Dead terrorist domains for sale, just without the hyphens

People are trying to make a quick buck flogging domains matching the names of suspects in recent terrorist atrocities, but they’re stopping short of including the hyphens.

The 2024 Christmas-New Year period was marked by two vehicular terrorist incidents on either side of the Atlantic: the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany on December 20 and the Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans, Louisiana in the early hours of January 1.

In both cases, domains (almost) matching the names of the alleged attackers were registered within minutes of their identities being revealed.

The suspect in the New Orleans ramming attack, who was shot dead by police, has been named by authorities as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and the .com matching his name was registered even before it was officially announced.

It seems reporters at NOLA.com were the first to reveal his identity, at around 1700 UTC yesterday, and shamsuddinjabbar.com was registered at 1720 UTC, some time before the news conference where he was officially named.

The more correct spelling, shamsud-dinjabbar.com, has not been registered. Apparently, attempting to make money from an attack that killed 15 people is okay, but registering a domain containing a hyphen is a step too far.

The domain that was registered leads to a Dynadot sales lander with a $7,038.94 buy-it-now price. This converts to a round €6,800, suggesting the owner is based in the Eurozone.

The matching .net has also been registered and currently leads to a GoDaddy parking page.

The suspect in the Magdeburg attack , currently in police custody and charged with five counts of murder, was named by German authorities as Taleb A., abbreviated due to German privacy laws, just a few hours after the fact, but his full name has been widely reported as Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen.

The .com matching (almost) his name, talebalabdulmohsen.com, was registered shortly before 0500 UTC on December 21, hours before it had been reported by major news outlets’ live blogs. It’s currently parked with GoDaddy.

Again, the hyphenated version was not registered and is still available. The matching .de has not been registered.

Professional domain investors consider registering such domains for profit not only pointless but unethical. The Internet Commerce Association, which represents domainers, has in its code of conduct:

Respect for Human Suffering and Victims of Tragedy. A [ICA] member shall be respectful of persons and communities involved in tragedy. A member shall not register domains with the intent to profit from a recent tragedy.

The ICA has no policy on hyphens, to my knowledge.

Comment Tagged: terrorism

ICANN eyes more price hikes as it predicts dismal year for industry

The domain industry may not be set to shrink, but it’s not set to grow either, according to predictions in ICANN’s newest draft budget, published this week.

The Org’s bean-counters have also confirmed that the recently announced fee increases for registries, registrars and registrants may become a “repeatable” occurence.

ICANN says its budget for fiscal 2026, which starts next July, sees funding and expenditure both at $142 million, down $3 million on its adopted 2025 budget.

It’s predicting a pretty flat domain industry for FY26, with no growth in transactions from legacy gTLDs (mainly .com) and 1% growth from new gTLDs. Legacy would stay at $83.1 million and new would grow to $12 million.

ICANN reckons it will lose 17 contracted gTLD registries by the end of FY26, going from 1,109 to 1,092. It reckons it will accredit just three new registrars over the same period.

The estimates are all mid-points. ICANN has also given high and low estimates that vary from transactions growing by 9% or shrinking by as much as 14%.

The financial predictions are also probably going to get revised, as they don’t include the impact of ICANN’s planned fee increases, which have not yet been given final approval.

The Org said in October that it plans to raise the per-transaction fee for registrars, which buyers usually added on at the check-out, from $0.18 to $0.20.

The registry transaction fee will go up from $0.25 to $0.258. Fixed fees for registries and registrars will also go up.

The draft budget calls the increases “equitable, contractually efficient, pragmatic, and repeatable”.

“Inflationary increases can continue at ICANN’s discretion as contemplated by the Base gTLD Registry Agreement,” suggesting they could become an annual inflation-linked event.

The budget us currently open for public comment.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN

Meet the six people battling to join ICANN’s board

Candidates from Verisign, Amazon, GoDaddy, Identity Digital, Tucows, and DotAsia have put themselves forward to become the domain name industry’s next pick for the ICANN board of directors.

The GNSO Contracted Parties House — registrars and registries — are currently holding an election to pick the next occupant of board seat 13, which will be vacated by term-limited incumbent Becky Burr next year.

These elections are usually pretty secretive — not even the names of the nominees are published — but this time around I am able to name all six candidates and five of them have kindly provided DI with their candidate statements, bringing candidates’ views to a public audience for the first time.

The candidates, in alphabetical order, are:

• James Bladel, VP of government and industry affairs at GoDaddy
• Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia
• Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon
• Keith Drazek, VP of policy and government relations at Verisign
• Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows
• Jonathan Robinson, director of Identity Digital subsidiary Internet Computer Bureau

While most of the candidates work for companies that operate as both registries and registrars, each only officially votes in one of the two CPH Stakeholder Groups, as indicated by “RySG” or “RrSG”, below.

Four of the candidates come from the North America region, while Chung is from the Asia-Pacific region and Robinson is European. Burr, who they would replace, is North American.

All of the candidates have been involved with ICANN for well over a decade, some since almost its foundation. Four are former or current chairs of the GNSO Council. One up until a few weeks ago served on the ICANN board for a single term in a different capacity.

Some of the candidates’ statements focus on issues at ICANN they would like to fix, improve, or build on, while others focus more on the candidate’s personal qualities and qualifications.

James Bladel, GoDaddy, RrSG

Bladel is an ICANN veteran with 20 years of experience on various policy-making working groups and committees, including a stint as chair of the GNSO Council. He’s also sat on the boards of the .uk and .me registries.

His candidate statement lists three shortcomings he sees in ICANN’s current trajectory that he believes he could help correct.

He says ICANN “faces a crisis of credibility” due to its failure “to make timely progress on key policy initiatives” and has “fallen into endless discussions and efforts to mitigate unknown risks”.

He gives the Next Round of new gTLDs and Whois policy as examples of where ICANN has moved too slowly to implement policies.

“ICANN must stop telling the world why its role is important and start showing clear examples of multistakeholder successes,” Bladel states, warning that governments will get involved if ICANN can not prove its worth.

He adds that while he does not believe blockchain-based naming systems are viable alternatives to the DNS, ICANN should be paying more attention to how they could be complementary and looking into why there appears to be demand for them.

Bladel provided his statement (pdf).

Edmon Chung, DotAsia, RySG

Chung is a 25-year ICANN vet and has just completed a three-year term on the board, as a Nominating Committee appointee, where he regularly fielded questions related to internationalized domain names, which is one of his specialties.

Chung said he would champion efforts such as Universal Acceptance Day and the new Applicant Support Program, both of which are intended to promote the newer TLDs, particularly those in non-Latin scripts.

As CEO of DotKids, he led the only new gTLD application in the 2012 application round to qualify for the ASP.

“I believe with another term on the board, I can contribute substance to shaping the discussions on [conflicts of interest], board agility and the business of TLDs,” Chung wrote.

Chung provided his statement (pdf).

Greg DiBiase, Amazon, RrSG

Current GNSO Council chair DiBiase claims credit for helping steer the community through its negotiations with the board over new gTLD policy recommendations, which if not exactly fractious have certainly been convoluted, over the last couple years.

He says he would focus on “improving communication” between board and CPH through informal channels with the contracted parties, building on Burr’s work.

He says he would attempt to plug gaps in processes, such as the uncertainty about the board’s power to change its mind on community recommendations it has already adopted.

The board’s attitude to risk is also a concern.

“Many in the ICANN Community view ICANN Org as extremely risk-averse and willing to reject community-made policy recommendations if they increase the probability of ICANN being sued,” DiBiase wrote.

“Whether true or not, I believe ICANN should focus on bigger-picture risks, like harm to credibility… and not just specific risks like lawsuits or IRPs,” he wrote.

DiBiase has headed Amazon Registrar’s legal team for eight years and previously worked in compliance for the Endurance group of registrars (now Newfold Digital).

He provided his statement (pdf).

Keith Drazek, Verisign, RySG

Drazek has been involved with ICANN for over 20 years, according to the bio published by current employer Verisign, the company for which he has been working since 2010. Prior to Verisign, he held a similar policy relations role at Neustar.

He has been GNSO Council chair, a member of the ccNSO Council representing North America, and chair of the RySG, among other roles in important policy working groups.

Drazek has not yet responded to my inquiries and I do not have his candidate statement. I will update this article should I receive it.

Reg Levy, Tucows, RrSG

Levy presents the fact that she is not following the typical path to the board — via, for example, sitting in the GNSO Council chair or on the Nominating Committee — as a strength.

She says she would be “a strong voice for the Community” on the board, which she said has shown a “worrying trend of the Board ignoring the Community and ignoring the role of the GNSO Council”.

Levy is the only candidate to take aim at ICANN’s finances in her statement, with criticisms of how its budget has ballooned beyond the scope of most non-profits over the last couple of decades, of its costly deals with long-incumbent vendors, and of its “shocking” and “disingenuous” executive compensation practices.

Levy says that she would probably be the youngest person on the current board, which could help with “ushering in a generational shift”. As the only female candidate, who would replace a female director, she notes that she’s the only chance of maintaining the current gender balance on the board.

Tucows published Levy’s statement (pdf) on its web site a couple weeks ago.

Jonathan Robinson, Identity Digital, RySG

Robinson’s statement focuses on his extensive industry experience, which dates back to when he founded the UK-based registrar NetBenefit back in 1997, and his long-time participation in the ICANN community.

His only current paid role in the industry is as the director of Internet Computer Bureau, the .io registry and Identity Digital subsidiary.

But Robinson’s key selling point appears to be that he would quit the ICB gig should he be elected, likely freeing him up to be able to engage in board discussions about new gTLD policy and other issues affecting the domain name industry.

ICANN directors are expected to recuse themselves from discussions on issues for which they have conflicts of interest. Burr does not currently recuse herself from such votes because, while she was originally elected while working for Neustar, she no longer has ties to the industry.

Robinson provided his statement (pdf).

*

The candidates have already faced at least one round of interrogation by their voters, including at a closed-door session at ICANN 81 last month.

I’m told the first round of voting takes place this Wednesday, December 18, with a second round likely given the number of candidates. The current timetable published on the GNSO web site appears to be out of date.

The winner of the election will take over from Burr at ICANN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting next October in Muscat.

3 Comments Tagged: election, ICANN

New gTLD use cases not much use

ICANN has come in for periodic criticism over the last decade or so for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in public about its new gTLD program, but this time around it’s trying to do something about it.

New gTLD program participants have said that ICANN should have thrown more of its substantial resources into marketing the program, raising the profile of both the application period and the availability of new gTLDs when they go live.

But, under community guidance for the 2026 application window, Org started promoting the program earlier this year, with the publication of a “Next Round Champion’s Toolkit” web site containing ready-made marketing materials that consultants and gTLD service providers are free to use to reach out to their respective communities or sales prospects.

The latest component of this effort is a batch of 13 “use case” documents, each covering a specific gTLD from the 2012 round, compiled by ICANN, “each providing a compelling example of how different types of organizations use gTLDs”.

ICANN was wise to avoid calling them “case studies”. They’re pretty lightweight, with not [m]any particularly useful insights or actionable nuggets of advice. A cynic might summarize the 13 documents thus:

Hey, did you know .CEO/.SECURITY/.BANK exists? It really does! Here’s barely 500 words of elevator-pitch fluff from the registry’s PR folk, presented in the format of one of those glossy, double-sided, one-page inserts you find in a conference schwag bag and toss into your hotel room trash can unread when trying to reduce the weight of your carry-on.

Six out of the 13 use cases are generics run by XYZ Registry. Five are big-C “Community” gTLDs (including the geographic/linguistic niche offerings .gal, .lat and .bzh). Microsoft is the only dot-brand registry represented.

Notably, given how much emphasis ICANN has been putting on its goal to expand outreach efforts in under-served regions (op-eds and press releases have started popping up in places like India and Nigeria recently), there are no IDN gTLD use cases yet. And all the use cases are in English.

Still, I expect the use cases could be useful to Next Round “Champions” in some scenarios, certainly not as later-stage decision support but rather as part of an arsenal of foot-in-the-door introductory materials aimed at prospects utterly unaware that new gTLDs exist.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, next round

Defensive dot-brands are renewing, making ICANN millions

Companies that have not used their dot-brand gTLDs in a decade are nevertheless renewing their registry contracts with ICANN, leading to a situation where even ICANN seems to be benefiting directly from defensive registrations.

In just the last month or so, the registries behind .delta, .cipriani, .gallup, .icbc, .frontier, .alibaba, .taobao and others have renewed their Registry Agreements for a second 10-year term, despite having never registered a single second-level domain name.

Far more dormant dot-brands have renewed their contracts this year than have voluntarily terminated them.

According to my database, there are 116 dot-brand gTLDs today that have only ever registered their obligatory nic.[brand] domain and nothing else. That’s from a total of 369 dot-brands still live in the DNS.

Given that the absolute minimum a registry has to pay ICANN is its $25,000 annual registry fee — rising to $25,800 on January 1 — it looks like ICANN is making about $3 million per year, a couple of percent of its annual budget, from defensive dot-brands.

Registrar and back-end registry services partners are of course also making revenue from these unused brand gTLDs, but the terms of those contracts are typically not public.

There are any number of reasons why dormant dot-brands may renew their RAs. They may still be playing wait-and-see, they may be spooked by the looming 2026 application round, or they may just have an aggressive BLOCK EVERYTHING brand management strategy.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN

Identity Digital offers free domain trials through LinkedIn

Identity Digital says it is to offer its services via a partnership with LinkedIn.

The company said in a press release it will offer a three-month trial of the web site bundle offered by registrar subsidiary Name.com, to people who sign up for LinkedIn Premium, as one of the service’s “perks”.

The trial, which includes domain, hosting, and email, renews at $99 for the first year before reverting to the regular $289 annual price, the company said.

Other trial perks offered by LinkedIn Premium include a mindfulness app and Audible, which provides audiobooks and podcasts.

1 Comment Tagged: identity digital, linkedin, name.com

Antisemitic remarks cost registrar dearly

A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder’s televised antisemitic comments.

Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN’s then-CEO described Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s remarks on Jordanian TV as “beyond offensive or objectionable”.

Abu-Ghazaleh had deployed some pretty clear-cut antisemitic tropes and seemed to try to justify the Holocaust in a news interview related to the war in Gaza, causing outrage from at least one Jewish ICANN community member.

After Costerton’s published chastisement, AGIP’s DUM fell from 1,371 to 930 over the space of a month. It was the first substantial decline on record, with its DUM having been on a fairly steady but slow upward trajectory.

In August, the last month for which we have records, its gTLD DUM had gone down to 695, about half its peak.

AGIP is a boutique intellectual property management registrar, likely with higher margins than your typical domain retailer. A decline of a few hundred domains could represent the loss of just a few customers.

The registrar still has its ICANN accreditation. It’s also still contracted with ICANN to run an instance of the L-root DNS root server in Amman, despite a call for it to lose that deal.

But, as Domain Name Wire noted on Friday, it’s no longer listed as providing UDRP services for ICANN. This change seems to have occurred in mid-September, judging by Archive.org records.

Comment Tagged: agip, ICANN, l-root

ICANN lawyers want to keep their clients secret

IP lawyers in the ICANN community have come out swinging against proposed rules that would require them to come clean about who they work for, rules that are supported by registrars and governments.

A proposed policy that would force lawyers to disclose the identities of their clients when they participate in policy-making would violate their clients’ human rights, according to the Intellectual Property Constituency.

The criticisms came in response to an ICANN public comment period on a draft Community Participant Code of Conduct Concerning Statements of Interest, which opened in October and closed this week.

The draft would close a loophole that allows ICANN policy makers to keep their potential conflicts of interest secret when “professional ethical obligations” prevent them from disclosing this information.

“When disclosure cannot be made, the participant must not participate in ICANN processes on that issue,” the draft states.

The changes are keenly supported by the Registrar Stakeholder Group as a whole and by GoDaddy and Tucows in particular. As far as the registrars are concerned, the main problem with the draft is the somewhat vague enforcement mechanisms.

GoDaddy, for example, said in its comments:

We recognize that there may be situations in which a party is unable to disclose their client(s), and in those rare cases, GoDaddy agrees with ICANN’s conclusion that the participant forfeits the ability to participate in associated processes.

It added, echoing the RrSG as a whole, that more clarity is needed on enforcement, where the buck seems to stop with the chair of the working group where the disclosure infraction is alleged to have taken place, with no escalation.

On the opposing side are the IPC, the Business Constituency, and the International Trademark Association, which all filed comments criticizing the proposed changes. The IPC said:

The often-argued response of having attorneys not participate if they fail to uphold their ethical duty to their clients effectively vitiates the human right of representation by counsel and is not for the public benefit. ICANN has agreed to uphold human rights and therefore counsel cannot be compelled to disclose client identity.

Two of the concerns from lawyers is that the policy could require their clients to divulge trade secrets, such as whether they intend to apply for a new gTLD in the forthcoming application round.

Perhaps anticipating the Governmental Advisory Committee’s expected support for the policy changes, which was no secret, the IPC also raises the specter of the policy being broad enough to apply to the governments themselves: should they all be compelled to reveal the names of all the lobbyists who knock on their doors?

This forcing of transparency of national interest would significantly inhibit GAC members from fulfilling their role. Imagine a GAC member from one country filing an SOI saying that their government was being lobbied by numerous parties to gain favor in the New gTLD Rounds?

The GAC’s response to the public comment period was in fact cautiously supportive of the rule changes, saying:

Prima facie, the proposal referring to Statements of Interests seems to be in the right direction, and to fulfil the expectations expressed by the GAC. At the same time, the GAC looks forward to the reactions from ICANN org to the views expressed during the public comment period

Like the registrars, the GAC is looking for more clarity on enforcement mechanisms.

The public comments will by summarized for publication mid-December and the ICANN board could take action on the proposals next year.

5 Comments Tagged: bc, conflicts of interest, gac, godaddy, ICANN, ipc, rrsg, sois

Facebook cybersquatter asks ICANN to overturn UDRP ruling

A registrant who lost a slam-dunk cybersquatting complaint to Facebook owner Meta has asked ICANN to overturn the ruling, accusing WIPO of of breaching the UDRP rules by not publishing its decision fast enough.

The registrant apparently registered meta-platforms-inc.com earlier this year out of “frustration”, and in a state of some distress, after her social media accounts were closed by Meta. Meta’s full name is Meta Platforms Inc.

The registrant then asked Meta, when contacted by its lawyers, for financial compensation in exchange for the domain, according to WIPO’s findings (pdf).

It’s pretty much a clear-cut case of cybersquatting under the UDRP, and Meta prevailed. The domain was transferred to its ownership.

But the registrant has now complained to ICANN, using its Request for Reconsideration accountability procedure, saying WIPO broke its rules and behaved “fraudulently”.

The RfR is somewhat confusingly written, but the main thrust appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the UDRP rules, which require panels to submit their rulings to WIPO within 14 days of the complaint being submitted.

The registrant takes this to mean that the decisions also need to be published online within 14 days, which doesn’t appear to be the case. She wants the decision overturned on this basis.

Regardless of the merits, the RfR has zero chance of success. UDRP losers have tried and failed to invoke the Reconsideration policy to have their decisions reversed in the past.

Most notably, in 2022 Indian Covid-19 vaccine maker Zydus Lifesciences got miffed about the Reverse Domain Name Hijacking ruling it was given and filed two RfRs with ICANN.

The first was dismissed because RfR is used to challenge ICANN’s decisions and WIPO is not ICANN. In the second case, the Ombuds made a rare intervention to confirm that ICANN has no responsibility for UDRP rulings.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, reconsideration, rfr, udrp, wipo

.xxx founder Stuart Lawley has died

Stuart Lawley, who battled ICANN to launch the .xxx gTLD, has reportedly died of a heart attack aged 61.

AVN, a trade publication for the adult video industry, reported the news yesterday, citing his friend Greg Dumas.

While Lawley did not found ICM Registry, he took it over early in its fight for .xxx and ran it through its 2011 launch until its sale to MMX in 2018.

He was in charge during the protracted fight to get ICANN to approve .xxx over the objections of governments and some in the porn industry, which led to a precedent-setting Independent Review Process proceeding, which ICM won.

For the domain industry, Lawley arguably leaves two important legacies — a more accountable ICANN, and the now industry-standard concept of domain-blocking services, which ICM came up with with its “Sunrise B”.

I really liked Stu. I considered him a mate.

He was an extremely low-bullshit source, but our regular conversations back at the height of the .xxx controversy more often than not also diverged into our personal lives — everything from our love lives to our respective blood pressure scores — which doesn’t happen very often in my line of work.

Having sold his scratch-built fax machine company for $200 million in the 1990s, his life was considerably more interesting than mine. It’s because of Stu that, should the opportunity ever present itself, I know why it’s a bad idea to buy a private jet.

We hadn’t talked much since his son, Sabian, was killed by a hit-and-run driver a couple of years ago, a tragic and still-unsolved incident that caused him to retire from business.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, icm registry, xxx