Com Laude buys larger rival Markmonitor

Consolidation in the corporate registrar market continued this week, with Com Laude announcing that it is buying longstanding rival Markmonitor for an undisclosed sum.

Markmonitor is being spun out of Newfold Digital, which acquired it for $302.5 million three years ago, with Newfold saying it wanted to “simplify its portfolio” and focus on Network Solutions and Bluehost.

Both companies compete in the brand protection and corporate domain management space, managing domain portfolios and dot-brand gTLDs on behalf of high-value clients.

Markmonitor is the larger registrar by far in terms of gTLD domains under management, with over a million domains at the last count. Com Laude has about a quarter of that number on its accreditation.

Ben Crawford will remain CEO of Com Laude and Stu Homan will remain head of Markmonitor. The company will maintain its offices in Idaho, London, and Tokyo.

Just last week Com Laude said it was acquiring rival new gTLD consultant Fairwinds Partners. Expect to see Com Laude’s fingerprints on a lot of new gTLD applications next year.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, com laude, markmonitor, new gTLDs

Epik took down Charlie Kirk doxing site

Epik confirmed that it took down a web site dedicated to doxing people who celebrated the murder of right-wing American podcaster Charlie Kirk.

Epik said it had “removed” the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation — originally titled Expose Charlie’s Murderers — from its platform.

The company said it “will not provide services to anyone who generates credible security threats”.

While the site — originally at charliesmurderers.com before switching to ckdf.org — hosted an unmoderated database of personal information on tens of thousands of people who had allegedly celebrated Kirk’s murder online, Epik seems to have removed it on more technical grounds.

The registrar said the original domain was registered “using false information” in violation of its terms, and that there were “verifiable DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) threats” connected to the site.

Both domains in question are now at Namecheap, though neither resolve to a web site at time of publication and the group’s social media accounts appears to have been dormant for a few days.

Epik was once known as a safe haven for right-wing extremism but has since said it’s turned over a new leaf.

Comment Tagged: epik

Number of subsidized gTLD bidders far lower than thought

A huge number of organizations that started applying to ICANN for subsidized new gTLD applications have apparently pulled out of the program, judging by newly released stats.

As of September 19, 42 would-be applicants had joined the Applicant Support Program, with ICANN stats published yesterday revealing that 30 have been removed compared to last month’s stats because they are “deemed inactive, with 90 or more days of inactivity.”

Last month, there were over 70 reported applicants.

To date, only three have received provisional approval and of those only one has fully progressed through the system. Only one has formally withdrawn from the process.

ASP promises applicants — only non-profits and/or charities so far, though small businesses from the developing world can apply too — 75% to 85% off the expected $227,000 application fee when the next application opens in Q2 next year.

ICANN has faced some criticisms from governments at the lack of applicants so far from under-serviced regions such as South America.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, asp, ICANN, new gTLDs

Another registrar goes AWOL

ICANN has started takedown procedures against another registrar that appears to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

The registrar is 0101 Internet, based in Hong Kong, not to be confused with 101 Domain, which is based in Ireland and California and a completely different company.

0101 has been around for 15 years and had a little over 1,000 domains under management at the last count, mostly .com. Its DUM peaked at over 10,000 over a decade ago but has been declining since.

Currently, its web site doesn’t reliably resolve, which may be the reason ICANN can’t find contractually required information there. Archives show the place on its site where you would usually expect to see a company name or logo, it has just said “Your Brand” for the last few years.

The main problem outlined in ICANN Compliance’s breach notice is that 0101 has not been escrowing its registrant data with DENIC, which could cause problems when its customers’ domains are migrated to a new registrar.

It also hasn’t been paying its ICANN fees, according to the notice.

0101 has until October 3 to come into compliance or risk losing its contract.

Comment Tagged: 0101 internet, breach, compliance, ICANN

gTLD loses its second-largest registrar after breach

ICANN has terminated another registrar’s accreditation, this time putting about 10,000 domains at risk.

The registrar in question is Dubai-based Intracom Middle East, which does business at domains.gdn.

As the domain suggests, the company specialized in .gdn domain names. It had about 10,000 of them under management at the last count, sold for under a dollar each for the first year.

It was the .gdn registry’s second-biggest registrar after Dynadot.

ICANN Compliance is terminating its contract for not paying its fees, not implementing RDAP, and generally not publishing required transparency information on its web site.

As I noted in May, its web site appeared to be down, and archived versions of the site suggested it had been hacked at least once recently.

ICANN, which had been chasing Intracom for a little over a year, said it will follow the De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to move the company’s remaining domain names to a new registrar.

Comment Tagged: .gdn, compliance, ICANN, intracom

Com Laude buys Fairwinds

Two dot-brand gTLD consultants are to merge in a deal announced today.

London-based Com Laude said it is acquiring Washington DC-based Fairwinds Partners for an undisclosed amount.

Com Laude said that it got more than 120 dot-brand gTLDs for its clients in the 2012 round, and that Fairwinds was the consultant on 133 applications back then.

The company added that it is “currently engaged to assist customers to obtain hundreds of TLDs in the 2026 round”.

Word on the street is that Com Laude is doing gangbusters recruiting dot-brand clients for the Next Round, and scooping up Fairwinds certainly won’t hurt in that effort.

Both companies help brands with their gTLD applications and then take care of the ICANN paperwork to keep them — alive but often dormant — for their lifecycle.

My records show Fairwinds has lost a few dozen gTLD-management customers over the last few years, and has acquired none.

The Next Round is due to open for three months of applications next April.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, com laude, fairwinds

Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end

Unstoppable Domains has applied to ICANN to become a back-end registry services provider, according to the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould told DI that the company is currently going through the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which pre-approves RSPs prior to next year’s next round of applications.

There are 27 companies with applications submitted to the program, according to ICANN’s latest stats, but Unstoppable is the first confirmed market newcomer.

The company is a recently accredited registrar, but is best-known for selling names on non-DNS blockchain naming systems.

Gould said Unstoppable plans to use its RSP accreditation for its own gTLD applications and those of its crypto-company clients. It doesn’t sound like it will be aggressively competing for customers in the traditional DNS space.

The accreditation is necessary because Unstoppable intends to vertically integrate, marrying traditional DNS with on-chain names in its gTLDs, so extra technical work is needed, Gould said.

Unstoppable is building its registry infrastructure using Google’s open-source Nomulus software, he said.

6 Comments Tagged: blockchain, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, rsp evaluation program, rsps, unstoppable domains

Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad

ICANN’s board of directors has an unusually bumper crop of non-trivial resolutions on its agenda for next week, including the fate of the .ly TLD, new anti-harassment rules, and killing off as many as 16 applications from the 2012 new gTLD application round.

Of the nine items on the agenda, published overnight, four stand out as noteworthy:

Termination Procedure for Remaining 2012 Round Applications that were not Successful

With ICANN spooling up to start accepting new gTLD applications in the second quarter next year, it appears to be ready to clear the decks of the last application round by killing off lingering applications.

While details of the proposed procedure are not yet available, it could apply to as many as 15 applications that are currently marked as “Will Not Proceed” or other failure states in ICANN’s application database.

Perhaps the most obviously affected application is Nameshop’s bid for .idn, which was rejected because the string matches a protected country-code for Indonesia. ICANN has been begging Nameshop to withdraw its application for many years, but the requests have fallen on deaf ears.

If ICANN’s search engine is to be believed, major companies such as Tata (.tata, blocked on geographic grounds) and L’Oréal (.salon, lost at last-resort auction to Identity Digital) still have failed, unwithdrawn applications.

Applications for contested, legally challenged, as-yet-undelegated gTLDs, including .web and .hotel, are also apparently still live in the system.

Transfer of the .LY (Libya) top-level domain to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics

Libya’s .ly ccTLD is notable because it’s somewhat popular as a domain hack for words that end in “ly”. It’s been delegated to Libyan state-owned General Post and Telecommunication Company for 20 years.

While the transition from GPTC to GACI, the government regulator, may just be a formality, there’s an added wrinkle that Libya, tormented by civil unrest since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, currently has two governments and GACI is reportedly aligned with just one of them.

Community Anti-Harassment Policy and Retirement of Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

ICANN has been sitting on this one for longer than expected. The Org proposed revisions to its Community Anti-Harassment Policy a year ago and quickly putting them to public comment, but there’s been scant movement on the issue since January.

The proposed changes would further regulate personal and professional interactions between ICANN community members.

Some commenters complained that the changes do not go far enough, suggesting that situations where no offence was intended and none was taken should also be disciplinary infractions.

Others said that the changes would have a chilling effect and fail to sufficiently take into account cultural differences among ICANN’s global community.

The proposals came shortly after the latest in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits against the Org was revealed. That suit was settled after ICANN failed to get it thrown out of court.

Some relevant developments over the last eight months include the appointment of a new Ombuds and CEO, allegations (denied by ICANN) that it retaliated against friends of the latest harassment plaintiff by firing them, and ICANN’s capitulation to the Trump administration by easing itself away from public commitments to diversity, inclusion and equity.

3 Comments Tagged: dei, harassment, ICANN, idn, libya, ly, new gTLDs, redelegations

Registry to release one-letter domains tomorrow

People looking for a single-character domain name in a two-character ccTLD will have a new option from tomorrow.

Adsib, the registry for Bolivian ccTLD, plans to make one and two-character domains directly under .bo on September 4.

There are no restrictions on how many domains a person may register, not are there any local presence requirements, according to the registry’s new policy document.

It’s not clear yet whether there will be premium pricing for SCDNs. Regular pricing for a second-level .bo domain from the registry is BOB 980 (about $140). Overseas registrars mark up by about $50.

The new policies come as part of a broader sweep by Adsib that also updates rules on banned content, restricted second-level spaces, transfers and subdomains, among other things.

Comment Tagged: .adsib, .bo, bolivia, scdn, single-character

New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more

The way ccTLDs fund ICANN is being reformed, with some registries set to pay thousands of dollars more to the Org’s annual budget.

The new rules, adopted by the ccNSO late last week, won’t affect the largest ccTLDs like .de and .uk, but they could drag mid-tier and the smallest registries into higher tax bands.

The funding model, last adjusted in 2013, is based on each registry’s number of domains under management. The suggested contribution is fixed, rather than per-domain, and depends on which DUM range a ccTLD falls into.

The newly approved bands see the top two tiers unchanged — with over five million names the due is $225,000, and over 2.5 million it’s $150,000.

The third tier, which captures at least 14 ccTLDs from the likes of Denmark, Japan and Mexico, starts at 1.2 million names (a change from one million in the 2013 guidelines) and continues to suggest a $75,000 donation.

Moving the threshold from a million to 1.2 million doesn’t seem to affect many registries. Of the ccTLDs I have up-to-date stats for, only South Korea and possibly Montenegro appear to benefit from the change.

Band D, which affects about a dozen ccTLDs from the likes of Malaysia, Norway and New Zealand, is seeing its contributions go up from $25,000 to $35,000, but the threshold is rising from 500,000 domains to 600,000.

This means that .ai would have to pay the higher rate, but historically Anguilla has not contributed to ICANN at all.

As the ccNSO is at pains to point out, ccTLD contributions are all voluntary, and the bands are suggestions rather than binding.

Fees for the smaller ccTLDs seem to have seen the most rejiggering, with three new low-end tax bands being introduced for registries with the lowest DUM counts. There are now 10 bands in total rather than seven.

Under the 2013 guidelines, any ccTLD with under 50,000 names was only asked to pay $500 a year. That lowest threshold has now been reduced to 10,000 names, raising dozens of registries into higher bands.

Countries such as Ecuador, Azerbaijan and Algeria, and the French department of Réunion, will now be asked to asked to pay $2,500, up two grand a year.

The contributions are designed to pay for the services ICANN provides ccTLDs, but the overall amount is pretty small compared to the Org’s overall budget.

The ccNSO has calculated that the 2013 model affected 255 ccTLDs and would raise as much as $4 million for ICANN a year. That would change to $4.7 million from 306 ccTLDs under the 2025 model.

But that’s only if everyone plays ball. In reality, only 109 ccTLDs gave ICANN anything at all in its last-reported year, and the total take was $2.1 million. Some registries, from the UK, Israel and Russia, cut or eliminated their funding.

Since its start of the voluntary contribution model, fewer than half of all ccTLD registries have ever given ICANN any money.

1 Comment Tagged: budget, ccnso, cctlds, ICANN