Five million Indian government workers to get IDN email

The Indian government has announced plans to issue fully Hindi-script email addresses to some five million civil servants.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology announced the move, which will see each government employee given an @सरकार.भारत email address, in a statement this week.
सरकार.भारत transliterates as “sarkar.bharat”, or “government.india”.
The first stage of the roll-out will see the five million employees given @gov.in addresses, which apparently most of them do not already have.
Expanding the use of local scripts seems to be a secondary motivator to the government’s desire to bring control of government employee email back within its borders in a centralized fashion.
“The primary trigger behind the policy was Government data which resides on servers outside India and on servers beyond the control of the Government of India,” the MEITY press release states.
India currently has the largest number of internationalized domain names, at the top level, of any country.
NIXI, the local ccTLD manager, is in control of no fewer than 16 different ccTLDs in various scripts, with ample room for possible expansion in future.
The registry has been offering free IDN domains alongside .in registrations for about a year, according to local reports.
There are about two million .in domains registered today, according to the NIXI web site.

3 Comments Tagged: .in, cctlds, email, idns, india, nixi

ZACR to delete 12,000 .za domains next week

South African ccTLD registry ZACR is to delete more than 12,000 domains, many of them English dictionary words, ending in .org.za next week.
That’s more than a third of the current count of .org.za domains, which stands at about 33,000 today.
The list includes many English dictionary-word domains very possibly worth more than the standard registration fee, such as sex.org.za, accountant.org.za, comedy.org.za, vodka.org.za, casino.org.za and cash.org.za.
The domains will be deleted and then become available for first-come, first-served registration on September 1.
The current registrants have had fair warning. The company migrated to a new EPP-based registry back-end a few years ago and told its customers they had to migrate to an accredited registrar.
A year ago, it suspended 15,420 domains, cutting off their ability to resolve in the DNS, as way to bring the impending deletion to their owners attention, but since then only 2,394 suspended domains have become compliant with the new rules.
That means 12,677 .org.za domains face the chop Friday next week, unless their owners mount an eleventh-hour rescue operation.
ZACR has published a full list of the soon-to-be-deleted names here
The .org.za space is far less popular than commercial counterpart .co.za, which has over a million registered names.

1 Comment Tagged: .org.za, .za, deletions, premiums, zacr

GoDaddy’s reason for dumping Uniregistry doesn’t make a lot of sense

GoDaddy, as you may have read, has again decided to dump Uniregistry’s portfolio of TLDs, following wholesale price increases.
But its explanation for the move — trying to provide its customers with a “great product experience” — doesn’t seem to tally with the way it has gone about implementing the change.
The company confirmed this week that it will no longer offer new registrations in Uniregistry’s stable of new gTLDs, but will continue to support existing customers.
The registrar’s EVP of domains, Mike McLaughlin, reportedly explained the move like this:

GoDaddy strives to provide its customers with great product experiences wherever possible. After careful consideration, we decided to stop offering new Uniregistry domain names for sale because their pricing changes caused frustration and uncertainty with our customers.

But the way GoDaddy has gone about this looks like it is set to provide anything other than a great product experience.
For starters, existing registrants of Uniregistry names will find their registrations migrated over to the wholesale registrar Hexonet, for which GoDaddy will act as reseller.
They’ll still be able to manage their names via their GoDaddy control panels, but technically GoDaddy will no longer be the registrar.
This could well add friction to the customer support process, as well as meaning Hexonet will now show up in Whois as the sponsoring registrar.
Accompanying this move is the unexplained removal of Whois privacy services for all affected domains. Registrants will get a refund for their privacy service and will have the opportunity to switch registrars to one that will support privacy.
For those that remain, suddenly their personally identifiable information will become publicly available. This could lead to an increase in complaints and support calls as registrants realize what has happened.
In terms of price, existing registrants will presumably still be affected by Uniregistry’s increases to the same extent as they were previously. Again, their customer experience has not changed.
Overall, the explanation doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I put the above points to GoDaddy and VP of domains Rich Merdinger responded, via a company spokesperson:

After we made the decision to stop supporting Uniregistry domain names, we worked to provide the best possible experience we could to our customers. We wanted them to have a transparent experience. They will log in to the same GoDaddy account and service the domain names the same way they always have. Because of the transfer of the name to a different registrar, privacy had to be removed. While this impacts a small subset of these customers, we have done everything to make this transition as smooth as possible.

It’s true that GoDaddy isn’t a big seller of Uniregistry names. It’s one of Uniregistry’s smaller channel partners and the number of Uniregistry names it’s sold — measured in the thousands — is a drop in the ocean of the over 55 million gTLD names it currently has under management.
The two companies are also competitors, it probably should be noted.
But while Uniregistry’s registrar seems to be have been well-received by customers, and its domain volume has grown rapidly in the last three years, it still only had about 1.5 million domains under management at the last count; hardly an existential threat to the Scottsdale behemoth.
It should also be noted that GoDaddy is not the only registrar to distance itself from Uniregistry.
NameCheap also recently discontinued support for the TLDs that are experiencing the biggest price increases. Tucows announced a similar move in May.
GoDaddy had already said it would drop Uniregistry once before, but changed its mind, before changing it back again.

9 Comments Tagged: godaddy, new gTLDs, uniregistry

GoDaddy CEO to retire at 58

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving tonight announced his retirement from the company.
Irving, 58, said he will leave the corner office at the end of 2017, and will stick around on its board of directors until June next year.
He will be replaced by current chief operating officer Scott Wagner, who joined the registrar in 2013 from KKR, one of the three investment companies that owned GoDaddy in its interregnum between founder Bob Parsons and its 2013 initial public offering.
“After more than three decades in technology, I’ve decided it’s time to retire and begin the next phase of my life,” Irving said in a press release.
He added that revenue and profits had doubled under his watch, which commenced in 2013.
Wagner served as interim CEO of GoDaddy in 2012, after Parsons protege Warren Adelman’s short stint in the role.
He was also named president of the company last year.
GoDaddy’s share price has dipped slightly in after-hours trading in the hour or so since the announcement was made.

Comment Tagged: godaddy

Google shifts 400,000 .site domains

Google has given away what is believed to be roughly 400,000 subdomains in Radix’s .site gTLD as part of a small business web site service.
Since its launch a couple of months ago, the Google My Business web site builder offering has been offering small businesses a free one-page site with a free third-level domain under business.site.
Google My Business also offers users the ability to upgrade to a paid-for second-level domain via its Google Domains in-house registrar.
Google the search engine indexes 403,000 business.site pages currently. Because each subdomain is limited to a single page, it is possible that the number of subdomains is not too far behind that number, Radix believes.
This means that business.site is likely almost as large as the .site gTLD itself, which currently has about 450,000 names in its zone file.
Given the rapid growth rate, it seems likely the subdomain will overtake the TLD in a matter of weeks.
According to Radix, business.site was purchased off of its registry reserved premium list. The sale price has not been disclosed.
It’s good publicity for the TLD, and merely the latest endorsement by Google of the new gTLD concept.
As well as being the registry for many new gTLDs, Google parent Alphabet uses a .xyz domain and its registrar uses a .google domain.

11 Comments Tagged: .site, google, google my business, new gTLDs, radix

Another auDA director quits after conflict claims

Australian ccTLD manager auDA has lost its second director in two week with the resignation of Michaella Richards, announced today.
Richards’ position had been subject to criticism by disgruntled auDA members.
It had been speculated that her appointment to the board last December was less due to her experience in the domain industry, reportedly lacking, than due to her friendship with CEO Cameron Boardman.
The two had worked together in the Victorian state government, as DomainPulse uncovered.
Richards had been appointed a “demand class” director, meaning it was her role to represent domain buyers, rather than registrars, on the board. But critics doubted her credentials in this regard.
No reason was given for her resignation today. auDA simply said:

The auDA Board is seeking nominations, including from its demand class membership, for the Demand Class Director casual vacancy resulting from the resignation of Dr Michaella Richards.

Richards follows chairman Stuart Benjamin, who resigned at the end of July just a few days members were due to vote on an motion to oust him.
auDA has in recent weeks reversed its positions on a number of controversial policies after member outcries.

Comment Tagged: auda

Endurance losing founder-CEO next week

Endurance International, the parent company of registrar brands including Public Domain Registry, BuyDomains, Domain.com and BigRock, will see its founding CEO resign next week.
The company said this week that Hari Ravichandran will be replaced by Jeff Fox, most recently chair of customer relationship management software vendor Convergys, on August 22.
Endurance, which makes about 12% of its revenue from domain registrations, had disclosed Ravichandran’s plan to move on back in April, when it was characterized as an effort to move the company to the next stage of growth.
But it comes in the context, as the company has acknowledged, of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its 2015 acquisition of Constant Contact.
The SEC probe has been going on since at least December 2015.
Endurance is also facing flattening top-line growth — revenue of $292.3 million, up 1% on last year, in the second quarter — and deepening losses.
Fox was CEO of Convergys from 2010 to 2012. He is also principal of The Circumference Group, his own investment/advisory firm.

Comment Tagged: bigrock, buydomains, domain.com, earnings, endurance, Public Domain Registry

Google dumps Nazi domain in hours

Neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer found itself without a registrar for the second time in a day this evening, after Google cancelled its registration.
The company told BBC News:

We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.

The cancellation came not many hours after GoDaddy, the controversial site’s original registrar, gave its owners 24 hours to find a new registrar.
That was in response to people on Twitter complaining that the Stormer had published an article attacking a victim of alleged right-wing domestic terrorism, which GoDaddy said broke its terms of service inciting violence.
The current Whois record for dailystormer.com indicates that it is still with Google, but in a clientTransferProhibited status.
That means it should not be possible to transfer the name to a third registrar, unless and until Google changes the status.
The domain still resolves, however, from where I’m sitting.
It might be that the Stormer will now find itself registrar-hopping and/or facing a period of downtime.

1 Comment Tagged: godaddy, google

GoDaddy kicks out neo-Nazi site after dead protester post

GoDaddy has given neo-Nazi web site The Daily Stormer a day to GTFO after it posted an article viciously attacking the victim of racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In multiple tweets, the company said this morning that it had given the site’s owners 24 hours to move to a new registrar.

We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.

— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017

The tweets came in response to those who questioned why GoDaddy continued to host the site in light of an article posted about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting white nationalists at a rally on Saturday.
A man has been arrested and charged with her murder, after allegedly driving his car into a crowd, injuring 19 others.
The article in question was a horribly vicious, cartoonishly misogynistic rant, by site founder Andrew Anglin, entitled “Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut”.
GoDaddy did not specify which terms of service the Stormer had breached, but its terms do include a prohibition against promoting violence.
The Stormer web site has a disclaimer on it stating it is “opposed to violence” and that it will ban any commentators who promote violence.
Within hours of GoDaddy’s tweets, a post appeared on the site claiming to have been written by notorious hacking collective Anonynous, which claimed the site was now under its control.
The post said that the site would be taken down within 24 hours and that quantities of material on the Stormer and Anglin had been obtained.
At this time it is not clear whether the site has really been hacked or is a hoax carried out by the Stormer itself, perhaps designed to make light of upcoming downtime.
The Daily Stormer’s domain has been hosted with GoDaddy since its launch in 2013.

1 Comment Tagged: charlottesville, daily stormer, godaddy

Tucows revenue rockets after Enom buy

Tucows saw its revenue from domain names more than double in the second quarter, following the acquisition of rival Enom.
The company this week reported domain services revenue for the three months ending June 30 of $62.8 million, compared to $28.4 million a year ago.
That was part of overall growth of 78%, with revenue rising from $47.2 million in 2016 to $84.2 million this year.
Net income for the quarter was up 29% at $5.2 million.
Enom, which Tucows bought from Rightside for $76.7 million earlier this year, now accounts for a little under half of Tucows’ wholesale domains business, the larger portion going through its OpenSRS channel.
Sales from Tucows’ premium portfolio rose to $968,000 from $885,000 a year ago.
Its retail business, Hover, did $7.6 million of revenue, up from $3.6 million.

Comment Tagged: earnings, enom, rightside, tucows