China loses over half a million domains

The Chinese ccTLD .cn shrunk by over half a million domains in the first half of the year, according to the latest semiannual report from the local registry.

There were 19,562,007 registered .cn names at the end of June, down from 20,125,764 at the end of 2023, a decline of 563,757 domains, according to the CNNIC report.

Despite the decline, .cn is still the largest ccTLD, ahead of the 17,703,602 that Germany’s DENIC (.de) reported June 30.

The dip is not surprising. Verisign has pointed to weakness in China as a reason .com’s volume has been tumbling in recent quarters.

The fact that .cn is going down too suggests the negative growth is in fact due to macroeconomic factors rather that Chinese .com registrants migrating to their local ccTLD.

Comment Tagged: cnnic

ICANN to be director light for months

ICANN’s board of directors will be down one person for six months or more after last month’s unexpected resignation of Katrina Sataki.

The ccNSO, which selected Sataki and is charged with picking her successor, does not expect to be able to name a new director until well into next year, and the vacant seat will stay vacant until then.

The ccNSO Council said it will open nominations for three weeks beginning September 10, but does not expect to hold the election until February 2025, “following the completion of due diligence on the nominee(s) by a professional firm”.

If the election is hotly contested, a second ballot could take place in March.

After the result is confirmed, it will need to be approved by ICANN’s sovereign Empowered Community before the new director can take their seat. Sataki’s seat could be empty for six or seven months.

The Council said that nominations from the Latin America and Caribbean region will not be accepted because the ccNSO’s other appointed director, Patricio Poblete, a Chilean, is from that region.

Sataki resigned with immediate effect August 23 citing personal reasons. Technically, her successor is to carry out her remaining term, which ends in November, but practically that is of course not possible.

Comment Tagged: board, ICANN

FBI seizes Russian fake news domains

The FBI has seized 32 domain names it says were being used by Russian-government-backed interests to peddle fake news to influence the war in Ukraine and the upcoming US presidential elections.

The agency named three sanctioned Russian companies as the owners of the domains, which it said “covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election”.

The FBI called the Russian campaign, which used cybersquatted domains such as fox-news.in and washingtonpost.pm as well as original creations such as waronfakes.com and vip-news.org, “Doppelganger”.

Eight domain registrars and registries have been told by a US court to redirect the domains in question to the FBI’s name servers, where they currently serve either a seizure notice, a placeholder, or counter-propaganda presented as news.

Identity Digital was told to grab the most domains — 11 in total, across .info, .media, .ltd, .agency and .io. Verisign was told to redirect six .com and .net names. Namecheap, as registrar, had to take action on six, in .org, .press and .us.

GoDaddy was told to seize three, in .co (as registrar) and .work (as registry). Domains at NameSilo and Tucows were also affected.

In one case, the FBI went after the Palau-based registry for forward.pw, and in another it went after Finland-based Sarek, the registrar for washingtonpost.pm.

2 Comments Tagged: fbi, seizures

Chinese registrars back in trouble after porn UDRP suspension

A collection of six registrars in the XZ.com stable are back on the ICANN naughty step, facing more Compliance action just a couple of years after a sister company was suspended over UDRP failures.

ICANN has published breach notices against DotMedia and five other registrars under common ownership, claiming that they are failing to send their registration data to the correct escrow provider.

Since last year, registrars have been obliged to escrow their data to DENIC, which replaced NCC Group as ICANN’s sole provider. Escrow is important as it helps make sure registrants keep their domains if a registrar goes out of business.

The six DotMedia registrars have failed to make this transition despite months of hand-holding from ICANN, according to the breach notices. Compliance has been on their case since at least April.

The registrars are among 20 that appear to be under common management, almost all based in Hong Kong and using xz.com as their primary storefront, and it’s not clear why only six accreditations have been found in breach.

The whole group appears to be on the skids in terms of registration volume. The main accreditation, US-registered MAFF Inc, once had around 600,000 gTLD names under management, but that’s down to around 60,000 in the latest registry reports. The others have a few thousand each, having suffered similar percentage declines.

Another member of the group, ThreadAgent.com, was actually suspended for months in 2022 after it failed to transfer two domains lost in cybersquatting complaints under the UDRP to BMW and Lockheed Martin.

The six registrars have until September 25 to come back in compliance or face further action.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, dotmedia, ICANN, udrp, xz.com

Sataki quits ICANN board

Katrina Sataki has abruptly resigned from the ICANN board of directors.

In a letter last week to the ICANN brass and to the Country Code Names Supporting Organization, which elected her to the post three years ago, Sataki wrote:

I am writing to hand in my resignation as a member of the Board of Directors at ICANN, effective immediately for personal reasons. After careful consideration I regretfully see no other option and need to step down to allow another nominee from the ccNSO to fully commit to this work.

She apologized to the ccNSO for the suddenness of her departure.

Sataki, the CEO of Latvia’s .lv ccTLD registry, had served almost one full three-year term on the board, but had been reelected by the ccNSO for a second term due to begin this November.

The ccNSO is expected to open a call for nominations for her replacement this week.

The replacement would serve out Sataki’s remaining term, which has just over two months left on the clock, though it seems likely they would be appointed simultaneously also to serve a full term of their own.

For those keeping score on this kind of thing, the ICANN board now comprises five women and fourteen men (or 10 men if you only count the voting members), with CEO/director Sally Costerton also due to be replaced by a man in December.

2 Comments Tagged: board, ccnso, ICANN

Microsoft switches two gTLDs from GoDaddy to Nominet

Microsoft has moved two of its branded gTLDs from GoDaddy’s registry back-end to Nominet’s.

Records show that .skype and .office both recently made the switch.

Microsoft had already moved six TLDs — .azure, .bing, .hotmail, .microsoft, .windows and .xbox — from Verisign to Nominet about a year ago, and .skype and .office mean its whole collection is now on Nominet’s service.

While .office isn’t technically a dot-brand because it does not have a Spec13 exemption in its ICANN contract, it is in use — you can log in to your email and other services, at least for now, via www.office.

.skype, meanwhile, has a handful of domains that work as redirects to skype.com.

3 Comments Tagged: godaddy, Microsoft, nominet

ICANN homes in on new gTLD application fee

ICANN has narrowed down the expected application fee for the next round of new gTLDs, and while it’s towards the lower end of previous guidelines, it’s still much higher than in 2012.

The bog-standard base application fee is now expected to be $220,000, according to a draft document circulated by ICANN.

That’s up on the $185,000 applicants paid in 2012, but it’s at the less-pricey end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range ICANN outlined at its meeting in Rwanda this June.

But the base fee is simply to get your foot in the door. It’s accompanied by an à la carte menu of additional services incurring additional fees, some of which were part of the base fee in 2012.

Because the new gTLD program is being run on a cost-recovery basis, the fee is set according to how many applications ICANN expects to receive, which is rather speculative and based largely on anecdotal evidence.

That predicted number is now 1,500, down on the 1,930 actual applications received in 2012.

The $220,000 fee is the lowest up-front fee that applicants would have to pay, and does not include extra payments they would have to make in the event of contention, additional evaluations or objections.

There are 10 different additional fees that could be incurred by applicants, including one that’s new to me — an “Occupancy fee” which the document says is “for lingering applications”.

I can’t help but think that this is an attempt to avoid a repeat of Nameshop, which applied for the banned string .idn in 2012 and continues to refuse to admit defeat, withdraw its application, and get its refund.

The new ICANN document notes that this proposed squatters’ rent is still open to discussion, but other fees, while not given a price tag yet, appear more likely to become a reality.

It seems dot-brand applicants will have to pay extra fees for their Spec9 and Spec13 exemptions, which allow them to work outside the usual registrar channel and allocate names only to themselves.

Applicants for community gTLDs and geographic strings would also pay extra fees.

There’s also the chance that the base fee could go up before the application window opens, depending on the outcome of some still-unconfirmed parts of the application process, such as the mechanism to address name collision risk. This alone could add thousands to each applicant’s bill.

The good news is that if the next round is significantly over-subscribed and ICANN makes back the $70 million it reckons the program cost, it plans to offer rebates to applicants dependent on how much extra cash it has received.

The draft document also includes estimates for the cost of the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which enables RSPs to get the ICANN seal of approval before pitching their services to new gTLD applicants.

Also priced on a cost-recovery basis, this program is still expected to cost a maximum of $92,000 per RSP, with the costs potentially falling if more than 50 RSPs apply to be accredited.

ICANN has a pretty good idea that the roughly 45 companies currently providing back-end registry services for gTLDs will probably use the RSP program. If a large number of startups or ccTLD registries want to get involved too, that would bring the price down.

Comment Tagged: fees, ICANN, new gTLDs

Four more dot-brands switch back-ends

Four dot-brand gTLDs have recently changed their back-end providers, according to the latest records, three moving away from Verisign.

US insurance company American Family Insurance has moved its .americanfamily and .amfam from Verisign to GoDaddy, as has AARP, a US interest group representing retired people, with .aarp.

Aquarelle.com Group, a French flower delivery company, has meanwhile switched from French ccTLD operator Afnic to London-based CentralNic (which is still Team Internet’s registry brand).

The AmFam moves are notable because while Verisign has for some time been getting out of the dot-brand back-end business, most of its clients have been migrating to Identity Digital.

I count seven gTLDs making the Verisign-GoDaddy switch, compared to 60 going Verisign-Identity Digital over the last couple years. Verisign is now down to a few dozen dot-brands.

The Aquarelle.com move is notable because it’s rare for a dot-brand to use a back-end in a different time zone that predominantly uses a different language, but Team Internet does have a footprint in France and other Francophone countries so it’s perhaps not wholly weird.

Three of the dot-brands are not heavily used — .aarp has three resolving domains that redirect to aarp.org, while .amfam has about 10 names in its zone that do not publicly resolve and .americanfamily has none.

You might infer from the name “Aquarelle.com” that the company is not a big believer in the dot-brand concept, but you’d be surprisingly wrong — .aquarelle has more than 50 domains that resolve to web sites without redirecting to traditional TLDs.

Comment Tagged: .americanfamily, .aquarelle, aarp, afnic, amfam, centralnic, godaddy, new gTLDs, verisign

Uzbekistan gets its first ICANN registrar

A registrar in Uzbekistan has become the first in the country to receive its official ICANN accreditation, according to the latest records.

Tashkent-based Suvan.net, which does business as @host.uz (ahost.uz), currently specializes in the local .uz ccTLD, where it appears to be the leading registrar by some margin.

The company already sells gTLD domains too, albeit as a reseller. It claims to have over 30,000 customers.

Comment Tagged: accreditation, ahost, ICANN, suvan.net

Almost 100,000 .tr domains registered in one day

Türkiye’s ccTLD has seen a massive spike in registrations, experiencing instant growth of about 8%, at the end of its year-long second-level liberalization process.

The .tr space had 1,187,324 domains at the end of yesterday, according to stats published by government-run registry Trabis, up about 91,000 on the previous day.

That’s more that four time’s .com’s daily growth over the same period.

The sudden growth spurt came due to the registry’s allocation of second-level domains that match previously registered third-level domains under several extensions including .com.tr, .org,tr and .info.tr.

The multi-stage grandfathering process latterly prioritized registrants based on which extension their domain was in and ran from February to early August. The registry decided which registrants had made the cut August 27.

The liberalization came about after Trabis took over from previous registry Nic.tr in 2022. The number of .tr domains has almost doubled since then, crossing on million late last year.

Trabis intends to open up the .tr second level to all comers, full general availability, next Wednesday, September 4.

Türkiye follows the likes of the UK, New Zealand and Australia in opening up the second level of their traditionally three-level spaces.

Comment Tagged: .tr, second-level, trabis