Uniregistry sale leads to BBC telling millions that domainers exist

The BBC dedicated five minutes of prime-time air to telling the British public that domainers exist, after a Uniregistry domain name sale led to interest from producers.
The One Show appears on BBC One at 7pm five days a week. It’s the BBC’s flagship magazine program and appears to currently have about 3.5 million viewers per day.
It’s notorious for its hosts’ often jarring segues between sycophantic interviews with visiting celebrities and prerecorded human interest stories covering everything from people who collect doylies to people who are dying from AIDS.
In Friday’s episode — guest-hosted by Jerry Springer, no less — the first VT of the show is about domainers.
Regular host Alex Jones points out that while Springer and guest Rita Ora own their matching .com domains, fellow guest Tracey Ullman’s .com name is on the market for $795 (it’s registered to HugeDomains, but that isn’t mentioned).
Ullman laughs, and the UDRP-fodder is never mentioned again.
Cut to VT.
The roving reporter, whose name is not given, tells us that there are 335 million domains on the internet today, anyone can come up with one, and that “there are other people out there known as ‘domain dealers’ who buy these domains and sell them on for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pounds”.
Brit domainer Graham Haynes is then introduced as “one of the first people to buy and sell domains”. He says he sold a portfolio of domains for £1.5 million ($1.91 million at today’s exchange rate) and spent $600,000 on furniture.co.uk.
Haynes says domains are always going up in value so he always tries to hold on as long as he can before he sells.
Then we get a few seconds over Skype with Aron Meystedt, who bought first-ever .com Symbolics.com eight years ago and says the name as been a “good cornerstone” of his portfolio. He uses the word “domainer” for the first time.
Then our reporter says she wants to find out whether she has what it takes to be a domainer.
We’re introduced to 25-year-old domainer Simon Whipps, who says he buys domains for £10 to £20 and sells them to end users for about £1,000.
The reporter hands him a list of domains she’s come up with and gives him half an hour to tell her whether they’re worth anything or not.
Then we’re off to the Cayman Islands, where a Londoner identified only as “Mo” lives. It’s presented as if he’s living the high life on a beach having made a killing from domains.
I believe he’s Mohammed Khan, a broker from Uniregistry. He says he helped broker personalloans.com ($1 million) and kiwi.com ($800,000).
Then it’s into the Uniregistry office, where a VP identified (mistakenly, it turns out) as “Alan Schwartz” mentions that he helped broker the $13 million sale of sex.com.
Back to Whipps, who tells the reporter than the only two domains on her list worth a damn are christmas.net and adventure.net. Given she owns neither, it’s not clear how she came up with these picks.
All in all, it’s a strange, thin, directionless fluff piece with nothing to say about domaining other than the fact that it exists. It could have been produced at basically any time in the last 15 years with barely any changes.
According to Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling, the item came about as a result of interest from producers after Uniregistry made an aftermarket sale to somebody involved in the show.
It’s not clear who the buyer was or what the domain was, but apparently the kernel of the idea of the piece came about “organically” as a result of the deal.

10 Comments Tagged: the one show, uniregistry

Cybersquatting cases down in .uk

The number of cybersquatting complaints filed against .uk domains fell in 2016, according to data out this week from Nominet.
The .uk registry said that there were 703 complaints filed with its Dispute Resolution Service in the year, down from 728 in 2015.
However, the number of individual domains complained about appears to have increased, from 745 to 785. That’s partly due to registrants owning both .co.uk and .uk versions of the same name.
The number of cases that resulted in domains being transferred was 53%, the same as 2015, Nominet said.
The large majority of cases were filed by UK-based entities against UK-based registrants, the stats show.

Comment Tagged: .uk, cybersquatting, drs, nominet

As .boots self-terminates, ICANN will not redelegate it

The dot-brand .boots may become the first single-dictionary-word gTLD to be taken off the market, as The Boots Company told ICANN it no longer wishes to be a registry.
Boots, the 168-year-old British pharmacy chain, told ICANN in April that it is unilaterally terminating its Registry Agreement for .boots and ICANN opened it up for comment this week.
As with the 22 self-terminating dot-brands before it, .boots was unloved and unused, with just the solitary, ICANN-mandated nic.boots in its zone file.
Boots, as well as being a universally known brand name in the UK and Ireland, is of course a generic dictionary word representing an unrelated class of goods (ie footwear).
It’s the first dying dot-brand to have this kind of dual use, making it potentially modestly attractive as a true generic TLD.
However, because it’s currently a dot-brand with no third-party users, it will not be redelegated to another registry.
Under Specification 13 of the Registry Agreement, which gives dot-brands special rights, ICANN has the ability to redelegate dot-brands, but only if it’s in the public interest to do so. That’s clearly not the case in this instance.
These rules also state that ICANN is not allowed to delegate .boots to any other company for a period of two years after the contract ends.
Given that there’s no chance of ICANN delegating any gTLDs in the next two years, this has no real impact. Perhaps, if the ICANN community settles on a rolling gTLD application process in future, this kind of termination may be of more interest.

1 Comment Tagged: boots, dot-brands, ICANN, termination

GoDaddy launches security service after Sucuri acquisition

GoDaddy has revealed the first fruits of its March acquisition of web security service provider Sucuri.
It’s GoDaddy Website Security, what appears to be a budget version of the services Sucuri already offers on a standalone basis.
For $6.99 per month ($83.88/year), the service monitors your web site for malware and removes it upon request. It also keeps tabs on major blacklists to make sure you’re not being blocked by Google, Norton or McAfee.
This low-end offering gets you a 12-hour response time for the cleanup component. You can up that to 30 minutes by taking out the $299.99 per year plan.
The more expensive plan also includes DDoS protection, a malware firewall and integration with a content delivery network for performance.
There’s also an intermediate, $19.99-per-month ($239.88/year) plan that includes the extra features but keeps the response time at 12 hours.
An SSL certificate is included in the two more-expensive packages.
The pricing and feature set looks to compare reasonably well with Sucuri’s standalone products, which start at $16.66 a month and offer response times as fast as four hours.
As somebody who has suffered from three major security problems on GoDaddy over the last decade or so, and found GoDaddy’s response abysmal on all three occasions (despite my generally positive views of its customer service), the new service is a somewhat tempting proposition.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, godaddy, securi, security, website security

Zero registrars pass ICANN audit

Some of the biggest names in the registrar game were among a bewildering 100% that failed an ICANN first-pass audit in the latest round of random compliance checks.
Of the 55 registrars picked to participate in the audit, a resounding 0 passed the initial audit, according to data released today.
Among them were recognizable names including Tucows, Register.com, 1&1, Google and Xin Net.
ICANN found 86% of the registrars had three or more “deficiencies” in their compliance with the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
By far the most problematic area was compliance with sections 3.7.7.1 to 3.7.7.12 of the RAA, which specifies what terms registrars must put in their registration agreements and how they verify the contact details of their customers.
A full three quarters of audited registrars failed on that count, according to ICANN’s report (pdf).
More than half of tested registrars failed to live up to their commitments to respond to reports of abuse, where they’re obliged among other things to have a 24/7 contact number available.
There was one breach notice to a registrar as a result of the audit, but none of the failures were serious enough for ICANN to terminate the deficient registrar’s contract. Two registrars self-terminated during the process.
ICANN’s audit program is ongoing and operates in rounds.
In the current round, registrars were selected from those which either hadn’t had an audit in a couple of years, were found lacking in previous rounds, or had veered dangerously close to formal breach notices.
The round kicked off last September with requests for documents. The initial audit, which all registrars failed, was followed by a remediation phase from January to May.
Over the remediation phase, only one third of the registrars successfully resolved all the issues highlight by the audit. The remainder issued remediation plans and will be followed up on in future rounds.
The 0% pass rate is not unprecedented. It’s the same as the immediately prior audit (pdf), which ran from May to October 2016.

2 Comments Tagged: audit, compliance, ICANN, raa

Zone file access is crap, security panel confirms

ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service has some serious shortcomings and needs an overhaul, according to the Security and Stability Advisory Committee.
The panel of DNS security experts has confirmed what CZDS subscribers, including your humble correspondent, have known since 2014 — the system had a major design flaw baked in from day one for no readily apparent reason.
CZDS is the centralized repository of gTLD zone files. It’s hosted by ICANN and aggregates zones from all 2012-round, and some older, gTLDs on a daily basis.
Signing up for it is fairly simple. You simply fill out your contact information, agree to the terms of service, select which zones you want and hit “submit”.
The purpose of the service is to allow researchers to receive zone files without having to enter into separate agreements with each of the 1,200+ gTLDs currently online.
The major problem, as subscribers know and SSAC has confirmed, is that the default subscription period is 90 days.
Unless the gTLD registry extends the period at its end and in its own discretion, each subscription ends after three months — cutting off access — and the subscriber must reapply.
Many of the larger registries exercise this option, but many — particularly dot-brands — do not.
The constant need to reapply and re-approve creates a recurring arse-ache for subscribers and, registry staff have told me, the registries themselves.
The approval process itself is highly unpredictable. Some of the major registries process requests within 24 hours — I’ve found Afilias is the fastest — but I’ve been waiting for approval for Valuetainment’s .voting since September 2016.
Some dot-brands even attempt to insert extra terms of service into the deal before approving requests, which defeats the entire purpose of having a centralized service in the first place.
Usually, a polite email to the person handling the requests can produce results. Other times, it’s necessary to report them to ICANN Compliance.
The SSAC has evidently interviewed many people who share my concerns, as well as looking at data from Compliance (where CZDS reliably generates the most complaints, wasting the time of Compliance staff).

This situation makes zone file access unreliable and subject to unnecessary interruptions. The missing data introduces “blind spots” in security coverage and research projects, and the reliability of software – such as security and analytics applications – that relies upon zone files is reduced. Lastly, the introduced inefficiency creates additional work for both registry operators and subscribers.

The SSAC has no idea why the need to reapply every 90 days was introduced, figuring it must have happened during implementation.
But it recommends that access agreements should automatically renew once they expire, eliminating the busywork of reapplying and closing the holes in researchers’ data sets.
As I’m not objective on this issue, I agree with that recommendation wholeheartedly.
I’m less keen on the SSAC’s recommendation that registries should be able to opt out of the auto-renewals on a per-subscriber basis. This will certainly be abused by the precious snowflake dot-brands that have already shown their reluctance to abide by their contractual obligations.
The SSAC report can be read here (pdf).

4 Comments Tagged: czds, ICANN, ssac, zone files

Ombudsman steps in after harassment claims in Whois group

ICANN Ombudsman Herb Waye has started monitoring an ICANN mailing list after multiple complaints of disrespectful behavior.
Waye this week told participants in the Registration Data Services working group that he is to trawl through their list archives and proactively monitor the group following “multiple complaints regarding behavior that contravenes the ICANN Expected Standards of Behavior and possibly the Community Anti-Harassment Policy”.
The RDS working group is exploring the possibility of replacing the current Whois system, in which all data is completely open, with something “gated”, restricting access to authenticated individuals based on their role.
Law enforcement agencies, for example, may be able to get a greater level of access to personal contact information than schmucks like me and you.
Privacy advocates are in favor of giving registrants more control over their data, while anti-abuse researchers hate anything that will limit their ability to stop spam, phishing and the like.
It’s controversial stuff, and arguments on the RDS WG list have been been very heated recently, sometimes spilling over into ad hominem attacks.
The Expected Standards of Behavior requires all ICANN community members to treat each other with civility.
I haven’t seen anything especially egregious, but apparently the disrespect on display has been sufficiently upsetting that the Ombudsman has had to step in.
It’s the first time, that I’m aware of, that the ICANN Ombudsman has proactively monitored a list rather than simply responding to complaints.
Waye said that he plans to deliver his verdict before ICANN 59, which kicks off in a little over a week.

Comment Tagged: harassment, ICANN, Ombudsman, rds, whois

US “threatens” Costa Rica over Pirate Bay domains

The US government has been threatening to “close down” Costa Rica’s .cr registry over its refusal to take down a Pirate Bay domain name, according to the registry.
Representatives of the US embassy in Costa Rica have been badgering NIC.cr to take down thepiratebay.cr since 2015, according to a letter from Pedro León Azofeifa, president of Academia Nacional de Ciencias, which runs the registry.
The letter claims:

These interactions with the United States Embassy have escalated with time and include great pressure since 2016 that is exemplified by several phone calls, emails and meetings urging our ccTLD to take down the domain, even though this would go against our domain name policies

According to the letter, a US official “has mentioned threats to close our registry, with repeated harassment regarding our practices and operation policies and even personal negative comments directed to our Executive Director”.
The letter was sent to the chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee 10 days ago, CC’d to senior ICANN, Costa Rican and US governmental figures, and has been circulated this week in the Latin American domain name community.
The form of the alleged threats to close the registry is not clear, but it should be noted that prior to October 1 last year the US Department of Commerce, via its now-relinquished oversight of ICANN, played a key role in the administration of the DNS root zone.
The Pirate Bay is of course a popular directory of BitTorrent links largely used to disseminate pirated copies of movies and music, much of it American-made.
The site has been TLD-hopping for years, as registries around the world shut down its domains for violations of their own local rules. It has been live on thepiratebay.cr since December 2014, when its Swedish operation was shut down by authorities.
The NIC.cr letter says that its own policies follow international “best practices” and allow it to take down domains when presented with a Costa Rican court order, but that “the pressure and harassment [from the US] to take down the domain name without its proper process and local court order persists”.
The US Department of Commerce even pressured its Costa Rican counterpart to investigate NIC.cr, but that probe concluded that the registry was acting within its procedures, according to the letter.
It’s not the first attempt to get rid of the Pirate Bay this year.
Public Interest Registry in February announced a “UDRP for copyright” proposal that would allow copyright holders to have piracy disputes heard by independent arbitrators. It looked like a way to get unloved thepiratebay.org domain taken down without PIR having to take unilateral action.
That proposal was shelved after an outcry from the industry and civil rights watchdogs.
In April, one of the Pirate Bay’s founders launched a piracy-friendly domain registration service.
Just this week, the European Court of Justice ruled, after seven years of legal fights, that the Pirate Bay infringes copyright, raising the possibility of the site being blocked in more European countries.
The NIC.cr letter is dated June 6. It has not yet been published by ICANN or the GAC.

1 Comment Tagged: .cr, commerce, copyright, gac, iana, ICANN, nic.cr, ntia, piracy, the pirate bay

Forget emojis, you can buy Egyptian hieroglyph .com domains

Call them the Emojis of the Ancient World.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were once the cutting edge of written communication, and it turns out Verisign lets you register .com domains using them.
Internationalized domain names expert Andre Schapp discovered a couple months ago that the Unicode code points for the ancient script have been approved in 16 Verisign gTLDs, and apparently no others.
This means that domains such as should resolve.
Unfortunately, DI’s database does not support these characters, so I’m having to use images.
But at least one domain investor seems have snapped up a few dozen single-pictograph Egyptian hieroglyph names about a month ago, and his page has clickable links.
Whether you see the hieroglyph or the Punycode, prefixed “xn--“, seems to depend on your browser configuration.
Ancient Egyptian is apparently not the only dead script that Verisign supports.
According to IANA, you can also get .com domains in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, which went out of fashion in the second century CE, as well Phoenician, the world’s oldest known script.
Then there’s Imperial Aramaic, Meitei, Kharosthi, ‘Phags-pa, Sylheti Nagari and goodness knows how many other extinct writing systems.
It seems .com has been approved for 237 IDN scripts, in total. Let it not be said that Verisign does not offer domainers ample opportunity to spunk their cash on gibberish.
No Klingon, though.

12 Comments Tagged: .com, emojis, hieroglyphs, idns, verisign

Donuts to pay $213 million for Rightside

Donuts is to acquire Rightside for $213 million, the companies have just announced.
The $10.60 per share cash offer represents a 12% premium over Rightside’s average closing share price over the last 30 days. Rightside’s 52-week high is over $12.
Just one year ago, Donuts offered $70 million for Rightside’s portfolio of gTLDs, but was shot down.
Rightside also turned down a $5 million offer for four gTLDs from XYZ.com in April 2016.
The $213 million offer is funded at least partly by Silicon Valley Bank, which is providing a credit facility to Donuts.
Assuming the deal closes — which will require the holders of more than half its shares to agree to the price — it will make Rightside a private company once more, as a wholly owned Donuts subsidiary.
The two gTLD registries are already partners, with Rightside providing domain registry services for Donuts’ roughly 200 new gTLDs.
There was talk of a split last year, with Donuts apparent endorsement of Google’s Nomulus platform, but the two companies reaffirmed their relationship earlier this year.
Rightside itself has a portfolio of 40 gTLDs, but it’s faced criticism from shareholders over the last year or so over their relatively poor performance.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, who owns almost 9% of Rightside, has been pressuring the company’s board to take radical action for the last 15 months.
Earlier this year, Rightside got out of the once-core wholesale registrar game by selling eNom to rival Tucows for $83.5 million.

11 Comments Tagged: acquisition, donuts, rightside