Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system

Most of the largest domain registrars are not currently participating in ICANN’s new Registration Data Request Service, according to my research.

I used the RDRS tool to check domains managed by every accredited registrar that has over a million domains under management and discovered that at least 25 out of these 40 registrars do not currently support the service.

The number may be 26, but RDRS did not recognize any domains managed by Chinese registrar Ali Baba as valid, giving instead a “domain does not exist” error message, even for alibaba.com itself.

In total, the 25 registrars coming up blank look after over 63 million gTLD domains, about 28% of the total.

Some very recognizable brands are not in the system.

Squarespace Domains II, the new name for the old Google Domains, the fourth-largest registrar, is the largest company not participating. Together with its original accreditation, Squarespace Domains, they have over 10 million domains under management.

TurnCommerce, GMO, IONOS, NameSilo, PDR, Gname, Dynadot, Wix, OVH, Register.com, FastDomain, Name.com, Domain.com, Hostinger, Sav.com, Xin Net, West.cn, Cronon, Domain Robot, Automattic, DNSPod, and Cloudflare are also not in the system.

Oh, and neither is Markmonitor.

While I only checked 40 registrars, not the full 2,702 that were active in the July registry transaction reports, I would expect the level of support to decline the lower down the list you get, particularly as hundreds of accreditations have a trivial number of domains or are merely aliases for companies already known to not support RDRS.

It’s quite possible some of the registrars I’ve named here are planning to sign up and have just been slow to do so, but they’ve had plenty of time — ICANN has been onboarding registrars since September 20.

The level of support from the registrar industry will be critical to judging whether the RDRS project is deemed a success.

In a recent letter to the GNSO Council discussing “success criteria” for the program, ICANN chair Tripti Sinha wrote (pdf):

The Board agrees that the participation of a sufficient number of registrars with a sufficient number of domain name registrations under management will be important with respect to gathering data.

On the bright side, GoDaddy, Tucows and Namecheap are on board, and that represents about 90 million domains. GoDaddy alone accounts for 65 million, slightly more than the combined total of the 25 large registrars that are not participating.

RDRS is a system designed to simplify the process of requesting non-public Whois data by passing all such requests to the relevant registrars through a central hub.

Of course, it’s only useful if the registrars are actually in the system.

ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live

ICANN has this evening gone live with its service that enables anyone to request private Whois data on any gTLD domain.

The Registration Data Request Service lets people request contact information on registrants that would otherwise be redacted in the public Whois due to laws such as the GDPR.

The press release announcing the launch seems to have come out an hour or two before the service actually became accessible, but it’s definitely live now and I’ve tried it out.

The system is defined largely by what it isn’t. It isn’t an automated way to get access to private data. It isn’t guaranteed to result in private data being released. It isn’t an easy workaround to post-GDPR privacy restrictions.

It is a way to request an unredacted Whois record knowing only the domain and not having to faff around figuring out who the registrar is and what their mechanisms and policies are for requesting the data.

After scaling back the extremely complex and expensive original community recommendations for a post-GDPR Whois service, ICANN based the RDRS on its now decade-old Centralized Zone Data Service, which acts as an intermediary between registries and people like myself who enjoy sniffing around in zone files.

The RDRS merely connects Whois data requestors — the default settings in the interface suggest that ICANN thinks they’ll mostly be people with court orders — with the registrars in charge of the domains they are interested in.

Anyone who has used CZDS will recognize the interface, but the requesting process is longer, more complex, and requires accepting more disclaimers and Ts&Cs. That said, it’s not particularly confusing.

At first glance, it looks fine. Slick, even. I’ve used it to submit a test request with GoDaddy for my own Whois data, specifying that whoever deals with the request is free to ignore it. Let’s see what happens.

A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site

Israel-based registrar Wix is being blamed for a gory anti-Hamas web site being promoted by Israeli government officials.

A number of recent media reports — notably including this one by usually reliable news wire UPI — have said that Wix is behind the incredibly NSFW web site at hamas.com.

The site is a dark parody of a Hamas fund-raising page, containing disturbing footage of the group’s October 7 atrocities — dead bodies, terrorists taking hostages, shooting dogs and burning homes.

So I imagine Wix would be disturbed to learn it is being credited as the creator of the site, apparently purely because the domain was registered via its registrar and hosted on its hosting service.

“The Israeli software company Wix has created a website to spread anti-Hamas propaganda amid the war in Gaza,” UPI reported, sourcing a GoDaddy Whois lookup that lists Wix as the registrar but shows no registrant information.

A Whois lookup on Wix itself, which should contain information beyond the registry record supplied by GoDaddy, does not reveal any additional information — not even redacted fields — about the registrant.

Hamas usually uses hamas.ps for its web site, but it’s currently down reportedly due to cyber-attacks by pro-Israel hacktivists.

hamas.com has been parked for years by what UPI uncharitably refers to as “cybersquatters”.

Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack

A single-letter domain, an AI-related name, and a category-killer domain hack appear to have been sold by Google Registry during the latest week of its ongoing Early Access Period for the new .ing gTLD.

Judging by the .ing zone file, at least three domains have been registered in .ing since I last posted about the apparent seven-figure sale of host.ing a couple weeks ago.

The new names are w.ing, shipp.ing and tur.ing. I assume tur.ing refers to war hero Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing and namesake of the Turing Test, used to judge AI intelligence.

w.ing was registered first, on November 13, when it would have incurred a six-figure price tag, according to published registrar retail prices. The registrant is listed as Google via the registrar Markmonitor.

Unlike w.ing and host.ing, the other two were registered via GoDaddy (albeit with redacted registrant names) so we can be more confident they are actually sales to third-party registrants.

Both shipp.ing and tur.ing were registered shortly after Google’s EAP rolled over into week three pricing ($35,000 at 101Domain‘s low-end prices, as a guide) on November 21 at 1600 UTC.

If Whois can be relied upon, the shipp.ing registrant is based in Texas and the tur.ing registrant in Arizona.

tur.ing is the only one trying to resolve currently, from where I’m sitting, but it fails due to a cert error.

Google’s EAP enters week four tomorrow at 1600 UTC, at which point prices fall daily until they settle at general availability pricing on December 5.

Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?

There’s evidence that Google Registry may have sold a .ing domain name for seven figures during its pre-launch period.

Google is well into its Early Access Period for the new gTLD, which runs for five weeks with premium prices decreasing every week or day until December 5, when they go to general availability pricing.

The EAP was notable for just how premium the first-week prices were — if you really wanted a quality domain hack for your business, it would cost you well north of $1 million.

But as far as I can tell from zone files, just one domain was added during that first week — host.ing, which has a Whois creation date of November 6, well within the cut-off for the seven-figure price tag.

The domain does not resolve and Whois currently shows Google itself as the registrant and Google’s go-to registrar, Markmonitor, as the registrar.

So it may be a self-reg, but waiting until EAP to grab a name in-house when Google has had literally years to do so does seem unusual.

Bosnian government to sue US domain firm that cut it off

One of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two governments has said it will sue a US domain name company — probably Verisign — for turning off the domain it was using for official government business.

“The Government of the Republic of Srpska will hire legal experts to prepare a lawsuit against the company that disabled the use of the website of the Government of the Republic Srpska without prior notice,” the government said in a statement on its new web site.

It did not name the company in question, but we can narrow it down to a few.

Its old domain, vladars.net, was registered via Dotster, a reseller for Domain.com, part of Newfold Digital. The .net registry is of course Verisign. These are all American companies subject to US legal jurisdiction.

The domain still exists in Whois, but has been removed from the .net zone file and does not resolve.

The Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic, is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina that doesn’t particularly want to be a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As such, its new domain is in .rs, the ccTLD for neighboring Serbia, rather than Bosnia’s .ba.

The old .net domain was reportedly deleted due to US sanctions against the Republic, which were expanded October 20 to include members of President Milorad Dodik’s family and several corporate entities.

The US accuses the Dodik family of widespread “graft, bribery, and other forms of corruption” and engaging in “divisive ethno-nationalistic rhetoric” to divert attention from their activities. It additionally accuses them of violating the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in the region in the 1990s.

Nominet takes over failed .desi

Nominet has been picked as the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator for failed gTLD .desi, the company confirmed today.

The gig means the .uk registry will be responsible for keeping .desi ticking over — handling DNS, EPP, Whois etc — while ICANN looks for a successor registry.

.desi was operated by mom-n-pop outfit Desi Networks of Maryland on a Team Internet back-end until it threw in the towel this July, having failed to sell more than a handful of domains.

The term “desi” refers to the cultures of the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora, giving an addressable market well over a billion people. But there were only 1,743 registered domains at the last count but the only active sites that show up in Google are porn.

It’s the second gTLD to go into special measures after .wed, which Nominet is also handling. ICANN has three accredited EBERO providers, the others being CNNIC of China and CIRA in Canada.

While .wed has only one active registrar and barely 30 registered domains, .desi has almost 300 registrars, about 70 of which have domains.

Freenom spanked for holding Olympics domain hostage

Freenom has been hit by its third ICANN contract-breach notice in under a month, this time because the organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics could not transfer a domain out to another registrar.

The registrar, formally OpenTLD, failed to take off the ClientTransferProhibited status from the domain club2024.tickets, preventing the registrant from transferring it, ICANN claims.

Digging through my database and Whois records, it looks like the organizing committee of Paris 2024 used Freenom to defensively register 10 .tickets domain names related to its Le Club Paris 2024 marketing initiative in July 2020.

They were the only .tickets domains Freenon has ever sold.

When they came up for renewal last year, the Paris committee instead transferred nine of them out to local registrar Gandi, where they remain. The 10th domain was not transferred for some reason.

ICANN says Freenom is in violation of the Transfer Policy by failing to unlock the domain without a good reason. Additionally, the domain doesn’t show up in Whois queries on Freenom’s web site, despite still being in the zone file.

Compliance has given the registrar until November 7 to come back into compliance or risk losing its accreditation.

Freenom is already working under two active breach notices, which ICANN said it has not yet responded to. The deadline on the earlier, September 20 notice has already passed, so ICANN could escalate any day.

Seven domain hacks already registered in Google’s .ing

Some companies are using their trademarks to grab potentially valuable domain hacks in the upcoming .ing gTLD, possibly avoiding having to cough up seven figures for them later on.

There’s about a week left on Google Registry’s .ing sunrise period, but some hacks have already started showing up in the .ing zone file. Not counting those that look like they belong to Google, I count seven so far:

• adapt.ing
• design.ing
• draw.ing
• dumpl.ing
• edit.ing
• giv.ing
• sign.ing

None of them resolve to web sites from where I’m sitting and Whois is pretty much useless nowadays other than to confirm that the registration dates that fell within the .ing sunrise, which began September 20.

edit.ing and sign.ing both have Adobe-owned name servers, which may give an indication of who registered those names.

To get a domain name during sunrise, you don’t necessarily need to have a famous brand, you only need to have a trademark recognized by the ICANN-approved Trademark Clearinghouse.

The trademark string can “cross the dot”, which may be what’s happened in the case of dumpl.ing and giv.ing.

Getting these potentially valuable generic domain hacks is particularly important in the case of .ing, where Google has set ludicrously high fees for its Early Access Period, which follows sunrise on October 31.

As first reported by Domain Name Wire, EAP prices start at $1.1 million retail.

Ancient registrar gets ICANN breach notice over UDRP

A thirty-year-old registrar — practically prehistoric by internet standards — has been hit with an ICANN breach notice after apparently failing to transfer a domain lost in a UDRP and not paying its fees.

ICANN has told Texas-based GKG.net that it failed to implement a July UDRP decision (pdf) over the domain top-rx-market.com, which was won by generic pharmaceuticals firm TopRX.

That domain is using GKG’s Whois privacy service and suspended-domains.net as its name servers but still resolves to an active pharma storefront from where I’m sitting. The UDRP says the domain was registered to a Russian, who did not respond to the UDRP.

While the UDRP-related alleged breach is pretty recent, it looks like ICANN has been chasing GKG for a couple of years.

Compliance first notified the registrar that it was past due on its quarterly fees back in February 2022.

Since March, it also has been looking at alleged failures to handle abuse reports for pharma-related domains including canadianpharmstore.net, usapharmacymall.com, good-pills.com, and 1-pharm.com, which all resolve to the same discount medicines site.

ICANN says all of its attempts to call, email and fax GKG have fallen on deaf ears.

GKG isn’t tiny. It had over 83,000 gTLD domains under management in May, though it appears to have been shrinking by hundreds of domains per month for over a decade.

The company was accredited by ICANN with IANA number 93, which means it’s among the first wave of registrars accredited over two decades ago — it’s older than GoDaddy.

GKG has until October 13 to clean up its act or face suspension and termination.