GoDaddy project unveils brand-blocking calculator

GlobalBlock, an ambitious brand-protection initiative led by GoDaddy, has revealed a blocking calculator on its web site, showing potential clients how many thousands of domains they can expect to block for a single annual fee.

The calculator takes the user’s trademark as input (you can enter any string) and tells them how many domains are eligible to be blocked with the GlobalBlock service, which includes exact-match names in hundreds of TLDs, and GlobalBlock+, which includes variants.

The first value seems to top out at 511 right now, suggesting there are currently 511 TLDs live in the system.

The GlobalBlock+ result seems to depend to a large extent on how many potentially confusing homographs (such as ASCII letters that look like Cyrillic or Greek letters) your trademark contains. The string “facebook” shows 58,765 blocks, for example, while “google” returns 63,875.

GlobalBlock, a service of the GoDaddy-owned Brand Safety Alliance, had previously said it expects to launch this week with over 650 supported TLDs. Several gTLD registries are still waiting for ICANN approval to participate via the Registry Service Evaluation Process.

What’s not currently available is pricing. GlobalBlock is selling via “agents”, usually registrars, and while some registrars have already started marketing the service with press releases or blog posts, nobody seems to have put a dollar value on the service yet.

1 Comment Tagged: brand safety alliance, globalblock

Report: Monster “misappropriated” millions from Epik

Epik former CEO Rob Monster “misappropriated” over $3.5 million from the company before his departure last year, according to a report in Wired yesterday.

In a fairly in-depth piece on the registrar’s turbulent 2023, the tech publication said it has had eyes on a forensic accounting document that made the allegations:

An accounting firm hired by Epik to conduct a forensic investigation alleged that Monster had misappropriated more than $3.5 million, according to an internal preliminary report obtained by WIRED. More than $1.5 million was attributed to Monster personally withdrawing funds from the company. Nearly $2 million of Epik funds was used in Kingdom Ventures, Monsters’ venture capital firm, according to the report.

The article does not make it clear whether any criminality is alleged and Monster did not respond to the magazine’s request for comment.

The article also shed some extra light on the takeover of the former Epik Inc registrar by Epik LLC, a new company confirmed by ICANN to be owned by a company-formation outfit in Wyoming called Registered Agents Inc and not affiliated with Monster.

Registered Agents’ lawyer Bryce Myrvang told Wired that the plan is to offer its clients domains and web hosting when they form their companies, apparently confirming that the company is in it for the synergies rather than to hide Epik’s true owner.

Myrvang also offered his apologies to anyone offended by the recent weirdness coming out of its official Twitter account, which led some to believe that Monster was still pulling the strings at the company despite the new ownership.

1 Comment Tagged: epik, ICANN, registered agents

.com is shrinking but Verisign raises prices again anyway

Verisign has confirmed that it plans to exercise its fourth and final .com price-increasing power under its current registry contract, even as its domains under management continues to head south.

The company confirmed last night that it will increase the annual registration and renewal wholesale fee for a .com domain from $9.59 to $10.26 on September 1 this year. It’s the last of the four times it’s allowed to raise prices by up to 7% in its current contract with ICANN, which expires in November.

The news came as Verisign reported its fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 financial results, which were as profitable as we’ve come to expect.

But in terms of domains under management, .com and .net continued to decline, which CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts was all China’s fault. Domains managed by Chinese registrars shrank by 2.2 million in Q4, leading to an overall .com/.net shrinkage of 1.2 million names.

There were nine million new .com/.net registrations in Q4, down from 9.7 million in the same quarter in 2022.

Bidzos said the decline in China was due to factors such as stricter local regulations and a weaker economy, and said he expects those challenges to continue to hit Verisign’s numbers in 2024. He did not blamed higher prices for the drop.

Indeed, the .com zone file has been shrinking by about 1,500 domains per day on average since the start of the year. Zone numbers are usually a reliable predictor of DUM trends.

Revenue from China was down about $14.4 million, CFO George Kilguss said.

Bidzos said Verisign expects its DUM to be flat this year, with a possible 1% swing either way.

For Q4, the company reported revenue up 3% year over year at $380 million, with $265 million net income, up from $179 million a year earlier.

For the whole of 2023, revenue was up 4.8% at $1.49 billion and net income was $818 million, up from $674 million in 2022.

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

D3 announces fourth crypto new gTLD client

New gTLD consultancy startup D3 Global, which emerged just five months ago, is signing up would-be applicants at a pretty rapid clip, announcing its fourth client today.

The company said it is working with NEAR Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, to apply for .near when ICANN opens up the next application window, which is currently expected in 2026.

NEAR is behind what it calls a Blockchain Operating System, a set of software designed to make it easier for developers to create apps that work across multiple blockchains.

D3’s specialty is working with companies that want to apply for gTLDs that work on both blockchains and the consensus ICANN DNS root.

It’s already announced deals with Gate.io (.gate), Viction (.vic) and Shiba Inu (.shib).

4 Comments Tagged: .near, d3, ICANN, near foundation, new gTLDs

Donald Trump loses second UDRP case

Former US president Donald Trump has lost a second cybersquatting case related to his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he lives in Florida.

A three-person WIPO panel late last month ruled that DTTM Holdings, which has owned a trademark on the term Mar-a-Lago since 1997, had failed to show that the registrant of maralago.com, Michael Gargiulo, did not have a legitimate interest in the domain.

Gargiulo, an investor who bought the domain from a third party in 2021, had argued that “mar a lago” is a generic term, meaning “sea to lake” in Spanish and other languages. He also said it could mean the personal name “Mara Lago”.

DTTM failed to convince the WIPO panel otherwise. It ruled (pdf) that “the Complainant was unable to provide persuasive specific evidence to overcome the Respondent’s arguments”. It did not rule on whether the registration was made in bad faith.

It’s the second Mar-a-Lago case DTTM has lost recently. Late last year it lost a UDRP complaint against a company called Marq Quarius (from which Gargiulo acquired maralago.com) over the domain mar-a-lago.com.

The single panelist in the earlier case (pdf) ruled that while the registrant’s defense (that the three words in the domain corresponded to the names of dead pets) strained credulity, there was no evidence of bad-faith cybersquatting.

Trump uses maralagoclub.com for the club’s official web site.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, donald trump, udrp, wipo

UK cybersquatting complaints hit record low

There were fewer cybersquatting complaints filed against .uk domain holders in 2023 than in any other year since Nominet started reporting its annual stats, according to the latest annual Nominet DRS report.

There were just 511 complaints filed last year, down from 568 in 2022, according to the latest report. That’s the lowest number for at least the last 14 years Nominet has been reporting its annual DRS stats. The highest number was 728, in 2015.

Just 48% of cases resulted in a domain being transferred to the complainant (compare to the 82% WIPO reported for its UDRP cases in 2023), up from 43% in 2022, Nominet said.

The number of disputed domains was 680, down from 745 in 2022, but the number of domains in .uk complained about rocketed from 26 to 122, the second-highest level since Nominet opened the second level for direct registrations a decade ago.

The number of disputed .co.uk domains was down from 686 in 2022 to 538 in 2023.

The decline in cybersquatting complaints come as .uk as a whole continues to shrink. The second and third levels combined lost a net 366,778 domains in 2023, ending December at 10,732,479 domains, according to Nominet stats.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, drs, nominet, trademarks

No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse

Public Interest Registry has announced that it will pay for all domain registries to receive alerts when child sexual abuse material shows up in their TLDs.

The non-profit .org operator said today that it will sponsor any registry — gTLD or ccTLD — that wants to sign up to receive the Domain Alerts service from the Internet Watch Foundation, the UK-based charity that tracks CSAM on the internet.

According to the IWF, only a dozen registries currently receive the service, PIR said.

“Our sponsorship will extend access to Domain Alerts to over a thousand TLDs at no cost enabling any interested registry to help prevent the display of criminal, abusive content on their domains,” the company said.

PIR didn’t say how much this is likely to cost it. IWF doesn’t publish its prices, but it seems only paying members usually receive the service. Its membership fees range from £1,000 ($1,259) to £90,000 ($113,372) a year, based on company size.

The partnership also means all registries will have free access to the IWF TLD Hopping List, which tracks CSAM “brands” as they move between TLDs whenever they are taken down by registries in a given jurisdiction.

IWF says that in 2022 it found 255,000 web pages hosting CSAM, spread across 5,416 domains. PIR says it has removed 5,700 instances of CSAM across its portfolio of TLDs over the last five years.

4 Comments Tagged: csam, iwf, pir

ICANN insists it is working on linkification

Having been accused of ignoring the lack of universal support for new gTLDs in favor of virtue-signalling its support for multilingual domain names, ICANN has now insisted it is working on the problem.

ICANN chair Tripti Sinha said in a letter (pdf) published today that ICANN staff have been “actively engaging” with the software developer community on a “multitude of efforts” aimed at getting Universal Acceptance for all domain names.

She was responding to an October 2023 letter from .tube CEO Rami Schwartz, whose solo research last year uncovered the fact that many major app developers — including WhatsApp maker Meta — were relying on hard-coded TLD lists up to eight years old to validate domains.

This meant domains in the hundreds of TLDs that went live after November 2015 were not being detected as domains, and therefore not automatically “linkified” into clickable links, in many near-ubiquitous apps and web sites.

But Sinha insists that ICANN has been putting resources into the problem, including creating a “technical UA team” that is “actively engaging with technical organizations and communities, raising bug reports, as well as contributing open-source code where possible”.

The team has been participating in hackathons and conferences to push the UA message, she said, and has engaging in web sites such as Stack Overflow (where coders ask each other questions about tricky programming problems) to educate developers.

She named Meta and WordPress as software companies ICANN has been reaching out to directly.

“The ICANN org team has been meeting with META and reported UA related issues to them, including linkification. The team has recently also reported the issues shared by you related to more recently delegated TLDs, including .TUBE,” she told Schwartz. “META continues to look into these issues and is making progress towards resolving them.”

She also pointed out that ICANN and the ICANN-funded Universal Acceptance Steering Group held a Universal Acceptance Day last year and will conduct another this year.

UA Day is actually dozens of individual events — over 50 last year — that took place across the world over the space of a couple of months. This year’s event appears to be equally diverse, with events taking place from March to May across many locations mainly in Asia, Africa and South America.

The UASG supplies PowerPoint presentations and videos to each event to use if they wish, but the focus is very much on the substantially trickier problem of UA for internationalized domain names — domains or email addresses that use non-Latin scripts or diacritics not present in ASCII — rather than the lower-hanging fruit of getting developers to update their TLD lists more frequently.

Even though there hasn’t been a new TLD delegation for a couple of years, there were still almost 30 TLDs deleted from the DNS root last year. The number of valid TLDs changes perhaps more frequently than many developers realize.

Walking down the street somewhere, I once saw a barbershop called “Every Six Weekly”. Crap brand, certainly, but the message lodged itself in my borderline autistic nerd brain — that’s how often society expects me to get my hair cut, every six weeks.

Maybe ICANN should try something like that.

Comment Tagged: .tube, .ua, icann. uasg, idns, new gTLDs

Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps

Namecheap has sued ICANN in California, asking a court to force the Org to revisit its decision to lift price caps on .org and .info domain names five years ago.

Registrar CEO Richard Kirkendall announced the suit on Twitter this afternoon:

Today we filed suit against @ICANN. After a previous ruling via a mediation process they have taken little action towards the recommendations of that ruling and so our hand has been forced to take this action. We feel that ICANN is in direct violation of their mandate and…

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) February 5, 2024

The lawsuit follows an Independent Review Process case that Namecheap partially won in December 2022, where the panel said ICANN should hire an economist to look at whether price caps are a good idea before revisiting its decision to scrap them.

The panel found that the ICANN board of directors had shirked its duties to make the decision itself and had failed to act as transparently as its bylaws mandate.

Namecheap says that over a year after that decision was delivered, ICANN has not implemented the IRP panel’s recommendations, so now it wants the Superior Court in Los Angeles to hand down an injunction forcing ICANN to do so.

Before 2019, .org was limited to 10% price increases every year, but the cap was lifted, along with caps in .info and .biz, when ICANN renewed, standardized and updated the respective registries’ Registry Agreements.

After the decision was made to scrap .org price caps, despite huge public outrage, Namecheap rounded up its lawyers almost immediately.

The caps decision led to the ulimtately unsuccessful attempt by Ethos Capital to acquire Public Interest Registry, which runs .org.

Namecheap’s new lawsuit wants the judge to issue “an order directing ICANN to comply with the recommendations of the IRP Panel”.

That means ICANN’s board would be told to consider approaching PIR and .info registry Identity Digital to talk about reintroducing price caps, to hire the economist, and to modify its procedures to avoid any future transparency missteps.

Comment Tagged: .biz, .info, .org, ICANN, identity digital, irp, lawsuit, namecheap, pir, price caps, pricing

GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration

GoDaddy has updated its domain management platform to allow users to add their Ethereum blockchain wallet addresses to their domains for free.

The registrar said it has partnered with Ethereum Name Service to offer the service, which will enable mutual customers to transact with ETH cryptocurrency using regular domain names instead of the massive gibberish strings crypto wallets usually use.

It’s free, due to ENS’s release last week of gasless DNSSEC, which links Ethereum to DNS by placing wallet addresses in the TXT records of domain names.

Before this update, ENS said the crypto transaction fees (“gas fees”) involved in validating domain ownership could reach as high as 0.5 ETH, which is over $1,100 at today’s prices.

The GoDaddy integration means the process of adding the TXT records has been simplified and can the accomplished in just a few clicks via the usual domain management interface.

Using ENS with your domain does require turning on DNSSEC, which adds some security benefits but also carries a downtime risk over the long term.

1 Comment Tagged: blockchain, crypto, ens, ethereum, godaddy