GoDaddy in talks to buy massive registrar Host Europe – report

GoDaddy is reportedly talking to Host Europe Group, one of Europe’s largest registrars, about an acquisition.
Reuters today reported that the deal, should it go ahead, could be worth as much as $1.8 billion.
GoDaddy has been favored over rival bids from United Internet (owner of United-Domains) and buyout firm Centerbridge, Reuters said.
HEG is the parent company for several registrar brands. Notably, it owns 123-reg and DomainMonster, two of the UK’s largest registrars.
123-reg had over 900,000 gTLD domains on its books at the last count. HEG overall says it manages over seven million domains.
The company was acquired by private equity group Cinven for £438 million ($545 million) in 2013.
It has 1.7 million customers and 1,300 employees spread across eight countries. It primarily operates in the UK and Germany.
HEG had 2015 revenue of €269.8 million ($286.3 million) and made a loss of €55.6 million ($59 million).
For GoDaddy, the acquisition is a chance to shift its revenue mix away from domains and more towards the more profitable hosting market, according to Reuters.

3 Comments Tagged: acquistion, godaddy, heg, host europe

Amazon backtracks after pricing free Alexa list at over $900,000

Amazon has reversed, at least temporarily, its decision to yank its free list of the world’s most popular domains, after an outcry from researchers.
The daily Alexa list, which contains the company’s estimate of the world’s top 1 million domains by traffic, suddenly disappeared late last week.
The list was popular with researchers in fields such as internet security. Because it was free, it was widely used.
DI PRO uses the list every day to estimate the relative popularity of top-level domains.
After deleting the list, Amazon directed users to its Amazon Web Services portal, which had started offering the same data priced at $0.0025 per URL.
That’s not cheap. The cost of obtaining same data suddenly leaped from nothing to $912,500 per year, or $2,500 per day.
That’s beyond the wallets, I suspect, of almost every Alexa user, especially the many domain name tools providers (including yours truly) that relied on the data to estimate domain popularity.
Even scaling back usage to the top 100,000 URLs would be prohibitively expensive for most researchers.
While Amazon is of course free to price its data at whatever it thinks it is worth, no notice was given that the file was to be deleted, scuppering without warning goodness knows how many ongoing projects.
Some users spoke out on Twitter.

The quiet death of the @Alexa_Support top million sites is a grievous blow to internet researchers everywhere. $2500 per pull now.

— April King (@aprilmpls) November 21, 2016

Removing the top 1M list is a HUGE mistake. It was extremely useful to assess the impact of new security vulnerabilities. 🙁 @Alexa_Support

— Benjamin Beurdouche (@beurdouche) November 22, 2016

@Alexa_Support I'm disappointed, but I hope you reconsider. The Top 1M list is a standard reference in research. It's simply irreplaceable.

— Santiago Zanella (@xEFFFFFFF) November 22, 2016

I spent most of yesterday figuring out how to quickly rejigger DI PRO to cope with the new regime, but it seems I may have been wasting my time.
After an outcry from fellow researchers, Amazon has restored the free list. It said on Twitter:

Thanks to customer feedback, the top 1M sites is temporarily available again. We’ll provide notice before updating the file in the future

— Alexa Support (@Alexa_Support) November 22, 2016

It seems clear that the key word here is “temporarily”, and that the the restoration of the file may primarily be designed to give researchers more time to seek alternatives or wrap up their research.

2 Comments Tagged: alexa, amazon, new gTLDs, security

Oracle buys Dyn just weeks after huge attack

Oracle has signed a deal to buy DNS services provider Dyn for an undisclosed amount probably in the nine-figure range.
The software giant said it plans to integrate Dyn’s services into its existing cloud computing platform. For the moment, existing Dyn customers are unaffected.
Dyn provides distributed DNS resolution services mainly to the enterprise market, where it has about 3,500 customers.
But it also provides redundant DNS to some TLD registries, notably Uniregistry.
Knowing how ruthlessly opportunistic Oracle can be when it comes to M&A, I have to wonder how much impact the recent denial of service attack against Dyn had on the timing of the deal being signed.
Dyn customers including Twitter and Netflix found themselves inaccessible for millions of North American internet users a couple of weeks ago.
Customers that may have been reconsidering their DNS options following the downtime may feel more reassured now that Dyn is about to become part of a much larger company.
While the acquisition price was not disclosed, it’s certainly going to be in the hundreds of millions.
Just six months ago, Dyn received $50 million in venture capital, following on from a $38 million round in 2012.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, ddos, dyn, oracle

After shaky start, .blog launches today

The new gTLD .blog goes into general availability today, after some mild controversy about the way the registry allocated reserved domain names.
Knock Knock Whois There, the registry affiliated with WordPress maker Automattic, last week apologized to some would-be customers for declining to honor some landrush pre-registrations.
Some registrants had complained that domains that were accepted for pre-registration were subsequently added to KKWT’s list of registry-reserved names, making them unavailable for registration.
KKWT said in a blog post Thursday that the confusion was due to it not having finalized its reserved list until just before its landrush period kicked off, November 2.
Registrars, including those accepting pre-registrations, were not given the final lists until the last minute.
Landrush applications cost around $250 but were refundable.
KKWT also revealed the make-up of its founders program domains, the 100-strong list of names it was allowed to allocate pre-sunrise.
The founders program currently seems to be a bit of a friends-and-family affair.
Of the 25 live founder sites currently listed, about 20 appear to be owned by the registry, its employees and close affiliates.
The registry said in its blog post that 25 super-generic domains had been given to WordPress.com. It seems the blog host will offer third-level names in these domains for free to its customers.
.blog had 1,743 domains in its zone file yesterday.
General availability starts about 30 minutes from the time this post was posted, at 1500 UTC. Prices are around the $30 mark.

2 Comments Tagged: .blog, automattic, founders, kkwt, knock knock whois there, landrush, reserved

Famous Four exec moves to CentralNic

Famous Four Media has lost its chief marketing officer to CentralNic.
Andy Churley joined the London-based registry services provider as group marketing manager this month, according to press release.
He’s been with FFM for the first few years of its entry into the gTLD game, overseeing the launches of cheap TLDs such as .science, .download and .bid.
Previously, he was with the registrar Group NBT.
CentralNic now of course is also in the registrar business, having acquired Internet.bs and Instra over the last few years.

1 Comment Tagged: centralnic, Famous Four Media, ffm, new gTLDs

Who are the five new ICANN directors?

Almost a quarter of ICANN’s board of directors were replaced at the organization’s annual general meeting in Hyderabad last week.
Five of the 21-strong board are fresh faces, though many will be familiar to regular ICANN and industry watchers.
They hail from five different countries in four of ICANN’s five regions. One is female.
They replace Bruce Tonkin, Erika Mann, Suzanne Woolf, Kuo-Wei Wu and Bruno Lanvin, each of whom have served terms between three and nine years.
The newcomers all get initial, renewable, three-year terms.
Here’s some abbreviated bios of the newly appointed directors.
Maarten Botterman
Appointed by the Nominating Committee, Botterman is an internet governance consultant with strong historic ties to the registry industry.
From the Netherlands, he was chairman of .org manager Public Interest Registry for eight years until July 2016 and served as its interim CEO for several months in 2010.
Prior to that, he held advisory roles in the Dutch and European Union governments.
Becky Burr
American Burr replaces term-limited Bruce Tonkin as the GNSO contracted parties representative to the board. Since 2012 she’s been chief privacy officer of Neustar. Before that, she was a lawyer in private practice.
There are very few people more intimately familiar with ICANN. In the late 1990s, while working at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, she was a key player in ICANN’s creation.
Khaled Koubaa
Koubaa, a Tunisian, is founder of the Arab World Internet Institute, a non-profit dedicated to improving internet knowledge in the Arab region, and until recently head of Middle-East and North Africa public policy at Google.
He was selected by the NomCom. He is also a former member of NomCom, having sat on it during its 2008/9 session. He’s also been a volunteer adviser to PIR in the past.
Akinori Maemura
Hailing from Japan, Maemura works for IP address registry JPNIC. He was selected for the ICANN board by the Address Supporting Organization.
Until recently, he was chair of the executive council of APNIC, which is responsible for distributing IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Kaveh Ranjbar
Iranian-born, Netherlands-based Ranjbar is chief information officer of RIPE NCC, the European IP address authority.
He was appointed to the ICANN board by the Root Server System Advisory Committee.

1 Comment Tagged: board, hyderabad, ICANN, icann 57

.food goes live, and it’s a closed generic

The new gTLD .food went live in the DNS on Friday, but nobody except the registry will be able to register domains there.
In what I would argue is one of the new gTLD program’s biggest failures, .food will be a dot-brand, closed to all except the “brand” owner.
The registry is Lifestyle Domain Holdings, a subsidiary of US media company Scripps Networks.
Scripps runs the Food Network TV station in the States and the site Food.com. It has a trademark on the word “Food”.
Its registry agreement for .food, signed back in April, includes Specification 13, which allows registries to restrict all the second-level domains to themselves and their affiliates.
So food producers, restaurants, chefs and the like will never be able to use .food for their web sites.
ICANN signed the contract with Scripps despite objections from several entities including the Australian government, which warned “restricting common generic strings, such as .food, for the exclusive use of a single entity could have a negative impact on competition”.
Under ICANN rules hastily cobbled together after outrage over so-called “closed generics”, a registry cannot run as a dot-brand a gTLD that is:

a string consisting of a word or term that denominates or describes a general class of goods, services, groups, organizations or things, as opposed to distinguishing a specific brand of goods, services, groups, organizations or things from those of others.

Almost all applications flagged as closed generics were subsequently amended to make them restricted but not brand-exclusive. Scripps was the major hold-out.
The loophole that allowed .food to stay in exclusive hands appears to be that Scripps’ trademark on “Food” covers television, rather than food.
If .food winds up publishing content about food, such as recipes and healthy eating advice, I’d argue that it would go against the spirit of the rules on closed generics.
It would be a bit like Apple getting .apple as a Spec 13 dot-brand and then using the gTLD to publish content about the fruit rather than computers.
No sites are currently live in .food.

6 Comments Tagged: .food, closed generics, ICANN, lifestyle domain holdings, new gTLDs, scripps

Afilias retains .org back-end deal

Public Interest Registry is sticking with Afilias to run the .org registry back-end.
The announcement came yesterday after a open procurement process that lasted for most of 2016.
Over 20 back-end providers from 15 nations — basically the entire industry — responded to PIR’s February request for proposals, we reported back in March.
Afilias retaining the contract is not a huge surprise. The bidding process was widely believed to be a way for non-profit PIR to reduce its costs, believed to be among the highest in the industry.
PIR said yesterday:

Afilias was selected as the best value solution based on the objective criteria and requirements set forth in Public Interest Registry’s procurement process. It is anticipated that Afilias will commence operations under the new contractual agreement on Jan. 1, 2018.

It’s very likely that the new deal will be worth a lot less to Afilias than the current arrangement, which costs PIR about $33 million per year.
In 2013, the last year for which we have Afilias’ financials, .org brought in $31 million of its $77 million revenue.
It’s believed that PIR is currently paying about $3 per domain per year, but Kieren McCarthy at The Register, citing unnamed industry sources, reckons that’s now been bumped down to $2, saving PIR about $10 million per year.
The .org gTLD has about 11.2 million domains under management, but its numbers have been slipping for several months, according to registry reports.

Comment Tagged: .org, afilias, pir, public interest registry

Nominet suspends over 8,000 “criminal” domains as IP complaints double

Police claims of intellectual property infringement led to the number of .uk domains suspended doubling in 2016, according to Nominet.
Statistics released today show that the .uk registry suspended 8,049 domains in the 12 months to October 31, compared to 3,889 in the year-ago period.
It’s an almost tenfold increase on 2014, when just 948 domains were taken down.
Nominet suspends domains when law enforcement agencies tell it the domains are being used in crime. No court order is required and Nominet rarely refuses a request.
Registrants can have the suspension lifted if they can show to law enforcement that the allegedly criminal behavior has stopped.
The vast majority of the complaints in 2016 again came from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, which asked for and got 7,617 names suspended.
Just 13 suspensions were reversed, Nominet said. Most of these were due to sites selling so-called “legal highs” being slow to respond to a change in the law.
The controversial ban on “rape” domains resulted in just one suspension among the 2,407 domains automatically flagged for containing rapey substrings.
Nominet published the following infographic with more stats:

2 Comments Tagged: .uk, nominet, pipcu, piracy, rape, suspensions

GMO offers free SSL with .shop domains

GMO Registry is to offer .shop domain registrants a free one-year SSL certificate with every purchase.
The company said yesterday that the deal, made via sister certificate company GMO GlobalSign, should be in place by the end of the month.
The certs on offer appear to be the of low-end “Domain Validation” variety.
Nevertheless, GlobalSign usually sells them for over $150 per year, many times more expensive than .shop domains themselves.
Popular registrars are currently selling .shop names from $10 to $25.
There are about 90,000 domains in .shop’s zone file today.
That’s a goodish volume by new gTLD standards, but probably not good enough to help GMO recoup the $41.5 million it paid for .shop at auction any time soon.
Upsell opportunities such as the SSL offer, assuming they get any uptake, may help accelerate its path to breakeven.

1 Comment Tagged: .shop, gmo registry, new gTLDs, ssl