Com Laude acquires Scottish rival

Brand protection registrar Com Laude has picked up smaller competitor Demys for an undisclosed sum.
Demys, based in Edinburgh, is an ICANN-accredited registrar that specializes in the UK automotive, retail/leisure, media and consumer goods sectors.
It also acts as the registry manager and exclusive registrar for .bentley, the lightly-used dot-brand of luxury car-maker Bentley Motors.
It had around 12,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count, about 7,200 of which were in .com.
It’s about an eighth the size of Com Laude in terms of gTLD domains under management.
Demys has a very light footprint in new gTLDs, with local geo .scot — where it is the largest corporate registrar and fifth-largest registrar overall — being a notable exception.
London-based Com Laude said it was also interested in the company for its brand monitoring services and dispute resolution work.
Two of Demys’ top guys act as arbitrators for UDRP and .uk’s Dispute Resolution Service.

Comment Tagged: .bentley, acquisition, bentley motors, brand protection, com laude, demys, trademarks

CentralNic acquired yet another company

Acquisitive registry/registrar CentralNic has picked up another company, paying up to €2.56 million ($2.95 million) for a small Delaware-based registrar.
It will pay €1.5 million up-front for GlobeHosting, with the rest coming in two annual installments.
GlobeHosting may have a US corporate address, but it plays primarily in the Romanian and Brazilian markets.
It’s not ICANN-accredited. Instead, it acts as a Tucows reseller for gTLD domains (though I imagine that arrangement’s days are numbered).
The company had revenue of €849,000 for the 12 months to July 31 2018 and EBITDA of €419,000, CentralNic said.
The timing is arguably opportunistic. Earlier this year, Romanian registry ICI Bucharest (or ROtld) introduced an annual domain registration renewal fee for the first time (for real).
It recently started deleting names that do not pay the fee, a modest €6 per year.
CentralNic said that GlobeHosting, which appears to be notable player in the .ro market, is “expected to benefit” from this change.

Comment Tagged: .ro, acquisition, centralnic, globehosting, ici bucharest, rotld, tucows

Empty Whois a threat to the US elections?

Could a lack of Whois records thwart the fight against attempts to interfere in this year’s US elections?
That’s the threat raised by DomainTools CEO Tim Chen in a blog post, and others, this week.
Chen points to recent research by Facebook, based on an investigation by security company FireEye, that linked a large network of bogus news sites and social media accounts to the Iranian state media.
FireEye’s investigation used “historical Whois records”, presumably provided by DomainTools, to connect the dots between various domains and registrants associated with “Liberty Front Press”, a purportedly independent media organization and prolific social media user.
Facebook subsequently found that 652 accounts, pages and groups associated with the network, and removed them from its platform.
The accounts and sites in question were several years old but had been focusing primarily on politics in the UK and US since last year, Facebook said.
Based on screenshots shared by Facebook, the accounts had been used to spread political messages bashing US president Donald Trump and supporting the UK’s staunchly pro-Palestinian opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Google’s research, also inspired by FireEye’s findings and Whois data, linked the network to the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
The actions by Google and Facebook come as part of their crackdown on fake news ahead of the US mid-term Congressional elections, this November, which are are largely being seen as a referendum on the Trump presidency.
Because the domains in question predate the General Data Protection Regulation and ICANN’s response to it, DomainTools was able to capture Whois records before they went dark in May.
While the records often use bogus data, registrant email addresses common to multiple domains could be used to establish common ownership.
Historical Whois data for domains registered after May 2018 is not available, which will likely degrade the utility of DomainTools’ service over time.
Chen concluded his blog post, which appeared to be written partly in response to data suggesting that GDPR has not led to a growth in spam, with this:

Domain name Whois data isn’t going to solve the world’s cyberattack problems all on its own, but these investigations, centering on an issue of global importance that threatens our very democracy, likely get severely impaired without it. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, a few uniquely important investigations among the hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks going on all day every day all over the globe by people and organizations that can now hide behind the anonymity inherent in today’s internet. It’s reasonable that domain names used for certain commercial or functional purposes should require transparent registration information. Whois is not a crime.

DomainTools is one of the founders of the new Coalition for a Secure and Transparent Internet, a lobby group devoted to encouraging legislatures to keep Whois open.
Representatives of Facebook and Iran’s government are among the members of the Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, an emergency ICANN working group that is currently trying to write a permanent GDPR-compliant Whois policy for ICANN.

6 Comments Tagged: DomainTools, elections, epdp, facebook, fake news, fireeye, gdpr, google, privacy, security, whois

Donuts gets bought by former ICANN CEO’s firm

Donuts is to be bought by a private equity firm that has a former ICANN CEO as a partner.
The company, which holds the largest portfolio of new gTLDs, has agreed to be acquired by Boston-based private equity firm Abry Partners for an undisclosed sum.
Not much info about the deal has been released, but one senses an ICANN alum’s hand at the wheel.
Former ICANN chief Fadi Chehade is a partner at Abry, having been initially employed as senior advisor on digital strategy back in 2016 after he left ICANN.
Abry, on its web site, says it focuses its investments on profitable companies, adding:

Depending on the type of fund, we target investments from $20 million to $200 million.
Since Abry’s inception, we’ve developed deep industry expertise in Broadband, Business Services, Communications, Cybersecurity, Healthcare IT, Information Services, Insurance Services, Internet-of-Things, Logistics, Media, and Software as a Service.

Since its formation in 1989, Abry has “completed more than $77 billion of transactions, representing investments in more than 650 properties.”
Donuts was founded by domain veterans Paul Stahura, Jon Nevett, Richard Tindal and Daniel Schindler in order to take advantage of ICANN’s new gTLD program..
It was initially funded by $100 million from Austin Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, TL Ventures, Generation Partners and Stahurricane.
It currently runs over 200 TLDs, the most populous of which I believe is .ltd, with over 400,000 names.
Donuts is the latest of a series of domain companies to exit via the private equity route, notably following Neustar and Web.com.
Chehade was ICANN’s CEO between 2012 and 2015. While he was not involved in the industry during the new gTLD’s program’s inception, he did oversee its early years.

3 Comments Tagged: abry partners, acquisition, donuts, ICANN

.tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned

A Chinese registrar that focused exclusively on selling .tel domain names has been shut down by ICANN.
Tong Ji Ming Lian (Beijing) Technology Corporation Ltd, which did business as Trename, had its registrar contract terminated last week.
ICANN claims the company had failed to pay its accreditation fees and failed to escrow its registration data.
The organization had been sending breach notices since June, but got no responses. Trename’s web site domain currently resolves to a web server error, for me at least.
Trename is a rare example of a single-TLD registrar, accredited only to sell .tel domains. It didn’t even sell .com.
It is Telnames’ second-largest registrar after Name.com, accounting for about 6,000 names at the last count. At its peak, it had about 55,000.
Its share seems to be primarily as a result of a deal the registry made with a Chinese e-commerce company way back in 2011.
I’m a bit fuzzy on the details of that deal, but it saw Trename add 50,000 .tel names pretty much all at once.
Back then, .tel still had its original business model of hosting all the domains it sold and publishing web sites containing the registrant’s contact information.
Since June 2017, .tel has been available as a general, anything-goes gTLD, after ICANN agreed to liberalize its contract.
That liberalization doesn’t seem to have done much to stave off .tel’s general decline in numbers, however. It currently stands at about 75,000 names, from an early 2011 peak of over 305,000.
ICANN told Trename that its contract will end September 19, and that it’s looking for another registrar to take over its domains.
With escrow apparently an issue, it may not be a smooth transition.

2 Comments Tagged: .tel, breach, compliance, ICANN, telnames, termination, trename

Whois privacy did NOT increase spam volumes

The advent of more-or-less blanket Whois privacy has not immediately led to the feared uptick in spam, according to researchers.
Data from Cisco’s Talos email data service, first highlighted by security company Recorded Future this week, shows spam levels have been basically flat to slightly down since ICANN’s GDPR-inspired new Whois policy came into effect May 25.
Public Talos data shows that on May 1 this year there were 433.9 billion average daily emails and 370.04 billion spams — 85.28% spam.
This was down to 361.83 billion emails and 308.05 billion spams by August 1, an 85.14% spam ratio, according to Recorded Future.
So, basically no change, and certainly not the kind of rocketing skyward of spam levels that some had feared.
Cisco compiles its data from customers of its various security products and services.
Looking at Talos’ 18-month view, it appears that spam volume has been on the decline since February, when the ratio of spam to ham was pretty much identical to post-GDPR levels.
It also shows a similar seasonal decline during the northern hemisphere’s summer 2017.

There had been a fear in some quarters that blanket Whois privacy would embolden spammers to register more domains and launch more ambitious spam campaigns, and that the lack of public data would thwart efforts to root out the spammers themselves.
While that may well transpire in future, the data seems to show that GDPR has not yet had a measurable impact on spam volume at all.

Comment Tagged: cisco, gdpr, ICANN, privacy, recorded future, security, spam, talos, whois

Afilias finally admits it’s American

Afilias has changed its corporate structure and is now officially based in the United States.
A new holding company, Afilias Inc, has been created in Delaware. It now owns Afilias Plc, the Ireland-based company that has been until now the parent of the Afilias family.
Being “based” in Ireland and doing business primarily in the US was always partly a tax thing, and the company admitted in a press release yesterday that “recent favorable US tax changes” are one of the reasons it’s relocating to the States.
Trump’s tax changes last year reportedly saw corporation tax reduced from 35% to 21%, a steep cut but still a heck of a lot higher than Ireland’s aggressively business-friendly regime.
Other reasons for shift, CEO Hal Lubsen said in a press release, are: “More of the company’s shares are now owned by Americans, and our executive group is increasingly becoming American.”
The company also noted that its biggest partners — Public Interest Registry and GoDaddy — are American.
Afilias’s global HQ is now its office in Horsham, Pennsylvania. It also has offices in Canada, Australia, India and China.
The company told registrars that it does not expect the restructuring to have any impact on its operations.

Comment Tagged: afilias

Could a new US law make GDPR irrelevant?

Opponents of Whois privacy are pushing for legislation that would basically reverse the impact of GDPR for the vast majority of domain names.
Privacy advocate Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project today scooped the news that draft legislation to this effect is being circulated by “special interests” in Washington DC.
He’s even published the draft (pdf).
Mueller does not call out the authors of the bill by name — though he does heavily hint that DomainTools may be involved — saying instead that they are “the same folks who are always trying to regulate and control the Internet. Copyright maximalists, big pharma, and the like.”
I’d hazard a guess these guys may be involved.
The bill is currently called the Transparent, Open and Secure Internet Act of 2018, or TOSI for short. In my ongoing quest to coin a phrase and have it stick, I’m tempted to refer to its supporters as “tossers”.
TOSI would force registries and registrars to publish Whois records in full, as they were before May this year when ICANN’s “Temp Spec” Whois policy — a GDPR Band-aid — came into effect.
It would capture all domain companies based in US jurisdiction, as well as non-US companies that sell domains to US citizens or sell domains that are used to market goods or services to US citizens.
Essentially every company in the industry, in other words.
Even if only US-based companies fell under TOSI, that still includes Verisign and GoDaddy and therefore the majority of all extant domains.
The bill would also ban privacy services for registrants who collect data on their visitors or monetize the domains in any way (not just transactionally with a storefront — serving up an ad would count too).
Privacy services would have to terminate such services when informed that a registrant is monetizing their domains.
But the bill doesn’t stop there.
Failing to publish Whois records in full would be an “unfair or deceptive act or practice” and the Federal Trade Commission would be allowed to pursue damages against registries and registrars that break the law.
In short, it’s a wish-list for those who oppose the new regime of privacy brought in by ICANN’s response to the General Data Protection Regulation.
While it’s well-documented that the US executive branch, in the form of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is no fan of GDPR, whether there’s any interest in the US Congress to adopt such legislation is another matter.
Is this an IP lawyer’s pipe-dream, or the start of a trans-Atlantic war over privacy? Stay tuned!

5 Comments Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, legislation, ntia, Open and Secure Internet Act, privacy, tosi, Transparent, whois

No more free ride for ICANN Fellows?

Newcomers who get free travel to ICANN meetings will have to show they’re serious about participating in the community, under new rules.
ICANN is revamping its Fellowship program to ensure that it’s actually meetings its goals of increasing the pool of mugs knowledgeable volunteers that the community can draw on.
The program, designed to bring in people unable to afford their own in-person meeting attendance, had come in for criticism for not being sufficiently accountable, and perhaps a poor use of money in a time of budget pressure.
It’s not been easy to measure the ratio of valuable ICANN citizens it was creating versus freeloaders who abuse the system for a free busman’s holiday.
Among the key changes being introduced now are requirements for Fellows to attend a minimum number of session-hours per meeting, casually policed by seven “mentors” — selected from and appointed by each supporting organization and advisory committee.
The number of hours required doesn’t appear to be set in stone as yet, with ICANN saying it will work with mentors to arrive at a figure.
While ICANN admits it obviously can’t force Fellows to participate after their first meeting, it plans to make sure returning Fellows can provide documentary evidence that they have engaged on subsequent applications for the program.
The three-meetings-only rule will remain.
The request for post-meeting reports from Fellows will be piloted at the Barcelona meeting in October.
More information of program revamps can be found here.

1 Comment Tagged: fellowship, ICANN

Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal

Afilias has sued the Indian government to prevent it awarding the .in ccTLD back-end registry contract to fierce rival Neustar.
The news emerged in local reports over the weekend and appears to be corroborated by published court documents.
According to Moneycontrol, the National Internet Exchange of India plans to award the technical service provider contract to Neustar, after over a decade under Afilias, but Afilias wants the deal blocked.
The contract would also include some 15 current internationalized domain name ccTLDs, with another seven on the way, in addition to .in.
That’s something Afilias reckons Neustar is not technically capable of, according to reports.
Afilias’ lawsuit reportedly alleges that Neustar “has no experience or technical capability to manage and support IDNs in Indian languages and scripts and neither does it claim to have prior experience in Indian languages”.
Neustar runs plenty of IDN TLDs for its dot-brand customers, but none of them appear to be in Indian scripts.
NIXI’s February request for proposals (pdf) contains the requirement: “Support of IDN TLDs in all twenty two scheduled Indian languages and Indian scripts”.
I suppose it’s debatable what this means. Actual, hands-on, operational experience running Indian-script TLDs at scale would be a hell of a requirement to put in an RFP, essentially locking Afilias into the contract for years to come.
Only Verisign and Public Interest Registry currently run delegated gTLDs that use officially recognized Indian scripts, according to my database. And those TLDs — such as Verisign’s .कॉम (the Devanagari .com) — are basically unused.
Neither Neustar nor Afilias have responded to DI’s requests for comment today.
.in has over 2.2 million domains under management, according to NIXI.
Neustar’s Indian subsidiary undercut its rival with a $0.70 per-domain-year offer, $0.40 cheaper than Afilias’ $1.10, according to Moneycontrol.
That would make the deal worth north of $12 million over five years for Afilias and over $7.7 million for Neustar.
One can’t help but be reminded of the two companies’ battle over Australia’s .au, which Afilias sneaked out from under long-time incumbent Neustar late last year.
That handover, the largest in DNS history, was completed relatively smoothly a couple months ago.

1 Comment Tagged: .in, back-end, cctlds, idns, india, lawsuit, neustar, nixi, rfp