Unstoppable gets ICANN accreditation

Unstoppable Domains has become the second blockchain alt-root naming service to get its ICANN accreditation.

The company said today it intends to carry the “the vast majority of generic top-level domains”. It had already been selling .com names, alongside its suite of blockchain extensions, as a reseller.

It also said it intends to sell ccTLD domains, although ICANN accreditation is of course not required for most of those.

It’s the second purveyor of blockchain names to move into the domain name industry after Freename, which got its accreditation last month.

Unstoppable is also working with several blockchain technology companies to prepare applications for new gTLDs when ICANN opens its next application window in 2026.

Comment Tagged: accreditation, ICANN, unstoppable

AI and games among July’s interesting dot-brand domains

A domain hosting a fun little video game for Lidl staff was the highlight dot-brand domain registration in July.

There were 210 registrations in dot-brands in July 2024, spread across 34 individual TLDs. As usual, the largest registrant was German financial services firm Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which gives .dvag domains to its agents, with 90 new regs.

Just like in the non-brand space, not all dot-brand regs immediately resolve publicly. Some never will. Others, technical indicators show, are only designed for private corporate purposes.

These are the new domains that caught my eye in July.

levelup.lidl (also level-up.lidl) — These domains leads to a surprisingly polished, cutesy-cutesy browser game where the player, presumably a new hire at the German supermarket giant, controls a cartoon potato (?) character as they wander around a 3D landscape interacting with other characters to learn about Lidl’s corporate values. Okay, I admit I only gave it five minutes, but it surely beats a PowerPoint.

gemini.google — Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot. The brand has been around since last December, but it took until July for the matching .google domain to be registered. It currently resolves to gemini.google.com, the official Gemini site. Google also registered another of its brands, fitbit.google, in the month, but it does not currently publicly resolve.

sustainability.bostik (and 27 others) — Adhesives maker Bostik registered 28 .bostik domains in July, all related to product categories (paper.bostik, tape.bostik), customer verticals (transportation.bostik, construction.bostik) or corporate purposes (history.bostik, careers.bostik). The company only has 36 active .bostik domains, registering none for over a year, so the new regs suggest a possible rethink of the dot-brand, even though the domains don’t yet publicly resolve.

escapegames.bnpparibas — Why would BNP Paribas, a large French bank, be interested in “escape games”? Is it planning on locking people in its massive safes? The domain doesn’t currently resolve, so I couldn’t tell you.

sellersinyourcommunity.amazon (and variants) — Amazon also registered the likes of sellersofthecommunity.amazon and sellersinthecommunity.amazon, but the registration of siyc.amazon suggests “Sellers In Your Community” is to be the correct brand for whatever localized e-commerce initiative the online retailer has in mind.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, new gTLDs

ICANN U-turns on appeals loophole after community revolt

ICANN has backtracked and substantially pared down a proposal that could have weakened its accountability mechanisms after most of the community said they didn’t like it.

The Org has published for public comment a proposed amendment to its bylaws that will exclude its new Grant Program from the Request for Reconsideration and Independent Review Process mechanisms.

The amendment would specifically exclude claims “relating to decisions to approve or not approve an application to the ICANN Grant Program” from both procedures.

An earlier proposal would have created a new procedure to enable ICANN to also exclude other programs from accountability in future, if certain conditions were met.

But the community largely reacted with revulsion to that proposal, saying they could not support something so overly broad, forcing ICANN to narrow it down to the Grant Program only. ICANN needs the support of its sovereign Empowered Community if it wants to amend its fundamental bylaws.

The $220 million Grant Program is seeking to distribute ICANN’s new gTLD auction funds to worthy causes, but there was a fear the cash could be siphoned off by lawyers if unsuccessful grant applicants were allowed to trigger the accountability mechanisms.

The revised language is likely to be much more palatable to the community, based on previous comments.

The public comment period is open until September 16.

Comment Tagged: accountability, grant program, ICANN, irp, rfr

ICANN to terminate five new gTLDs

ICANN is set to terminate the registry contracts for five new gTLDs run by an apparent deadbeat registry.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have all been “Escalated to Termination Process” following a July breach notice, according to ICANN’s web site.

The first stage of the termination is mediation, which can be followed by arbitration before the contracts, which were all due to expire next month anyway, finally get torn up.

The escalation was not unexpected. All five gTLDs were migrated to the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program last month after critical systems failed to function within the contractual requirements.

It is believed that the TLDs stopped functioning properly after AGIT failed to pay its back-end provider. It also allegedly failed to pay its ICANN fees.

The gTLDs in question for the most part were not used. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of third-party registrations but the others never launched in the decade AGIT was contracted to run them.

.tci is an interesting case, a planned dot-brand that AGIT had intended to operate on behalf of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, the country’s incumbent telco.

Comment Tagged: agit, asia green it system, breach, compliance, ICANN, termination

US could change .com pricing terms

The US government and Verisign are to enter talks about possible changes to .com pricing.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has told the company that it “intends to renew its Agreement with Verisign” but said it welcomed Verisign agreeing to talks that “may include an amendment to the pricing terms”.

The news came in an exchange of letters between NTIA assistant secretary Alan Davidson and Verisign chief Jim Bidzos over the weekend, published last night. Davidson wrote:

NTIA has questions related to pricing in the .com market. We are therefore pleased that Verisign has agreed to discussions regarding .com pricing and the health of the .com ecosystem, including retail and secondary markets. The parties will discuss possible solutions that benefit end-users, both businesses and consumers, and serve the public interest

The Cooperative Agreement between NTIA and Verisign gives the company the right to raise prices by 7% in four of the six years of its term, all of which Verisign exercised in the current run, which ends in a couple months.

The price-rising powers were frozen under Obama administration but reinstated under Trump, giving Verisign masses of extra revenue and huge profit margins, even as .com volume numbers took a prolonged dive.

NTIA’s intervention follows letters from three campaign groups calling .com a “cartel” and inquiries from three Congresspeople.

In response to NTIA’s letter, Bidzos wrote:

We have observed that our capped .com price increases have not always been passed through to benefit end-users and therefore we welcome an opportunity to have this important discussion. We are prepared to consider structures to address this and other issues, including ways to make .com pricing more predictable for the channel as part of it.

It’s clear from this rather tense exchange that the two parties might not exactly see eye-to-eye on their desired outcomes.

Verisign’s position recently has been that .com volumes have been falling in large part because of what Bidzos called the “unregulated retail channel” pumping up prices to increase profit-per-domain over domains under management.

He also pointed out in the company’s most-recent quarterly earnings call that the average price of .coms on the secondary market is $1,600, or 166x the wholesale price.

As some have pointed out, Verisign complaining about profiteering in the channel is the height of chutzpah, given its own mouth-watering margins, which appear to be what it seeks to protect more than anything else.

If Verisign reckons the registrar business is so great, why hasn’t it launched a registrar of its own yet? The company has been legally permitted by the Cooperative Agreement and its ICANN contract to do so for years.

Comment Tagged: .com, ICANN, ntia, pricing, verisign

Two out, two in as NomCom picks new ICANN directors

Two ICANN directors will lose their seats on the board and be replaced by newcomers at the Org’s annual general meeting later this year.

Vice chair Danko Jevtović and Edmon Chung, who have served two and one of the maximum three three-year terms respectively, will depart, according to the announcement of this year’s Nominating Committee picks.

They will be replaced by Amitabh Singhal, from the Asia-Pacific region, who I believe is an Indian internet policy expert who founded .in registry NIXI and also sits on the board of .org manager Public Interest Registry.

Also named, Miriam Sapiro, who I can only assume is Ambassador Miriam Sapiro, a US Trade Representative under the Obama administration who also held a senior policy role at Verisign for a couple of years two decades ago before leaving on acrimonious terms.

Chair Tripti Sinha of North America has also been reappointed for a final term.

The noobs, who both seem incredibly well-qualified for their new roles, will take their seats for the first time at the end of ICANN 81 in Istanbul in October.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

.cv domains now on sale worldwide

Cabo Verde has become the latest nation to market its ccTLD globally based on its meaning in other languages.

The country’s .cv domain is now available via several registrars and recently formed registry entity OlaCV.

A CV is of course shorthand for “curriculum vitae”, what Americans call a résumé, in many countries. OlaCV reckons its addressable market is 3.5 billion people, according to its web site.

OlaCV appears to be a Delaware corporation formed in May last year, shortly before it was awarded the five-year registry contract by Cabo Verde regulator ARME.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any company information on its web site, but OlaCV appears to have its roots in Nigeria, with the ICANN-accredited registrar Go54 (formerly WhoGoHost).

WhoGoHost founder Ope Awoyemi, who has been doing domainer conferences recently, is named as president of the company in a press release today. IANA has the technical contact for .cv as Portuguese ccTLD operator DNS.pt.

Some of the international registrars named on the registry web site do not currently seem to support .cv on their storefronts, and prices vary substantially among those that do carry it.

While OlaCV say prices should be around $10 a year, the only registrar I could find selling in that range was NameSilo. Prices around $70 to $120 seem a lot more common right now.

The registry’s premium pricing strategy is a little different to the usual — domains of six characters and under have premium pricing, regardless of their semantic value.

Cabo Verde is an island nation in West Africa with a population of about half a million. A former colony of Portugal, Portuguese is the main official state language.

Comment Tagged: .cv, olacv

It’s official, .internal is blocked forever

ICANN has formally confirmed that the gTLD .internal will never be delegated.

Its board of directors resolved earlier this week that it “reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications.”

It went on to recommend “that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization’s technical outreach.”

The idea is to give organizations a gTLD that they can use behind their firewalls that they can be sure will never become a public-DNS gTLD in future, which would carry the risk of name collisions and data leakage.

The string “internal” was picked in January over .private and put out for public comment to murmurs of approval.

The move means nobody will be able to apply for .internal in future new gTLD application rounds.

Comment Tagged: .internal, ICANN, new gTLDs

Amazon to launch two new gTLDs this month

Amazon Registry is to finally launch two of the gTLDs it has been sitting on for the best part of a decade.

The company expects to take .deal and .now to sunrise later this month, with general availability following in September.

According to information provided by ICANN, sunrise for both runs for a month from August 22, followed immediately by a week-long Early Access Period and general availability at standard pricing September 30.

Both extensions have been in the root since 2016, parts of Amazon’s portfolio of 54 mostly unused gTLDs.

They’re the first English-language strings the company has launched since .bot, which came out with a controlled release in 2018 before loosening its restrictions last year. It has about 14,000 domains.

Similar TLDs to .deal and .now are already available from other registries, which may give clues to their potential.

The plural .deals is part of Identity Digital’s massive portfolio, selling at a $25 wholesale price, but it currently has fewer than 10,000 registrations, having peaked at 11,388 in May 2022.

.now might be the more attractive of the two. The disputed ccTLD for Niue, .nu, means “now” in Swedish and has about 220,000 domains under management.

Comment Tagged: .deal, .now, amazon, eap, new gTLDs, sunrise

Revealed: who’s really running Epik

Scandal-rocked registrar Epik promised to turn over a new leaf when it got acquired last year, and now the guy in charge of the domains business — a familiar face to many– has broken cover and talked to DI about the company’s recent woes and turnaround plans.

That guy is director of domains Christopher Ambler, a thirty-year veteran of the industry, who came out of stealth mode today to talk about how he wants to kill Epik’s reputation as a refuge for far-right hate and regain the trust of its customers.

Ambler is perhaps best-known as the founder and CEO of Image Online Design, the company that offered a .web gTLD in an alt-root in the 1990s. More recently, until 2021 he also spent seven years as principal software architect at GoDaddy.

Ambler says he joined Epik’s new owner, Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in company formation services, in November 2022, with a remit to scratch-build a registrar to offer the company’s clients online presence services.

“The basic story is boring as hell,” Ambler said. “Registered Agents does business formations… the company just decided it made sense to be a registrar. They brought me on a year and a half ago with the idea to just build this thing from scratch.”

About six or seven months into this project, in June 2023, Registered Agents decided it could cut a couple of years of development time by simply acquiring the assets of an existing registrar, Ambler said, and Epik’s were up for grabs.

At the time, Epik was on the ropes, rocked by a financial mismanagement scandal under then-CEO Rob Monster that had led to registries disconnecting it for non-payment and an ICANN probe that put it at risk of losing its accreditation and going out of business.

Registered Agents paid $5 million for the registrar and set about paying off the registries and getting the ICANN accreditation transferred to the new owners, from Monster’s Epik Inc to the new Epik LLC.

Due to the nature of Registered Agents’ business — it sets up companies for people, often anonymously and not always to nice people — theories abounded, notably on the Namepros discussion forum, that the new owner was just a front for Monster.

“I totally get the whole ‘We think this is Rob Monster pulling another shady deal’ thing, and I don’t know this for a fact but if I were ICANN I would have thought that was entirely a possibility,” Ambler said. “But they went over it with a fine toothed comb and a microscope.”

Quite apart from the business mismanagement, Epik came with a tonne of reputational baggage. It had long been known as a safe haven for far-right bullies, with the likes of Gab.com, The Daily Stormer, InfoWars and Kiwi Farms among its customer base.

Ambler, who describes himself as “kind of a hippy”, culturally Jewish with spiritual leanings toward Buddhism, was not comfortable with this legacy.

While the new Epik did not publicly disassociate itself from these customers until early 2024, Ambler said the decision was made much sooner.

“When the deal was signed to buy Epik we knew on that day we were no longer the ‘free speech registrar’, we were not the right-wing registrar,” he said. “That’s what the old Epik did, I personally don’t agree with that.”

He compared the gear-shift to the day he interviewed at GoDaddy over a decade ago and made it clear he wasn’t happy working for the company if it was still running the “sexist” TV ads it was famed for in the noughties, which by then it had discontinued.

“When I was told we’re looking at buying [Epik’s] assets, the first thing I said was ‘Okay, but there is some dumpster fire involved here, we’re not going to keep that, right?’ and everybody said ‘No’,” Ambler said. “Absolutely everybody was completely on-board.”

The company then set about “politely inviting” its more controversial customers to take their business elsewhere and shutting down any customers involved in outright illegality, such as unlicensed pharmacies, publishing child sexual abuse material or hate speech that crossed the line into incitement to violence.

“I wouldn’t say it was a significant portion of the business, but it was certainly non-zero,” Ambler said. Hundreds of customers were “shown the door”, he said.

“One of things that angsts me is when you look at the online talk about Epik a lot of people still to this day think Epik is the right-wing registrar, because there’s so much stuff out there from years and years ago,” he said.

“People think Epik is the refuge of the white supremacists,” he said. “I really want to combat that message.”

Ambler said he also oversaw a security review of Epik’s code, following a major breach in 2021.

“We went nuts on security for the first couple months, just making sure everything was safe,” he said.

Was it?

“It is now,” he said.

Since the takeover, Epik has lost hundreds of thousands of domains as customers, fed up with its earlier antics and/or suspicious of the new owners, transferred to other registrars.

At its peak in August 2022, the company had 808,160 gTLD domains under management. By March 2024, the most recent month for which we have records, that number had dropped to 265,845, a loss of over half a million names.

“I daresay we’ve bottomed out at this point and actually have net positives on a number of metrics, but we kind of expected that,” Ambler said.

“Keep in mind that the peak of Epik was mostly accomplished by Rob Monster selling domains at a huge loss to create more appearance of growth,” he added. “That was his goal. He wanted to show that Epik was growing by leaps and bounds, but the company was taking losses left and right.”

Looking forward, Epik is focusing less on being the “be-all and end-all” to domain investors and more on being a solid “world class” retail registrar and selling to Registered Agents’ million-plus existing customers.

Ambler’s final messages to DI readers?

“First, we’re not the right-wing registrar, so please don’t confuse us with the old Epik,” he said, “Second, I’m terribly sorry it’s more boring than a lot of people seemed to think.”

“I’d love to get out there and tell people we’re the good guys now,” he said.

5 Comments Tagged: epik, ICANN, registered agents