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 .
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

More consolidation? Endurance said to be up for sale

Endurance International Group is reportedly up for sale, perhaps the next piece of consolidation or privatization in a rapidly changing domain name market.
Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, reports today that EIG is “is considering strategic options, including a possible sale”.
EIG owns domain brands Domain.com, BigRock, BuyDomains and ResellerClub, along with a bunch of hosting properties such as HostGator.
Bloomberg’s sources stressed that no final decision has been made, and that the company could remain public.
It’s currently listed on Nasdaq where it has a market cap today of almost $1.38 billion .
The company would be far from the first to change ownership in the last couple of years.
Most recently, Web.com (Network Solutions et al) announced a plan to go private in a $2 billion deal.
A year ago, Neustar went private in a $2.9 billion deal.
In terms of industry consolidation, we’ve more recently seen KeyDrive reverse into CentralNic and MMX buy ICM Registry.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, eigi, endurance

ICANN faces critical choice as security experts warn against key rollover

Members of ICANN’s top security body have advised the organization to further delay plans to change the domain name system’s top cryptographic key.
Five dissenting members of the influential, 22-member Security and Stability Advisory Committee said they believe “the risks of rolling in accordance with the current schedule are larger than the risks of postponing”.
Their comments relate to the so-called KSK rollover, which would see ICANN for the first time ever change the key-signing key that acts as the trust anchor for all DNSSEC queries on the internet.
ICANN is fairly certain rolling the key will cause DNS resolution problems for some — possibly as much as 0.05% of the internet or a couple million people — but it currently lacks the data to be absolutely certain of the scale of the impact.
What it does know — explained fairly succinctly in this newly published guide (pdf) — is that within 48 hours of the roll, a certain small percentage of internet users will start to see DNS resolution fail.
But there’s a prevailing school of thought that believes the longer the rollover is postponed, the bigger that number of affected users will become.
The rollover is currently penciled in for October 11, but the ultimate decision on whether to go ahead rests with the ICANN board of directors.
David Conrad, the organization’s CTO, told us last week that his office has already decided to recommend that the roll should proceed as planned. At the time, he noted that SSAC was a few days late in delivering its own verdict.
Now, after some apparently divisive discussions, that verdict is in (pdf).
SSAC’s majority consensus is that it “has not identified any reason within the SSAC’s scope why the rollover should not proceed as currently planned.”
That’s in line with what Conrad, and the Root Server System Advisory Committee have said. But SSAC noted:

The assessment of risk in this particular area has some uncertainty and therefore includes a component of subjective judgement. Individuals (including some members of the SSAC) have different assessments of the overall balance of risk of the resumption of this plan.

It added that it’s up to the ICANN board (comprised largely of non-security people) to make the final call on what the acceptable level of risk is.
The minority, dissenting opinion gets into slightly more detail:

The decision to proceed with the keyroll is a complex tradeoff of technical and non-technical risks. While there is risk in proceeding with the currently planned roll, we understand that there is also risk in further delay, including loss of confidence in DNSSEC operational planning, potential for more at-risk users as more DNSSEC validation is deployed, etc.
While evaluating these risks, the consensus within the SSAC is that proceeding is preferable to delay. We personally evaluate the tradeoffs differently, and we believe that the risks of rolling in accordance with the current schedule are larger than the risks of postponing and focusing heavily on additional research and outreach, and in particular leveraging newly developed techniques that provide better signal and fidelity into potentially impacted parties.
We would like to reiterate that we understand our colleagues’ position, but evaluate the risks and associated mitigation prospects differently. We believe that the ultimate decision lies with the ICANN Board, and do not envy them with this decision.

SSAC members are no slouches when it comes to security expertise, and the dissenting members are no exception. They are:

• Lyman Chapin, co-owner of Interisle Consulting, a regular ICANN contractor perhaps best-known to DI readers for carrying out a study into new gTLD name collisions five years ago.
• Kimberly “kc claffy” Claffy, head of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California in San Diego. CAIDA does nothing but map and measure the internet.
• Jay Daley, a registry executive with a technical background whose career includes senior stints at .uk and .nz. He’s currently keeping the CEO’s chair warm at .org manager Public Interest Registry.
• Warren Kumari, a senior network security engineer at Google, which is probably the largest early adopter of DNSSEC on the resolution side.
• Danny McPherson, Verisign’s chief security officer. As well as .com, Verisign runs the two of the 13 root servers, including the master A-root. It’s running the boxes that sit at the top of the DNSSEC hierarchy.

It may be the first time SSAC has failed to reach a full-consensus opinion on a security matter. If it has ever published a dissenting opinion before, I certainly cannot recall it.
The big decision about whether to proceed or delay is expected to be made by the ICANN board during its retreat in Brussels, a three-day meeting that starts September 14.
Given that ICANN’s primary mission is “to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems”, it could turn out to be one of ICANN’s biggest decisions to date.

Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover, ssac, verisign

.CLUB revenue not all that

.CLUB Domains may be one of the 5000 fastest-growing companies in the US, according to Inc magazine, but it’s returning the majority of its revenue back to its registrars.
CEO Colin Campbell revealed this week that the company returns almost 70% of its gross revenue in the form of rebates.
The revelation came in an interview with Domain Name Wire on its latest podcast.
Campbell told Andrew Allemann that in 2017 .CLUB had $9.3 million in what he called “cash flow” or “gross revenue”.
But “net cash” or “net revenue”, after rebates was just $2.8 million, meaning $6.5 million was returned to registrars via promotions.
The interview came a few days after Inc named the company 1164th in its 2018 list of fastest-growing US companies.
Inc had .CLUB’s revenue at $7.2 million, but that appears to have been calculated using the usual accounting standards of deferring revenue into future periods over the lifetime of the domain subscription.
.club has something like 1.4 million names under management.
Campbell said that the company is “adding about a million dollars of net revenue per year” and he predicted 2018 gross cash to come in at $10.5 million and net to come in at $3.7 million.
That’s a net revenue figure, remember, not a profit or net income line. Campbell said he’s more interested in growing the business rather than paying taxes on profits.
The aggressive rebating seems to have a focus in China, where it has regular deals with the likes of Alibaba (which was .club’s biggest registrar with 20% of the market at the last count) and West.cn.
While .CLUB is private, Campbell has been frank about its performance in the past.
The DNW interview follows DI’s interview with Campbell on more or less the same topic last September, and DNW’s in 2016.
It’s a good podcast, you should have a listen.

3 Comments Tagged: .club, .club domains, new gTLDs