Recent Posts
- Bye-bye .boomer! Blockchain players abandon new gTLD plans
- Decades-old US registrar gets a spanking
- love.you sold in apparent five-figure deal
- Bogus harassment complaints could get you an ICANN ban
- ICANN slaps open-mic ban on conflicted lawyers
- Final GTFO warning for 19 failed new gTLD bids
- Nominet opens $500,000 fund for open source projects
- Com Laude buys larger rival Markmonitor
- Epik took down Charlie Kirk doxing site
- Number of subsidized gTLD bidders far lower than thought
- Another registrar goes AWOL
- gTLD loses its second-largest registrar after breach
- Com Laude buys Fairwinds
- Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end
- Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad
- Registry to release one-letter domains tomorrow
- New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more
- .ai rival lines up gTLD bid
- Team Internet lays off 200
- Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…
- So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
- Cloud gTLD gets launch dates
- Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake
- NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids
- AI experts replace Chapman on ICANN board
- RDRS may not be dead
- Single-letter .com lawsuit thrown out of court
- Golding challenges McCarthy for Nominet board seat
- Three applicants qualify for cheapo gTLDs
- Blockchain crisis looming for new gTLD next round
- Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy
- ICANN looking at new bulk reg rules
- Reseller loss hits Tucows’ DUM but not revenue
- GoDaddy counts cost of losing .co deal
- Wine producers worried about new gTLDs
- Goodyear tires of its dot-brand
- Team Internet loses Radix to Tucows
- ICANN’s “review of reviews” kicks off
- Huge registrars flee from RDRS
- Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps
- Registrar shamed for alleged crypto abuse neglect
- Poblete’s ICANN board seat safe
- .com off to strong start in Q3
- .my is growing like crazy
- ICANN settles $77 million sexual harassment suit
- Chinese domain spikiness ends in first half
- Registrars agree to higher ICANN fees
- ICANN to review reviews after review review request fails
- Got junk? June’s biggest gTLD growers do
- ICANN ditches Oman due to Middle-East conflicts
- ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency
- ICANN faces first pushback over DEI U-turn
- Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program
- presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life
- One of the dumbest gTLDs just switched back-ends
- GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet
- Governments erect bulk-reg barrier to new gTLD next round
- Little interest in cheapo gTLD program
- US government opposes most new gTLDs
- GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital
- Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed
- .TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse
- Court denies ICANN’s #MeToo “cover up” attempt
- Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed
- An end to “Club Med for geeks” ICANN?
- Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks
- .io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty
- Big .gdn registrar at risk
- ICANN “reaffirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion”
- ICANN kills off diversity and inclusion
- Kaufmann picked for ICANN board
- Conflicted? STFU under new ICANN rules
- .hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed
- Gname adds another 200 registrars
- New Pope’s .com domain was registered the day Francis died
- Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders
- DotMusic has sold a lot of names, but not many are turned on
- .med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal
- ICANN cuts off money to UASG
- Web.com getting dumped
- .es and .pt riding out massive power outage
- .com is back as Verisign discounts bear fruit
- Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted
- Verisign gave Trump $100,000
- Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS
- Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours
- The Soviet Union might be safe after all
- Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”
- Facebook thinks ICANN is a bit rubbish
- ICANN spending $365,000 a year on coffee and booze
- Regulator going after suicide site that even Epik banned
- .ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month
- Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio
- UK’s Nigel Hickson has died
- .blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There
- WordPress buys Canadian, swaps CentralNic for CIRA
- Latest ICANN salary porn ruins my terrible pun
- .co deal worth $77 million up for grabs
- I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan
- Sales and profits dip at Team Internet
- Four deadbeat registrars get terminated
- “No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS
- ICANN to kill off 60-day domain transfer lock
- Lancaster bags up its dot-brand
- Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?
- NomCom confirms Americans rejected from ICANN board
- Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications
- Registry makes .ai an option for Koreans
- it.com now bigger than Guatemala
- ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program
- Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board
- Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD
- Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot
- Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand
- Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning
- .ai channel doubles under new management
- Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io
- As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains
- Second new gTLD contention set revealed
- UK intros global domain takedown law
- No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat
- Registries have started shutting down Whois
- ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist
- .com could return to growth this quarter
- Could Musk’s DOGE kill off D3’s .doge?
Go Daddy plays down “massive” attack claim
Malicious hackers have compromised a number of WordPress installations running on Go Daddy hosting, but the company claims very few customers were affected.
Slashdot carried a story a few hours ago, linking to a blog claiming a “massive” breach of security at the domain name registrar.
(EDIT: as noted in the comments, this blog may itself have been hacked, so I’ve removed the link. You can find it in the comments if you want to take the risk.)
But Go Daddy says the problem is not as widespread as it sounds.
“We received reports from a handful of Go Daddy customers using WordPress their websites were impacted by the script in question,” Go Daddy security chief Todd Redfoot said in a statement.
“We immediately opened an investigation into what happened, how it was done and how many sites were affected,” he said. “The investigation is currently ongoing.”
The attack is certainly not ubiquitous. I host a number of WordPress sites with Go Daddy, including this one, and they all appear to be working fine today.
And a Twitter search reveals no references to an attack today prior to the Slashdot post, apart from the blog it was based on.
That doesn’t prove anything, but when Network Solutions’ WordPress hosting was breached last week there was a lot more tweet noise. That attack had thousands of victims.
For those interested in the details of the attack, this WordPress security blog appears to be the best place to get the nitty-gritty.
.co enters pricey global sunrise
Trademark holders can from today apply for their brands as .co domain names, even if they do not do business in Colombia.
The second stage of .CO Internet’s sunrise period allows owners of non-Colombian trademarks to apply for their domains through one of 10 chosen launch registrars.
Prices vary from $225 with OpenSRS to $335 through Dotster, with most deals comprising non-refundable application fees plus first-year registration. Go Daddy is charging $299.99 and Network Solutions is charging $279.99.
With the possible exception of .xxx, I’ve got a suspicion that this could be one of the last “generic” TLD launches with such expensive sunrise periods.
It’s quite possible there could be pricing pressure if ICANN quickly approves a few hundred new gTLDs next year. If each charges ~$300 for a pre-launch, it could cause some some registrants to rethink their defensive registration strategies.
The .co sunrise ends June 10. General availability begins July 20.
Comwired buys DNS.com for relaunch
Comwired has acquired the domain name DNS.com in order to relaunch as a provider of managed enterprise DNS services.
The company announced this morning that it bought the domain, first registered in 1991 and previously parked, for an undisclosed amount.
The transaction appears to have happened at the end of last month and the site is already live.
With the acquisition, Comwired looks like it’s targeting the market for high-availability DNS resolution currently occupied by the likes of Neustar, Afilias and Dynamic Network Services.
The company was perhaps previously best-known for the geographic traffic-splitting service it offered to domainers and others.
The Whois record for DNS.com still shows a Moniker private registration, which I speculate would not be an exactly comforting sight for would-be enterprise customers.
Kurds seek new cultural gTLD
A Kurdish company will apply to ICANN for a .kurd or .kur top-level domain to represent cultural Kurds.
The application will join the likes of .cat, and expected gTLD applications including .scot, .cym, .bzh, and .gal, which promise representation to “cultural”, but non-geographic, user bases.
The potential community for .kurd is around 35 million people, according to Wikipedia, over three times the size of the international Catalan community represented by .cat.
While many Kurds live in middle-eastern nations such as Iran and Iraq, there are almost 14 million living in Turkey, likely soon to be part of the European Union, according to the CIA World Factbook.
I’ve been told that a non-profit cultural gTLD needs only about 10,000 registrations to stay afloat; this seems easily achievable.
The dotKurd application has a web site and a Twitter feed.
The brains behind the TLD is a German-resident software developer called Aras Noori. He recently wrote to ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom, outlining his plan.
Two-letter .info auctions get go-ahead
ICANN has approved Afilias’ request to auction off its reserve of one and two-letter .info domain names.
The company seems to be planning to allocate the names both at auction and through a request-for-proposals process that would see registrants promise to develop and market their .info sites.
Any big partnerships could provide a welcome profile boost to .info, which has been around for a decade but still only grows about as much in a year as .com does in a month.
While auctions could also bring a nice windfall to the company, Afilias can expect to come under pressure from certain trademark holders to keep their brands off the market.
Volkswagen’s lawyers apparently “threatened every action in the book” to keep vw.biz out of Neustar’s allocation process for two-letter .biz names last year.
ICM launches .xxx letter-writing campaign
ICM Registry looks like it has taken a leaf from its opponents’ playbook, and is encouraging supporters of the proposed .xxx top-level domain to send form letters to ICANN.
The company has revamped its web site this week, to make it look a little less 2005, and part of the revamp is this page, which allows users to quickly send emails supporting the TLD to ICANN’s public comment forum, which ends May 10.
The letter addresses the substantial concerns of the comment period — namely, how ICANN should process the .xxx application in the light of February’s IRP decision, which says ICANN was wrong to reject .xxx in 2007.
In recent weeks, Christian groups and the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition have organized campaigns aimed at protesting .xxx. Both campaigns have resulted in large numbers of emails flooding ICANN.
The Christian letters are way off-topic, basically just anti-porn rants.
While the FSC letters do address ICANN’s question, they largely challenge the idea that .xxx has community support. This may end up not being a consideration for the Board.
By contrast, ICM’s letters go directly to ICANN’s core mantras of accountability and equality.
Its letter says: “Picking and choosing elements of the Panel’s declaration, or adding unnecessary procedural steps in adopting the review’s findings, would be a clear sign to the global Internet community that the organization cannot be relied upon to do its job fairly and objectively.”
The new ICM web site does, however, bear the new slogan “It’s time for adult websites to self label”.
It seems to me that this could be quite easily interpreted as a call for all adult web sites to use .xxx, which I’m pretty sure is not ICM’s intention.
A timely domain drop – iquitfacebook.com
The domain name iquitfacebook.com is dropping this weekend, and it couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.
Facebook has walked into a bit of a privacy nightmare by announcing it will start to give third-party sites access to user data, leading some people to quit the service.
The site has already been called “Privacy Enemy Number One”, and there are dozens of other pieces of commentary and news picking holes in the new Facebook features.
Widely followed Googler Matt Cutts also raised eyebrows when he said he had deactivated his Facebook account today, and others are following suit.
“I just deactivated my Facebook account using the guide at http://goo.gl/rhpE Not hard to do & you can still revive it later,” Cutts tweeted earlier today.
Is there an opportunity for an enterprising domainer to capitalize on a trend here?
The name iquitfacebook.com is pending delete this weekend. It’s listed on SnapNames with an April 24 deadline, and has already attracted six bidders on Namejet, with a high bid of $79.
ICANN picks Colombia for December meeting
ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom has just confirmed via Twitter that Cartagena, Colombia has been picked for the organization’s December meeting.
Judging from US State Department reports, the country is nowadays not nearly as scary as it was when Joan Wilder made a flying visit to rescue her sister in 1984.
Still, I’m guessing we’ll still see a little bit of that nervousness and paranoia that usually rears its head when ICANN heads for cities with a reputation for violent crime.
Terrorism concerns in Kenya caused many US stakeholders to stay at home and brave unreasonably early mornings participating remotely.
Even the choice of Mexico City caused a bit of a stir last year.
Personally, I’d love to see ICANN hold a meeting in Oakland or Baltimore, just to see what the security advisory looks like.
Go Daddy feature tallies Whois queries on your domain
I may be a bit late off the blocks, but I just learned about a rather nifty little feature buried within Go Daddy that lets you see when somebody has done a Whois lookup on one of your domains.
Log in to your Domain Manager, click Tools, click Exportable Lists, click Add New Export, then check the relevant boxes in the wizard.
The feature exports a .csv file telling you how many Whois searches have been run against each of your domain names in the last day, week, month and year.
I imagine this could provide a few useful data points when deciding how much interest there is in a domain you’re planning to sell.
I also found it quite interesting that more people executed Whois queries on domainincite.com in March than bothered to click the About tab at the top of the page.
Domain people are an odd bunch.
Demand Media gets pre-IPO board boost
Demand Media has added two big names to its board of directors, a move certain to feed the rumors that the company is preparing for an IPO this year.
Joining the board is Peter Guber, CEO and chairman of Mandalay Entertainment, a TV and movie production company that also has its fingers in the sports and digital media pies.
Josh James also takes a seat. He co-founded web analytics firm Omniture, now part of Adobe, and took it public during the dot-com boom.
“The experience they bring from two different ends of the spectrum – creative arts and web analytics – will be invaluable as Demand Media continues to focus on creating the content that consumers want,” Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt said.
Demand Media, which owns domain name registrars eNom and BulkRegister, is mainly in the mass-market, search-driven content business.
It was reported last week that the company has hired Goldman Sachs to help it prepare for a public listing later this year.
Bulking up the board is one of the things companies do before they head to the stockmarket.
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