Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio

Financial services company Prudential Financial has dumped one of its three dot-brand gTLDs, which it was not using.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its contract to run .pramerica, which, despite the name, provides investment services to the Indian market. The subsidiary uses a .in domain for its web site.

While .pramerica has never had a registered domain in the eight years it’s been active, Prudential has two other gTLDs — .pru and .prudential — which are in active use.

Neither is used as the primary domains for their respective brands — both use exact-match .com names — but both have live corporate sites under domains such as pr.pru and stock.pru.

Prudential’s gTLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end registry.

Comment Tagged: .pramerica, .pru, dot-brands, prudential, termination

UK’s Nigel Hickson has died

Long-serving ICANN community member and UK government representative Nigel Hickson has died, according to friends and colleagues.

He’s said to have died at the weekend following a battle with cancer.

While the loss will be felt most keenly by his family, Hickson’s absence will also be felt by the ICANN community and wider domain name industry.

Hickson was most recently head of internet governance policy at the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, but he might be better known to the domains community as the country’s representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

He was until a few weeks ago one of the GAC’s vice-chairs and as such often a prominent and vocal presence during governmental discussions of ICANN’s policies at public meetings.

But he also engaged with the domain investor community, showing up to deliver the UK government’s perspectives at conferences such as the London Domains Summit.

Prior to joining the government, Hickson spent eight years working for ICANN as a vice president with a government engagement portfolio.

I only met Nigel on a handful of occasions, but he always came across as a thoroughly pleasant chap with a surprising sense of humor.

Hickson is said to be survived by his wife and daughter, who have our condolences.

1 Comment Tagged: gac, ICANN

.blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There

Hilariously named .blog registry operator Knock Knock Whois There has been ordered to change its name to “Knock Knock RDAP There” or risk the wrath of ICANN Compliance.

The company has been told it has 30 days to file papers requesting the name change with the California Secretary of State, or ICANN will initiate termination proceedings against it, putting about 300,000 .blog domains at risk.

The surprising move comes a couple of months after ICANN’s contracted parties finished their mandatory migration from the old Whois protocol to the newer Registration Data Access Protocol.

ICANN Compliance is taking the migration deadline incredibly seriously, according to a KKWT source.

“They started calling us up almost immediately,” she said. “When we got the first warning fax, we thought it was a joke so we just ignored it. But then we started getting menacing voicemails every day, then every hour. It’s gotten really frightening.”

“They even somehow found out my 90-year-old mom’s cell number and started calling her at her retirement home, telling her ‘the kid complies, or we escalate’,” the source said. “She has no idea what that means and she’s terrified.”

Compliance’s increasing belligerence is believed to be linked to boredom. The department, having successfully eliminated all DNS abuse, is now scrounging around for other things to enforce.

“Damn right we’ll escalate,” Compliance chief Ronnie Smanks told us. “Those Knock Knock wankers better get their house in order, or I’ll send the boys around.”

That’s believed to be a reference to ICANN’s recently created Physical Compliance department, a collection of rough lads often seen loitering around ICANN headquarters brandishing tire irons, pickaxe handles, and bicycle chains.

But KKWT says it will not be cowed, and is seeking out legal advice. It’s also recruited a creative agency to try to come up with a new company name that is just as funny as the original, which is, as everyone agrees, very, very funny indeed.

3 Comments Tagged: april 1

WordPress buys Canadian, swaps CentralNic for CIRA

Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and the .blog gTLD registry, says it’s switching to Hello Registry from its current provider.

Hello Registry is a joint venture of two like-minded national ccTLD non-profits: Canadian (.ca) registry CIRA and Dutch (.nl) registry SIDN. It was launched last November, having been developed under the name CIRA Registry Platform.

Automattic is currently running .blog, which has about 300,000 domains and added about 50,000 in the last year, on CentralNic, the registry services provider owned by Team Internet.

The company has told its registrants that it does not expect any disruption from the migration, saying in a blog post:

We’ve been working closely with our registrar partners since November 2024 to ensure a smooth transition, with the migration scheduled for the end of April, 2025.

It added that it believes the move will create “new opportunities for growth and innovation”.

UPDATE: Automattic has got in touch to ask for a clarification. A spokesperson said:

the decision to migrate .blog was made by Knock Knock WHOIS There (KKWT), which is the official registry operator for .blog. While KKWT is a subsidiary of Automattic, it operates independently as required by ICANN. So, this wasn’t a decision made by WordPress or WordPress.com

So…
.

Comment Tagged: .blog, automattic, cira, hello registry, sidn

Latest ICANN salary porn ruins my terrible pun

I’d always planned, if it turned out ICANN’s former interim CEO Sally Costerton was getting paid an absolutely, ridiculously, eye-popping pay packet, that it might be amusing to try to pin the nickname “Cost-a-tonne” on her.

Thanks. I’m here all week. Try the turbot.

But she wasn’t even ICANN’s highest-compensated employee last year, according to the Org’s latest tax return, which it published yesterday. That privilege went to general counsel John Jeffrey.

While her immediate predecessor Goran Marby made over a million bucks in his final years, Costerton made a more modest $835,585, compared to Jeffrey’s $837,137, the return states.

It’s the first time Costerton’s compensation has been disclosed. Previously, she was paid through her consulting company.

The form 990 (pdf) lists the 20 employees who get paid the most, with total compensation starting at $217,073. The top 10 employees received over half a million dollars in total compensation.

Some former ICANN staffers have recently said publicly that the figures in the 990 might give a misleading impression of how well rank-and-file employees are compensated.

On the corporate side, it was a relatively poor year for Jones Day, ICANN’s incumbent law firm and highest-paid contractor, which billed $3,617,243 compared to the $4,606,859 in the previous year. It was getting closer to $9 million a year not too long ago.

The top five contractors saw a new entrant at five, with HR firm ADO Professional Solutions getting $980,970 for recruitment services.

1 Comment Tagged: 990, financials, ICANN

.co deal worth $77 million up for grabs

The Colombian government has put the contract to run .co out for bidding, and it looks like the successful registry could make as much as $77 million over the lifetime of the deal.

GoDaddy currently runs .co through its subsidiary .CO Internet, which it acquired when in bought Neustar five years ago. The government’s RFP does not rule out the incumbent reapplying despite some friction in the past.

It’s not simply a back-end registry services deal. The successful registry will have to be the public face of .co too, handling front-of-house services and marketing as well.

Extrapolating from some figures and formulas in the RFP, it seems GoDaddy’s share (19% of the total revenue) has worked out to about $7.7 million a year on average over the last five years. The new contract would be a 10-year deal.

But is .co on the decline? According to the RFP, the were 3,217,570 .co domains in January this year, down from 3.4 million in 2022 and 3.3 million in 2023. Numbers for 2024 were not included.

That downward trend may merely be the post-Covid slump experienced by many TLDs. Indeed, when the current contract was signed in 2020, there were just 2.3 million .co domains under management, so GoDaddy’s done a pretty good job of growing the namespace.

2 Comments Tagged: .co, back-ends, godaddy, rfp

I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan

The registry for the former Soviet Union’s .su ccTLD has denied that ICANN plans to kick it off the internet, giving three reasons why its over 100,000 domains are safe.

RosNIIROS pointed to Russian law, ICANN ccTLD policy, and the lack of any formal retirement notice as reasons why the ccTLD isn’t going anywhere. The registry said in a post on its web site:

In connection with the media reports about the possible closure of the .SU domain zone, we inform you that this information periodically appears in the public domain, but does not correspond to reality. The registry (RosNIIROS) does not plan to liquidate the .SU domain and no formal actions have been taken by ICANN

The registry said that .su has been formally recognised under Russian law, via a ruling of the telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor, alongside .ru and .рф, as part of the “Russian national domain zone”.

It added that ICANN policy does not permit the Org to retire .su:

According to the procedure approved in 2022 by ICANN, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) can be removed from the DNS root zone only if the corresponding two-letter code is excluded from the ISO 3166 standard. Currently, the code “SU” is included in the ISO 3166 list with the status of “exclusively reserved”

The machine translation may be a bit wonky there, as the term used in English is “exceptionally reserved”. That’s the ISO 3166 status also enjoyed by the UK (.uk), Ascension Islands (.ac) and European Union (.eu).

But the ICANN policy on retiring ccTLDs specifically calls out .uk, .ac and .eu as being “grandfathered” in. It doesn’t mention .su at all, and it’s not at all clear from my reading whether being “exceptionally reserved” offers .su blanket protection.

ICANN’s former chair didn’t seem to think so in 2022 when he said, “the Soviet Union is no longer assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard and therefore is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD.”

RosNIIROS also referred its customers to the recent comments of ICANN director Becky Burr, who on March 12 had denied that ICANN had kicked off formal retirement proceedings.

I hadn’t listened to this session live, but I caught up with the recording today and have to say it’s a bit of an eye-opener. Burr said:

Let me just take the elephant in the room. We all saw the Domain Incite report on .su. I just want to say to everybody, there has been no formal letter kicking off any process on there, that’s clear. We are looking at the ccNSO policy, and I don’t want to say anything more about that other than to say whatever was in the Domain Incite article, there has been no formal initiation of a retirement process

I’m not sure whether to be irritated or flattered.

On the one hand, I seem to have received a public dressing down with the clear implication that there was some inaccuracy in my reporting, which is never nice. On the other hand, I didn’t write the damned article she’s referring to.

Burr seems to have read Domain Name Wire’s wonderful scoop on “plans to retire the [.su] domain” and just assumed it was my work. I’ll have to take it as a compliment, I guess. Cheers Becky!

The DNW article reported from the outset that a planned notice of retirement had not yet been sent, but that informal outreach had occurred, so I don’t even think there’s a clear allegation of inaccuracy here. For what it’s worth, I trust the reporting.

The day after Burr’s comment, ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist also said publicly that there had not yet been a “formal” notice of retirement.

4 Comments Tagged: .su, cctld, ICANN, retirement, ROSNIIROS

Sales and profits dip at Team Internet

Having been one of the industry’s notable growth stories over the last decade, Team Internet saw its revenue and profit go down in 2024, according to its latest earnings report.

The company is also predicting a miserable 2025 as it tries to work around Google’s decision to turn off advertising on parked domains by default for its customers, a key source of Team Internet’s revenue.

Revenue was down 4.1% to $802.8 million, the company said, and adjusted EBITDA was down 4.7% to $91.9 million.

The domains part of its business seemed to fare better than its search unit, recording revenue up 7.4% at $202.7 million. But this division also includes some non-domains software businesses, so we can’t really break its performance out any more granularly.

Team Internet said the current analyst consensus for adjusted EBITDA this year is between $60 million and $62 million, a huge drop on 2024, with double-digit growth returning next year.

CEO Michael Riedl said in a statement: “The Search segment’s difficult reset in 2025 in response to recent market developments is the acceleration of a long-anticipated pivot, not, the board believes, a permanent setback.”

He also seemed to confirm that the company will rely on AI-generated content to populate its domains, enabling it to use Google’s contextual advertising.

Comment Tagged: earnings, financials, team internet

Four deadbeat registrars get terminated

ICANN has terminated the contracts of four registrars that haven’t paid their accreditation fees in years.

US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology have all been canned, following public breach notices in January.

Judging by the termination notices, the registrars all stopped paying their quarterly fees between 2022 and early 2024. None of them had implemented recent ICANN policies such as RDAP adoption, the notices added.

It’s not a huge problem, as none of the four companies had ever sold a single gTLD domain name, so there are no customers to be affected.

Comment Tagged: compliance, ICANN, termination

“No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS

There is currently “no timeline” to remove the Soviet Union’s ccTLD from the internet, according to ICANN’s new CEO.

Asked by yours truly during the Public Forum at ICANN 82 whether retirement proceedings had been initiated against .su, Kurt Lindqvist responded, according to the real-time transcript:

ICANN has been in discussions with the managers of .su regarding retirement of the ccTLD for many, many years. There has not been sent a formal notice of removal to the ccTLD manager and no timeline for sending one, discussions will be keep on going and following the ccNSO retirement policy.

The words “formal notice of removal” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Domain Name Wire scooped earlier this week that on February 8 ICANN had privately told Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS), the .su registry, that it planned to retire the ccTLD by 2030.

DNW noted that a formal notice of removal had been due to be sent and published February 13, but had not.

With Lindqvist today saying that there is “no timeline for sending one”, it seems the matter might have been put to bed for now.

It would have been an incredibly ballsy move to start the process of taking down .su — beloved by Russians and groups in Russian-occupied Ukraine — at this particular point in history.

At the time DNW reported ICANN’s letter to ROSNIIROS was sent, US president Donald Trump had yet to publicly begin peace talks with Russia and Ukraine, but his openly pro-Russian statements on the conflict since his February 12 phone call with Vladimir Putin have alarmed many.

Trump probably isn’t an FSB asset, but he certainly plays one on TV.

Would ICANN want to risk pissing off the unpredictable leader of the country whose jurisdiction it lies within? Or Russia, which might try to make its life difficult in other internet governance fora?

Three years ago, at ICANN 73, ICANN’s then-chair said that the Soviet Union, which disbanded over 30 years ago, is “no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”.

I first floated the idea of ICANN taking down .su the day after the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

1 Comment Tagged: .su, cctld, ICANN, retirement, ROSNIIROS