DENIC kicks out NCC as ICANN’s sole escrow agent

DENIC has won the contract to be the sole supplier of registrar data escrow services for ICANN, the Org has announced.

The German registry is replacing NCC Group, which acquired Iron Mountain’s escrow business two years ago. Iron Mountain has been ICANN’s chosen escrow agent since it started requiring registrars to escrow registrant data in 2007 in the wake of the RegisterFly scandal.

Under ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars have to deposit this data either daily or weekly, depending on how many domains under management they have, to mitigate the risk of domains being lost.

Registrars can choose to use ICANN’s chosen escrow agent, in which case ICANN pays, or they can choose another from an approved list, in which case the registrar pays.

Naturally enough, the vast majority of registrars choose to go with the free option. DENIC has been on the approved list since 2017. There are also one Russian and three Chinese companies approved to provide these services.

The change of contractor means escrow will now be provided by a EU-based company for the first time. UK-based NCC’s contract was via its US subsidiary, NCC Group Software Resilience (NA) LLC. ICANN said DENIC has opened up facilities in North America.

ICANN said NCC “will no longer be accepting new registrars with immediate effect and will no longer provide [Registrar Data Escrow] services starting 1 November 2024”, so registrars have some breathing space to migrate.

The deal was worth $800,000 a year to NCC, according to ICANN’s latest tax forms. One assumes DENIC is doing it cheaper.

1 Comment Tagged: denic, escrow, ICANN, iron mountain, ncc

ICANN takes over country’s ccTLD after Hall of Famer’s death

ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years.

IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the “caretaker” sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday.

The Org replaces the American University in Beirut, which as the name suggests is an American-owned university in Beirut, as sponsor and Lebanese Domain Registry as the admin.

It appears that AUB has not been involved with running .lb for a few years, having terminated its relationship with LBDR in 2020, and has told IANA that it is no longer the ccTLD’s sponsor.

AUB’s disassociation with LBDR, which appears to have been quite acrimonious, forced the registry to move onto CoCCA’s managed registry platform, where it still sits today.

Nabil Bukhalid, LBDR’s founder and a member of ISOC’s Internet Hall of Fame, had been trying to secure a permanent home for .lb for years, according to a history of the domain on the registry’s web site.

But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while on vacation in January this year, leaving Lebanon’s domain in a bit of a limbo.

Kim Davies, head of IANA, revealed in a letter posted today (pdf) that .lb has been managed by Bukhalid’s “associates” for the last six months.

He said ICANN has approved a new “caretaker” role for IANA, and that the designation “will signal that there is an extraordinary and temporary operational situation”.

“IANA will continue to work with Bukhalid’s known associates to ensure the ongoing operation of the domain, until such time as a qualified successor is identified through a normal ccTLD transfer request process, at which time the caretaker designation will be removed,” he wrote.

.lb is believed to have fewer than 5,000 domains under management.

Bukhalid’s struggle to secure a successor played out against the backdrop of a Lebanese government that has far more important things to worry about. The country has been in a deep financial crisis since 2019, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a revolution, and one of the largest accidental non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The economic crisis was such that Bukhalid was forced to incorporate LBDR in Delaware a couple years back.

“We are establishing this designation out of an operational necessity. There appear to be no specific policies that govern a situation where the existing designated ccTLD manager no longer performs its role but there is no obvious successor,” Davies wrote.

He suggested that the ccNSO may want to consider creating a policy for this kind of scenario.

Similar situations could occur in future, I reckon, if increasingly grey and wrinkly Postel-era “Just Some Guy” ccTLD sponsors don’t make arrangements for their heirs.

Davies said in his letter that the “caretaker” designation has been used once before, for Libya’s .ly in 2004. But it’s the first time IANA has been a caretaker, and the Libya experiment went spectacularly badly.

Comment Tagged: .lb, aub, cctlds, iana, ICANN, lbdr, ly, redelegation

ICANN Ombudsman quits

Herb Waye has quit as ICANN’s independent Ombudsman, according to ICANN.

His last day will be September 30 and ICANN is already looking for his replacement, the Org said in a statement.

While the announcement includes a glowing quote from board chair Tripti Sinha it does not contain a quote from Waye and no reason was given for his departure.

Waye has been in the Ombudsman’s office for 16 years, the last seven as the Ombudsman itself.

The Ombudsman is a structurally independent office that deals with issues of fairness within the ICANN community. It’s one way community members can complain about each other and ICANN itself.

Most the work is handled confidentially, so it’s difficult to say exactly what it is the Ombudsman does for their money, but the last few years’ Ombudsman annual reports show the office typically receives a couple hundred complaints a year, maybe a couple dozen of which are actually within its jurisdiction.

Complaints cover issues such as abusive discourse, harassment, and contractual compliance.

Some of the most visible Ombudsman work has related to sexual harassment complaints at ICANN public meetings. Some female community members have stated that they would feel uncomfortable reporting sexual harassment to a male Ombudsman.

I’d be very surprised if the next Ombudsman is not a woman.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, Ombudsman

ICA baffled by plan to outlaw domaining in India

The Internet Commerce Association isn’t happy about a plan to ban domain investing in India’s .in domain, saying it will “destroy a valuable and thriving secondary market”.

NIXI, the government-overseen ccTLD registry, already has a policy in its Registrar Accreditation Agreement that bans registrars from “squatting, grabbing, hoarding, infringement, auctioning, drop catch or selling of the .IN domain names at a exceptionally higher price than the published MRP”.

The registry says that registrars are using registrants as proxies to get around this rule, and is now proposing to extend the ban from registrars to registrants as well.

It’s the latest in a series of strange, Draconian policy pronouncements from NIXI, which increasingly gives the impression of being ruled by fiat. Last year, it banned people from buying more than two domains at once.

The ICA, which represents the interests of domainers, has responded to the policy proposal with 10 arguments against it, largely designed to shame NIXI for acting against the Indian government’s pro-market stance, suggesting the change may well be illegal, and pointing out it is probably shooting itself in both feet at once, financially speaking.

On that last point, ICA general counsel Zak Muscovitch wrote:

NIXI will potentially face a dramatic loss of revenue as a result of its purported policy change as affected registrants will be compelled to drop their domain names and thereby not remit any renewal fees or fees for new registrations. In effect, NIXI will be going backwards in time by greatly reducing the number of registrations and its associated revenue thereby possibly having to rely upon new government funding for its operations

The number of affected registrations could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. You would be well advised to conduct a study to determine the volume of affected registrations prior to making such a monumental decision. After changing the policy, you will likely no longer be “one of the Fastest Growing Domain in the Asia Pacific”, but rather the opposite.

While NIXI does not regularly publish its numbers, it is believed to have well over three million domains under management. It’s a big ccTLD, but relatively small compared to India’s population of 1.4 billion. The only other country with a comparable population, China, has about 20 million .cn domains.

Comment Tagged: ica, nixi

No $8 million discount for dot-brands, says ICANN

ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators.

The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight.

But interim CEO Sally Costerton has now responded to “respectfully decline” the request, which would have wiped out about $8 million of ICANN’s annual budget, about 5% of its total revenue.

“The cost to support New gTLDs is not merely based on the number of domains under management or the level of abuse. Regardless of the size of the TLD, registry operators must still comply with the Registry Agreement and associated policies, and ICANN must monitor that compliance,” Costerton wrote.

Dot-brands already have lower fees because they uniformly don’t pass the 50,000 domains limit at which transactional fees kick in, she said.

There are mechanisms in the Base Registry Agreement that all amendments to be made, she said.

1 Comment Tagged: brand registry group, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs

Epik lost 125,000 domains in Q1

Epik’s domains under management total fell by over 125,000 in the first quarter, March registry transaction reports reveal.

The company had 607,891 domains in its stable at the end of March, down from 732,914 at the start of the year. The number was down 40,000 in the month, almost double the decrease of February.

Most of the decline can be blamed on transfers — it had 27,721 names go to rival registrars in March and a net transfer loss of 26,658.

Epik had its worst month for newly registered domains too. Having regularly added 10,000 to 20,000 names a month last year, in March that had dwindled to about 2,000.

The company is known to have had troubles paying the largest gTLD registries, but it’s not clear whether this had an impact on its March numbers.

Epik peaked at over 800,000 domains under management before its financial troubles started to emerge last September. Last month it was sold to a mystery buyer which has vowed to turn its fortunes around.

Comment Tagged: epik

Buckingham leaves Nominet’s board early

Nominet director Phil Buckingham has stepped down from Nominet’s board of directors just a few months before his seat comes up for reelection.

Nominet said he was leaving the board for personal reasons immediately.

He was a member-elected non-executive director approaching the end of a three-year term. He will not stand for reelection, Nominet said.

The company, which runs .uk, opened up the seat for nominations in April and will hold a vote in September.

Comment Tagged: elections, nominet

Epik is off the ICANN naughty step

Epik is no longer in breach of its ICANN registrar accreditation agreement, but it remains to be seen whether its anonymous new owners can take over the contract, ICANN has said.

The registrar has paid its past-due fees, explained why it delayed its customers’ renewal requests and promised to put in place measures to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, ICANN Compliance chief Jamie Hedlund blogged.

This means Epik has dodged a contract suspension and gets to continue with business as usual, for now, albeit with many distrustful customers.

Hedlund wrote that ICANN is now reviewing Epik’s request to transfer its accreditation from Epik Inc to new entity Epik LLC, whose owners have yet to reveal their identities.

ICANN has to do due diligence on the buyer before approving the transfer, but Hedlund said this case is “complex” and is expected to take “several months”.

The LLC bought the old registrar for almost $5 million last month after a tortuous few months for customers claiming to be owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some have speculated that the LLC is a front for Epik founder and former CEO Rob Monster, the person arguably most responsible for Epik’s woes over the last 12 months, but court documents published as part of a customer lawsuit include emails from Monster that suggest he was not involved.

Comment Tagged: compliance, epik, ICANN

Identity Digital is gobbling up Verisign’s back-end business

Verisign appears to be getting out of the new gTLD back-end registry services business, with Identity Digital taking over most of its dot-brand contracts.

Since 2018, over 80 gTLDs have moved from Verisign’s back-end to a competitor or have been removed from the DNS altogether. Over the same period, it hasn’t won any business from any of its rivals, according to data I’ve compiled.

Over the last few months about 30 new gTLDs have moved their technical back-end from Verisign to competitors, all but two to Identity Digital. Nominet and CIRA picked up a gTLD deal each.

Verisign tells me it’s not interested in providing new gTLD back-end services any more. A Verisign spokesperson said in an email:

In the case of the back-end services we provide to new gTLDs, we continually evaluate our business objectives and a few years ago, we decided that we would not be renewing our current new gTLD registry services customers and that we would help them transition before their contracts expired if they wished.

gTLDs moving home recently include .bosch, .crown, .chanel, .next, .nikon, .juniper and .fidelity.

Given the sheer number of gTLDs going to Identity Digital, it appears that there may be a side deal between the two registries to recommend migration to ID, but both companies declined to comment on that suggestion.

In 2012, Verisign had signed on to be the back-end for 220 new gTLDs, mostly dot-brands. Not all of those made it through the application process, but today my database has the company as RSP-of-record for fewer than 80 2012-round labels.

The company was said to be among the priciest option for dot-brands, trading on decades of .com uptime prestige, but the need for an RSP with 150 million domains under management is debatable when your gTLD is essentially just parked.

And for Verisign, the dot-brand business is not material to revenues and probably not especially profitable, at least when compared to the vast amounts of cash .com effortlessly generates.

In 2021, Verisign lost its deal to manage .tv to GoDaddy, after it declined to compete presumably due to the anticipated lower profit margins.

Comment Tagged: back-end, cira, godaddy, identity digital, nominet, verisign

o.com auction likely a damp squib after Overstock rebrand

Verisign’s long-planned auction of the single-character domain o.com is looking even less likely, with its most motivated bidder completely rebranding its company.

Overstock.com, which had been lobbying for Verisign to release the domain since at least 2004, said this week it’s bought the intellectual property assets of bankrupt rival furniture retailer Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million, and will rebrand accordingly.

That means it will drop Overstock.com the brand and overstock.com the domain, in favor of bedbathandbeyond.com in the US. The rebrand of its equivalent Canadian sites under .ca will come first.

The domain switch will presumably be less chaotic than the company’s attempt to rebrand as O.co in 2011, which caused huge confusion in .com-loving North America and was quickly reversed.

The change of course means that Overstock now has no motivation to bid on o.com, should Verisign ever actually get around to exercising its hard-won right to sell off the domain for charity.

All but a handful of single-character .com domains have been reserved for decades, but Verisign was given permission to sell o.com by ICANN in 2018 after years of pleading by Overstock founder Patrick Byrne.

Byrne quit Overstock not long after ICANN gave the nod due to his involvement with Russian spy-turned-politician Maria Butina and evidently took his obsession with o.com with him.

Disclosure: over a decade ago, I provided consulting services to a third party in support of the release of o.com.

4 Comments Tagged: auction, ICANN, o.co, o.com, overstock.com, verisign