CentralNic makes another registrar acquisition

CentralNic said today it has bought another registrar, Chile-based NameAction, in a $1 million deal.

NameAction has been around since the late 1990s and specializes in ccTLDs in the Latin American region, including offering local presence services for foreign registrants.

It sells gTLD domains too, acting primarily in the brand protection space, but does not appear to be ICANN-accredited in its own right.

CentralNic said the deal will immediately add $2 million to its top line and $200,000 to profits.

CEO Ben Crawford said in a press release that the deal is small but of strategic importance, giving the company a beachhead from which to expand into Latin America.

It’s the fourth acquisition announcement from CentralNic, which describes itself as an industry consolidator, this year.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, centralnic, nameaction

ICANN takes the lamest swipe at Namecheap et al over blockchain domains

ICANN has come out swinging against blockchain domains and the registrars that sell them. And by “come out” I mean it’s published a blog post. And by “swinging” I mean “offered the weakest criticism imaginable”.

The post starts off well enough, observing that services marketed as “domain names” that are not automatically compatible with the global DNS are probably not a great purchase, because they don’t work like regular domains.

Using these alternatives requires something like a browser plug-in or to reconfigure your device to use a specialist DNS resolver network, the post notes, before concluding with a brief caveat emptor message.

All good stuff. ICANN has been opposed to alt-root domain efforts for at least 20 years, and the policy is even enshrined in so-called ICP-3, which nobody really talks about any more but appears to still be the law of ICANN Land.

So, which domain-alternatives is ICANN referring to here, and which registrars are selling them? The post states:

Name resolution systems outside the DNS have existed for a long time. One could mention the Sun Microsystem Network Information Service (NIS), the Digital Object Architecture (DOA), or even the Ethereum Name Service (ENS)…

With some ICANN-accredited registrars now selling NIS, DOA, or other similar domains alongside standard domain names, the potential for confusion among unsuspecting customers seems high.

You may be asking: what the heck (or, if you’re like me, fuck) are NIS and DOA domains, and which registrars are selling them?

Great questions.

NIS is an authentication protocol (a bit like LDAP) for Unix networks developed in 1985 (the same year the original DNS standard was finalized) by Sun Microsystems, a company that hasn’t existed in over a decade.

To the best of my knowledge they’ve never been marketed as an alternative to regular domain names. Nobody’s ever used them to address a publicly available web site. Nobody sells them.

DOA, also known as the Handle System, is a more recent idea, first implemented in 1994, before some of you were born. Handles are mostly numeric strings used to address digital objects such as documents. Libraries use them.

The main thing to know about Handles for the purposes of this article is that they’re specifically designed to convey no semantic information whatsoever. They’re not designed to look like domain names and they’re not used that way.

So how many registrars are selling NIS/DOA domains? I haven’t checked them all, but I’m going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb and guess the answer is “none”, which is a lot less than the “some” that ICANN asserts.

But ICANN also mentions the Ethereum Name Service, a much newer and sexier way of cybersquatting, based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency blockchain.

ENS allows people to buy .eth domain names (which do not function in the consensus DNS) for the Ethereum equivalent of about $5. As far as I can tell, you can only buy them through ens.domains, and no ICANN-accredited registrar is functionally capable of selling them.

The ICANN post also contains a brief mention of “Handshake”, and this appears to be what ICANN is actually worried about.

Handshake domains, also known as HNS, look like regular domain names and a handful of ICANN-accredited registrars are actually selling them.

Handshake is also based on blockchain technology, but unlike ENS it also allows people to create their own TLDs (which, again, do not function without special adaptations). Registrars including Namecheap, 101domain and EnCirca sell them.

It’s Namecheap’s storefront hover text, warning that HNS domains don’t work in the regular DNS, that ICANN appears to be paraphrasing in its blog post.

The registrar has a lengthy support article explaining some of the ways you can try to make a Handshake domain work, including an interactive comment thread in which a Namecheap employee suggests that DNS resolvers may choose to resolve HNS TLDs instead of conflicting TLDs that ICANN approves in future.

That’s the kind of thing that should worry ICANN, but it’s got a funny way of expressing that concern. Sun Microsystems? Digital Object Architecture? What’s the message here?

Twenty years ago, I interviewed an ICANN bigwig about New.net, one of the companies attempting to sell alt-root domains at the time. He told me bluntly the company was “breaking the internet” and “selling snake oil”, earning ICANN a snotty lawyer’s letter.

Today’s ICANN post was ostensibly authored by principal technologist Alain Durand, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume comms and legal took their knives to it before it was published.

While some things haven’t changed in the last two decades, others have.

20 Comments Tagged: alt-roots, blockchain, doa, ens, ethereum, handle system, handshake, ICANN, namecheap, new gTLDs, nis

GoDaddy hack exposed a million customer passwords

GoDaddy’s systems got hacked recently, exposing up to 1.2 million customer emails and passwords.

The attack started on September 6 and targeted Managed WordPress users, the company’s chief information security officer Demetrius Comes disclosed in a blog post and regulatory filing this week.

The compromised data included email addresses and customer numbers, the original WordPress admin password, the FTP and database user names and passwords, and some SSL private keys.

In cases where the compromised passwords were still in use, the company said it has reset those passwords and informed its customers. The breached SSL certs are being replaced.

GoDaddy discovered the hack November 17 and disclosed it November 22.

It sounds rather like the attack may have been a result of a phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. The company said the attacker used a “compromised password” to infiltrate its WordPress provisioning system.

Comes wrote in his blog post:

We are sincerely sorry for this incident and the concern it causes for our customers. We, GoDaddy leadership and employees, take our responsibility to protect our customers’ data very seriously and never want to let them down. We will learn from this incident and are already taking steps to strengthen our provisioning system with additional layers of protection

You may recall that GoDaddy came under fire last December for punking its employees with a fake email promising an end-of-year bonus, which turned out to be an “insensitive” component of an anti-phishing training program.

About 500 staff reportedly failed the test.

Comment Tagged: godaddy, hack, phishing, security, wordpress

EURid to drop 48,000 Brexit domains in one day

All the .eu domain names formerly belonging to Brits and UK residents will be released for registration on a first-come, first-served basis in one day, EURid announced today.

There are about 48,000 of them, and they’ll be released in batches starting at 0900 UTC on January 3, two days later than the previously announced date, the registry said.

The names all belonged to UK registrants that lost their eligibility when the country left the EU in January last year.

There were almost 300,000 .eu domains registered in the UK at the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Most have since dropped or been transferred to EU-based entities or EU citizens that still qualify.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, eurid

Google to release another new gTLD next month

Google Registry is gearing up to unleash another gTLD from its stockpile of unreleased strings next month.

The gTLD is .day, one of over 100 that Google applied for in 2012 after a reported brainstorming session at the company.

According to its application:

The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to offer a new Internet environment that allows users to create and organize events that have or will occur on a particular day. The proposed gTLD will provide a single domain name hierarchy for Internet users globally to promote celebrations, such as a holi.day, wedding.day, or birth.day.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to see .day being a high-volume TLD along the lines of Google’s popular .app or .dev gTLDs.

While the company itself doesn’t seem to have addressed the launch publicly, it has given details to registrars and informed ICANN about its start-up dates.

It started a Qualified Launch Program program earlier this week. That’s where it gets to hand out a limited number of domains to hand-picked anchor tenants.

The sunrise period, restricted of course to trademarks, begins December 14 and ends January 24.

General availability starts January 25, according to registrars and ICANN records, with a seven-day Early Access Period during which domains can be purchased at daily-decreasing premium prices.

Full regular-price general availability begins February 1.

Comment Tagged: .day, eap, google, ICANN, new gTLDs, qlp, sunrise, trademarks

XYZ counting standard sales as “premiums” because its fees are so expensive

Portfolio gTLD registry XYZ appears to be counting regular sales of domains in certain TLDs as “premium” wins, because the base reg fee is so high.

The company said in a recent blog post that it sold over 270 “premium” names in October, but it added the following caveat:

Premium XYZ Registry domains refer to premium domains for extensions with standard and premium domains, and XYZ’s premium namespaces such as .Cars, .Storage, .Tickets, .Security, etc.

So if a name in a .com-equivalent priced TLD such as .xyz had been flagged as a premium by the registry and sold for a few thousands bucks, that counts as a premium sale, but any sale at all in .cars, where all domains cost a few thousand bucks regardless of the second-level string, also counts as a premium.

This reporting practice appears to bring in .security, .storage, .protection, .car, .auto, and .theatre, which all retail for four figures as standard. It also includes .tickets, where you won’t get much change out of a grand. It doesn’t include the fourth member of the cars family, .autos, where domains are priced as .com-equivalent.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

You can’t accuse the registry of being misleading — it’s disclosing what it’s doing pretty prominently mid-post, not even reducing the font size.

And you can’t reasonably argue that a standard $3,000 .cars domain, which renews at $3,000 a year, for example, has less claim to the adjective “premium” than a domain in .hair that has a premium-tier EPP code selling for $3,000 but renewing at $20.

It just feels weird to see the word used in this way for what appears to be the first time.

Comment Tagged: .auto, .autos, .car, .cars, .protection, .storage, .theatre, .tickets, .xyz, premium, security, xyz.com

Nominet names Paul Fletcher new CEO

Nominet has named Paul Fletcher as its new CEO.

He’ll join the company in February, filling the spot vacated by Russell Haworth, who quit earlier this year a few days before he could be fired by members.

Fletcher is currently CEO at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, Nominet said. BCS, formerly the British Computer Society, is also a membership organization, with 60,000 members.

Nominet is currently headed by interim CEO Eleanor Bradley, one of the directors removed from the board at the company’s fractious Emergency General Meeting in March.

Fletcher will join the board at the same time as he joins Nominet, the company said.

1 Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet

CentralNic takes over a dead dot-brand

CentralNic has become the latest company to pounce on a dot-brand gTLD that was on its way to the dustbin of history.

The ICANN contract for .case was transferred to a London company called Helium TLDs, a CentralNic subsidiary, last week.

That company was previously called FANS TLD, and was the vehicle CentralNic used to acquire .fans from Asiamix Digital in 2018 before later passing it on to Hong Kong-based ZDNS International.

I believe something similar is happening here.

.case was a dot-brand owned, but never used, by CNH Industrial, which Wikipedia tells me is an American-Dutch-British-Italian company that makes about $28 billion a year making and selling agricultural and construction machinery. Diggers and forklifts and such.

CNH also managed .caseih, .newholland, and .iveco for some of its other brands, but these contracts were terminated earlier in the year.

The company had also asked ICANN to cancel its .case agreement, but that seems to have attracted acquisitive registry operators, and the termination request was withdrawn as I noted in September.

While terminating a dot-brand can often be seen as a lack of confidence in the dot-brand concept, selling off the gTLD to a third party rules out reapplying for the same string in future and can be seen as an even deeper disdain.

Now, .case is in CentralNic’s hands. I believe it’s the first dot-brand the company has taken over.

Rival registries including Donuts, XYZ and ShortDot have also swept up unwanted dot-brand gTLDs, stripped them of their restrictions, and repurposed them as general-purpose or niche spaces.

2 Comments Tagged: .case, acquisition, assignment, centralnic, cnh, dot-brands, helium tlds, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

Delta variant cranks up Aussie domain regs in Q3

Australia’s ccTLD had a growth spurt in the third quarter, driven by pandemic lockdown rules.

Local registry auDA today reported that it took 171,846 new domain creates in Q3, up 22% on Q2. There were over 60,500 new regs in July, making it .au’s second-biggest sales month of all time.

auDA said in its quarterly report (pdf):

This increase took place at a time when COVID-19 restrictions were re-introduced in several states, and followed a levelling out of demand and seasonal dip over Easter in Q2. However, Q3 registrations are only slightly below the same period in 2020, which experienced a historic peak in new domain names created, driven by COVID-19.

Such lockdown bumps were experienced by many registries in 2020, as bricks-and-mortar businesses rushed to get an online presence to continue functioning while stores and venues were closed.

The delta variant of Covid-19 started worrying Australia in June, leading to lockdown rules in major cities that lasted most or all of July. The country has had a relatively low incidence of the virus, but has taken a hard line on restrictions.

At the end of September, .au registrations were up 5% at 3,386,186 names, auDA said. The .com.au level names were up 6% but .net.au was down 1.5%.

Next March, Australia will follow in the footsteps of some other ccTLDs and make second-level .au domains available for the first time.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, coronavirus, covid-19, lockdown, lockdown bump, pandemic

.music goes live, plots 2022 launch

.music has become the latest new gTLD to join the internet, but it seems unlikely to hit the market before the 10th anniversary of the 2012 ICANN application period.

The TLD was added to the DNS root at the end of October, with the first domain, the obligatory nic.music, going live a few days later.

The registry, Cyprus-based DotMusic, said in a press release that it plans to launch the gTLD next year.

.music was one of the most heavily contested gTLDs from the 2012 application round, with eight total applicants.

It was one of two Community applications, which promised a more controlled, restricted namespace in exchange for a smoother ride through the ICANN approval and contention resolution processes.

But it failed to win its Community Priority Evaluation, leading to years of appeals and ICANN reviews.

The contention set was finally resolved in 2019, apparently via auction, with DotMusic prevailing against heavy-hitters including Amazon and Google.

But the victorious registry was slow out of the blocks after that, taking almost two years to negotiate its registry agreement with ICANN.

It’s still going to be a restricted-community space when it finally launches, which makes its success anything but assured, regardless of the unquestionable strength of its string.

Sadly, while DotMusic CEO Constantine Roussos looked every bit the part of the hip young rocker when the .music application was first filed, showing up everywhere in a sports car, cool haircut, and designer skinny jeans, today he lives in a senior-care home, drives a mobility scooter, and needs to be changed hourly.

1 Comment Tagged: .music, delegation, dotmusic, ICANN, new gTLDs