxx ever started bouncing children to something pornographic, such as one of her music videos.
(As an aside, I think it’s worth mentioning that the .xxx zone file only has 93,000 names in it. These means about nine out of 10 live .xxx domains are reserved by the registry.)
So we’ve got 65,000 trademarks that are currently blocked in .xxx, and they’re all going to expire in 2021 because ICM only sold blocks for the duration of its original 10-year ICANN contract.
If all 65,000 domains are upgraded to AdultBlock, the service would be worth over $11 million a year, to a company currently reporting annual revenue around $15 million.
But they won’t.
You don’t have to scroll too far down the .xxx zone file (and I didn’t) to discover some absolute garbage, no doubt the result of scaremongering around the 2011 .xxx launch.
I mean, seriously, look at some of this Sunrise B guff:

100percentwholewheatthatkidslovetoeat.xxx, 101waystoleaveagameshow.xxx, 1firstnationalmergersandacquisitions.xxx, 1stchoiceliquorsuperstore.xxx, 2bupushingalltherightbuttons.xxx, 247claimsservicethesupportyouneed30minutesguaranteed.xxx, 3pathpowerdeliverysystembypioneermagneticsinc.xxx

I think we’re going to be looking at a significant junk drop of blocked domains come 2021.
That said, I think MMX may have a psychological advantage here, when it comes to persuading Sunrise B users to “renew”.
Who hasn’t renewed a domain name they strongly suspect they will never use or sell, simply because they couldn’t bear the thought of somebody else owning “their” domain?
An additional consideration for brand owners is that these Sunrise B names are going to show up on drop-lists when they are eventually deleted from the .xxx zone file, perhaps giving inspiration to cybersquatters.
This is a fantastic opportunity for MMX and brand protection registrars to put the hard sell on its Sunrise B customers to “renew” their blocks by upgrading to the new and improved AdultBlock service, which could cost literally 10 times more than what they originally signed up for.
AdultBlock is of course more comprehensive than Sunrise B. It covers three additional TLDs, for starters, and customers can pay a little more for potentially thousands of potential homographs (non-Latin-script domains that look almost identical to the original) to also be blocked.
MMX isn’t waiting until 2021, however. It’s currently offering companies that buy a 10-year-block before the end of 2019 the AdultBlock+ service for the price of the vanilla, no-variants offering.
Existing Sunrise B customers have until the same deadline to purchase the new service without having to have their trademarks re-verified, which carries an additional fee.
For those that miss this early-bird offer, come December 2021, the holders of up 65,000 trademarks are going to face a stark choice: sign up to pay a couple hundred bucks a year, or risk their brands being snapped up by pornsquatters.

1 Comment Tagged: .adult, .sex, cybersquatting, icm registry, Minds + Machines, mmx, porn, trademarks, xxx

Cryptocurrency firms to be banned from .bank

The registry for the already heavily restricted .bank and .insurance gTLDs wants to change its policies to make it clear that cryptocurrency firms are not welcome.
fTLD Registry Services has opened up a public comment period on proposed changes to its eligibility policies for the two TLDs which would drop the “service provider” category of registrant.
It would also clarify that eligible entities have to be “retail” banks regulated by a proper government authority.
The elimination of “service providers” is an effort to clarify that .bank is for banks and not peer-to-peer or cryptocurrency payment providers.
Heather Diaz, senior director of compliance and policy at fTLD, told us that the service provider category was created to allow “banking core processors” and the like to register domains. She said in an email:

More recently, as the financial services arena has evolved, particularly as it relates to fintechs offering financial products/services (e.g., P2P payment providers, cryptocurrency companies), we have found that some prospective Registrants were seeking domains to enhance their legitimacy to market to regulated entities and/or consumers.

By eliminating the category, fTLD hopes to clarify that .bank is just for regulated banks.
Registrants that already own service provider domains (it sounds like there are only one or two) would be grandfathered under the proposed policy, so nobody’s going to lose their existing domains.
The proposed changes were boiled up by fTLD’s bank-led Advisory Committee and its board of directors.
Comments are being accepted until August 24, after which the company’s board will decide whether to implement the new policies.

4 Comments Tagged: .bank, .insurance, cryptocurrency, ftld, new gTLDs

Cybersquatting cases down a bit in the UK

The number of cybersquatting complaints filed with Nominet declined slightly in 2018, according to the registry.
Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, which is a bit like the UDRP, handled 671 cases last year, compared to 712 in 2017.
The number of domains at issue was down from 783 to 763.
The slight decline appears to be because fewer complaints were filed against .org.uk, .me.uk and plain .uk domains.
The number of .co.uk registrations challenged was flat between 2017 and 2018 at 617 domains.
Only 49% of cases resulted in the disputed domain being transferred, according to the registry’s annual report (pdf).

Comment Tagged: .co.uk, .uk, cybersquatting, drs, nominet, udrp

Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner

It appears that the struggling new gTLD .fans has changed ownership for the second time in a year.
According to ICANN’s web site, the .fans Registry Agreement was assigned to a company called ZDNS International on June 28.
Since August 2018, the contract had been in the hands of a CentralNic subsidiary called Fans TLD, having been originally operated by Asiamix Digital.
ZDNS International appears to be a newish Hong Kong subsidiary of major China-based DNS service provider ZDNS.
ZDNS provides DNS services for more than 20 TLDs, mostly Chinese-language, but as far as I can tell it is not the contracted party for any.
It’s also known for providing registry gateway services for non-Chinese registries that want to set up shop in the country.
CentralNic took over .fans last year after Asiamix failed to get the TLD’s sales to take off.
.fans had about 1,700 domains under management at the time, and it’s been pretty much flat ever since. I don’t think CentralNic has been promoting it.
Over the same period, singular competitor .fan, which Donuts acquired from Asiamix last year, has gone from 0 to almost 3,000 registrations.
If CentralNic, a public company, made a profit on the flip it does not appear to have been material enough to require disclosure to shareholders.

Comment Tagged: .fan, .fans, acquisition, asiamix, donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs, zdns

Can NameCheap reverse .org price cap scrap?

NameCheap has taken it upon itself to fight ICANN’s decision to remove price increase caps on .org. But does it stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning?
The registrar has filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, appealing the organization’s signing of a Registry Agreement with Public Interest Registry that allows PIR to raise prices by however much it wants, more or less whenever that it wants.
NameCheap, which had over 390,000 .org domains under management at the last count, says it is fighting for 700-odd of its customers whose comments, filed with ICANN, were allegedly not taken into account when the decision was made, along with registrars and everyone else that may be adversely impacted by unfettered .org price increases.
NameCheap thinks its business could be harmed if price increases are uncapped, with customers perhaps letting their domains expire instead of renewing. It’s RfR states:

The decision by ICANN org to unilaterally remove the price caps when renewing legacy TLDs with little (if any) evidence to support the decision goes against ICANN’s Commitments and Core Values, and will result in harm to millions of internet users throughout the world.
…
Unrestricted price increases for legacy TLDs will stifle internet innovation, harm lesser served regions and groups, and significantly disrupt the internet ecosystem. An incredible variety of public comments was submitted to ICANN from all continents (except Antarctica) imploring ICANN to maintain the legacy TLD price caps — which were completely discounted and ignored by ICANN org.

Before the new contract was signed, PIR was limited to a 10% increase in its .org registry fee every year. It didn’t always exercise that right, and has said twice in recent months that it still has no plans to increase its prices.
The new contract — which has already been signed and is in effect — was subjected to a public comment period that attracted over 3,200 comments, almost all of them expressing support for maintaining the caps.
Despite not-for-profit PIR’s protestations, many commenters came from the position that giving PIR the power to increase its fee without limit would very possibly lead to price gouging.
That ICANN allegedly “ignored” these comments is the key pillar of NameCheap’s RfR case.
The public comment period was a “sham”, the registrar claims.
But is this enough to make ICANN change its mind and (somehow) unsign the .org contract?
There are three ways, under ICANN’s bylaws, to win an RfR.
Requestors can show that the board or staff did something that contradicts “ICANN’s Mission, Commitments, Core Values and/or established ICANN policy(ies)”
They also win if they can show the decision was was taken “without consideration of material information” or with “reliance on false or inaccurate relevant information”.
It’s quite a high bar, and most RfRs are rejected by the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which is the court of first instance for reconsideration requests.
Requestors rarely show up with sufficient new information sufficiently persuasive to kick the legs from under ICANN’s original decision, and the question of something contradicting ICANN’s core principles is usually a matter of interpretation.
For example, in this case, NameCheap is arguing that failing to side with the commenters who disagreed with the removal of price caps amounts to a breach of ICANN’s Core Value to make all decisions in consultation with stakeholders:

The ICANN org will decide whether to accept or reject public comment, and will unilaterally make its own decisions — even if that ignores the public benefit or almost unanimous feedback to the contrary, and is based upon conclusory statements not supported by the evidence. This shows that the public comment process is basically a sham, and that ICANN org will do as it pleases in this and other matters.

But one of ICANN’s stated reasons for approving the contract was to abide by its Core Value to depend “on market mechanisms to promote and sustain a competitive environment in the DNS market”. It doesn’t want to be a price regulator, in other words.
So we have a clash of Core Values here. It will be pretty easy for ICANN’s lawyers — who drafted the contract and will draft the resolutions of the BAMC and the full board — to argue that the Core Values were respected.
I think NameCheap is going to have a hard time here.
Even if it were to win, how on earth does one unsign a contract? As far as I can tell, ICANN has no termination rights that would apply here.
Where the RfR will certainly succeed is to force the ICANN board itself to take ownership, on the record, of the .org contract decision.
As ICANN explained to DI earlier this month, while the board was very much kept in the loop on the state of negotiations, it was senior staff that made all the calls on the new contract.
But an RfR means that the BAMC, which comprises five directors, will first have to raise their hands to confirm the .org decision was kosher.
NameCheap will then get a chance to file a rebuttal before the BAMC decision is handed to the full ICANN board for a confirmatory vote.
While the first two board discussions of the .org contract were not minuted, the bylaws contain an interesting feature related to RfRs that I’d never noticed before today:

If the Requestor so requests, the Board shall post both a recording and a transcript of the substantive Board discussion from the meeting at which the Board considered the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee’s recommendation.

I sincerely hope NameCheap invokes this right, as I think it’s pretty important that we get some additional clarity on ICANN’s thinking here.

3 Comments Tagged: .org, accountability, ICANN, pir, price caps, pricing, public interest registry, reconsideration

Neustar to keep .us for another decade

Neustar has secured a renewal of its contract to run the United States’ ccTLD until up to 2029.
The company and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced the new contract last week.
The initial term of the deal runs until August 2021, but there are four two-year renewal options after that.
Neustar has been running .us since 2001. It doesn’t pay NTIA for the privilege, nor does the NTIA pay Neustar.
There are currently around two million registered .us domain names. The TLD appears to be still growing, but not especially fast.

Comment Tagged: .us, cctlds, neustar, ntia