“Criminal” domain suspensions drop again in .uk but thousands of pandemic domains frozen

Nominet suspended thousands fewer suspected criminal domains in 2020 than last year, according to the registry’s latest annual update.

For the 12 months to the end of October, Nominet took down 22,158 domains, is down from 28,937 in the year-ago period.

As usual, suspected intellectual property crime made up almost all the takedowns — the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit was behind 21,632 requests, down from 28,606.

Notably, despite the reported uptick in scams related to the coronavirus pandemic, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency made just 13 takedown requests, down from 31.

This is perhaps due to Nominet taking a proactive approach, putting domains containing certain related keywords on hold at the point of registration. It froze 3,811 such domains this year, later releasing 1,568.

Eight domains were suspended for criminal activity related to Covid-19, the company said.

There were no suspensions related to banned “rape” domains, despite over a thousand new registrations being flagged for manual review. Nor were there any takedowns of domains hosting child sexual abuse material.

It’s the second year in a row that suspensions have been down. In the 2017/18 period Nominet took down 32,813 domains.

1 Comment Tagged: .uk, coronavirus, covid-19, crime, intellectual property, nominet, pandemic, suspensions, takedowns

NameSilo in profit as sales rise 11%

Canadian registrar NameSilo today reported a profit for the third quarter, as bookings increased 11% sequentially over the three months to September 30.

One of the fastest-growing registrars, the company said that as of today it has 3.54 million domains under management, up from the 3.45 million it reported at the start of September.

NameSilo said its revenue for the quarter was $8.07 million, up 2.8% on Q3 2019. Its net income was $2,72 million, compared to a net loss of $753,093 a year earlier.

Much of the net income was attributable to income on investments, the firm said.

Bookings, which represents the number of domains sold but not yet recognized as revenue for accounting purposes, was up 11% compared to Q2 at $8.4 million.

Comment Tagged: earnings, financials, namesilo

CentralNic more than doubles revenue as parking business thrives

CentralNic today reported revenue growth of 118% for the nine months to September 30, largely on the back of its recently acquired domain monetization business.

The company said it made a net loss after tax of $6.2 million, compared to $6 million, on revenue of $168.5 million.

Still casting itself as the domain industry’s consolidator, most of the growth came due to acquisitions made over the last couple of years, so CentralNic has also published pro forma results to give a better sense of organic growth.

On that basis, revenue was up a still-decent 17%.

The acquisition of Team Internet, which offers the ParkingCrew and Tonic monetization services, for $48 million just over a year ago was the biggest booster of growth.

Pro forma, CentralNic’s monetization segment was up 39% to $72.9 million in revenue, mostly due to a whopping 36% increase in RPMs.

Ninety-two percent of its monetization revenue comes from a single customer.

CentralNic’s indirect segment, which unhelpfully bundles together its registrar reseller channel with its registry service provider operation and .sk registry operator business, was up 51% to $63.5 million and up 8% to $65.2 million pro forma.

The company said the growth was mostly due to the acquisitions of TPP Wholesale and Hexonet Group last year.

The direct segment, which comprises its retail registrars as well as software and consultancy, dipped by 9% to $32.1 million, or 2% to $31.8 million pro forma.

Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials

WIPO handles 50,000th UDRP case as coronavirus drives complaints

The World Intellectual Property Organization handled its 50,000th UDPR case on November 20, the organization has announced.

It’s taken WIPO, which designed the policy and was the first to administer it back in 1999, over two decades to reach this milestone.

WIPO said that the 50,000 cases cover almost 91,000 domains, with complaints and respondents from over 180 countries.

The organization believes the coronavirus pandemic this year has driven growth, with an 11% increase in cases recorded between January and October. There were 3,405 cases over this period.

Erik Wilbers, director of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, said in a press release:

With a greater number of people spending more time online during the pandemic, cybersquatters are finding an increasingly target-rich environment. Rights owners, meantime, are stepping up their brand enforcement on the Internet as they further shift to marketing and selling online.

Comment Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19, cybersquatting, pandemic, udrp, wipo

Brits get small reprieve in Brexit domain crackdown

The .eu registry has given UK-based registrants an extra window to keep hold of their domains, which will soon be deleted due to Brexit.

Brits were originally set to lose their .eu names at the end of the year, due to the expiry of the year-long Brexit transition deal.

But rather than immediately “withdrawing” these domains, EURid will now merely “suspend” them at midnight January 1.

Registrant will then have until midnight April 1 to bring their registration data back into compliance — by transferring them to an entity still based in the EU — to remove the suspension.

Suspended domains will not resolve.

All affected domains will be placed in “withdrawn” status April 1, and then will be deleted and returned to the available pool in batches from January 1, 2022.

Essentially, EURid has given procrastinating Brits a three-month final warning window to avoid losing their names, along with a de facto alert system for those who have not been paying attention.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, eurid

Vaccine agency to get more domain takedown powers next year

The UK’s health regulator is going to be added to a Nominet pilot program enabling the speedy takeover of suspected criminal .uk domains next year, according to the registry.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency will become the second government agency after the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police to be added to the program.

The program is an expansion of the years-old takedown procedure coordinated between Nominet and law enforcement agencies, under which domains suspected by LEA of being used in criminal activity such as counterfeiting are promptly suspended by the registry.

In the pilot, when a domain is suspended it will bounce users to this informational image, rather than merely not resolving.

MHRA is the agency responsible for approving vaccines for, among everything else, COVID-19, so it’s bound to see nefarious activity next year as vaccines actually start hitting the market.

The news of its involvement was first announced in March as the pandemic took hold of the country but, like so much else in the UK government’s technology response to coronavirus, it looks like it’s going to be a year late and a quid short.

Comment Tagged: coronavirus, mhra, nominet, pandemic, pipcu, takedown, vaccines

Domain growth dropped off in Q3, says Verisign

The third quarter saw the worldwide domain industry base of registrations increase by 600,000 names over the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

September ended with 370.7 million names registered across all TLDs, up 0.2% sequentially and 3% year over year.

Annual growth of 10.8 million names is a sharp drop off from the 15.3 million growth seen in Q2, during which many nations were under coronavirus lockdown.

Breaking it down by sector, it’s a case of .com growth being offset by shrinkages in new gTLDs and ccTLD, at least on an annual basis.

.com ended the quarter with 150.3 million names, up from 148.7 million three months earlier, which .net was flat at 13.4 million.

ccTLDs as a whole were at 160.6 million, up by 500,000 sequentially but down by 1.2 million compared to Q3 2019.

Unusually, the ccTLD numbers were not affected one way or the other by free extension .tk, where domains are never deleted. Verisign reports the TLD flat in Q3, but I suspect that’s due to a lack of fresh data rather than anything else.

In the top 10 largest ccTLDs, most grew or were flat sequentially. The notable standout was .uk, which lost a full million domains compared to Q2 due to the expiry of a million second-level names in September.

New gTLDs declined by 1.5 million names to settle at 30.2 million at the end of the quarter, according to the DNIB.

The report can by downloaded from this page.

Comment Tagged: .uk, dnib, new gTLDs, verisign

Donuts boss discusses shock Afilias deal

Afilias is to spin off its registrar business and also its contested application for the .web gTLD, following its acquisition by Donuts, according to Donuts CEO Akram Atallah.

Speaking to DI last night, Atallah explained a little about how the deal, which creates a registry with about 450 strings under management, came about.

Rather than a straightforward bilateral negotiation, is seems like Afilias was shopping itself around for a buyer. Several companies were invited to bid, and Donuts won. Atallah said he does not know how many, or which, bidders Donuts was competing against.

Afilias was making over $100 million a year in revenue last time its accounts were published in 2017, but its largest gTLDs are in decline and it took a big hit when Public Interest Registry renegotiated its back-end contract for .org in 2018.

The acquisition, the value of which has not been disclosed, does not include Afilias’ registrar or mobile businesses, which Atallah said will be spun off.

He also revealed that the deal does not include Afilias’ .web gTLD application, which came second in an ICANN auction won by a Verisign-backed bidder a few years back.

Afilias is currently waiting for the results of an Independent Review Process case that seeks to overturn the winning $135 million bid and award the potentially lucrative gTLD to Afilias. The case was heard in August and a decision is surely not many months away.

What the deal does include are all of Afilias’ registry assets, including its owned gTLDs and its back-end service provider contracts.

I asked Atallah what the plans are for migrating or integrating the two registry platforms. While Afilias runs its own data centers, Donuts migrated its registry to Amazon’s AWS cloud service earlier this year.

“We have to make sure whatever we do is as painless as possible to our registrar channel and partners,” he said. “We believe that at least on the new gTLDs that they have it will probably be easier for us to move them to our back-end, which is on the cloud already… We’ll probably do that fairly quickly.”

“But remember they have other registries and ccTLDs that don’t own that they run on their back-end, so there’ll be business issues and negotiations there to see what we can do there,” he added.

While he’s not expecting anyone to notice any big changes immediately, Atallah said that over time features such as the companies’ different EPP commands will be merged, and that valued-added services will start to cross-pollinate.

“All of the features we have on our TLDs will migrate to their TLDs and vice versa,” he said.

That means things like the Domain Protected Marks List, a defensive registration service for trademark owners, will start to show up in Afilias gTLDs before long, he said.

I asked about the possibility of layoffs, something that is no doubt worrying staff at both companies right now and seems quite possible given the move to the cloud, but Atallah said it was too early to say. Nothing will change until the deal closes at the end of the year, he said.

“Once we actually close, we’ll sit down with the management of the Afilias registry team and look at all the different assets that we have and try to pick the best in class in technology and services,” he said.

Having seen some mutterings about competition concerns, I put that question to Atallah. He laughed it away, pointing out that, even combined with Afilias, Donuts will have fewer than 15 million domains under management.

5 Comments Tagged: .web, acquisition, afilias, auction, donuts, dpml, ndc, new gTLDs, verisign

GoDaddy has a secret weapon in its push into corporate domains

While GoDaddy has been focused for the last two decades on small and microbusiness customers, its entry this year into the corporate domains management space should not be dismissed — the company has one huge advantage.

Earlier this week, the company announced the launch of GoDaddy Corporate Domains, really just a rebranding of the company Brandsight, which it acquired back in February.

The move pits GoDaddy against industry leaders such as MarkMonitor, CSC, Com Laude, Safenames et al.

But the company has one huge advantage that its new competitors do not have: cybersquatters and criminals.

Buried at the bottom of this week’s press release is the announcement of a new service, the Verified Intellectual Property program, which “provides pre-vetted, well-known and famous brands an escalation path to address IP abuse”.

It sounds basically like a trusted notifier service not unlike those offered at the registry level by the likes of Donuts and Radix.

VIP clients will be able to get sites and domains hosted on GoDaddy taken down much quicker, via a special escalation email address, a spokesperson said. Takedown requests will still be subject to manual review, he said.

VIP is currently invitation-only, but I assume being a Corporate Domains customer would help expedite an invitation.

This kind of service is something GoDaddy’s new rivals cannot offer — they generally have no retail channel or hosting, so have no cyberquatters, pirates or counterfeiters as customers. If they want to take down a domain or web site, it’s not a simple matter of flipping a switch.

They also don’t have tens of millions of domains under management, many of which, through no fault of GoDaddy, will be maliciously registered.

This is potentially a pretty cool USP for GoDaddy, which could have rivals worried.

9 Comments Tagged: .vip, cybersquatting, fraud, godaddy, trademarks

Donuts acquires Afilias to create registry giant

Donuts has agreed to acquire Afilias, the two companies have just announced.

The purchase, for an undisclosed sum, will create a registry giant, responsible in one way or the other for over 450 top-level domains.

The deal will not include Afilias’ registrar or mobile software businesses, the companies said.

The acquisition, between two private companies, is expected to close before the end of the year.

Afilias is probably best known for .info, which it has been running for almost two decades. That gTLD has almost 4.7 million domains under management.

It also runs .mobi, .pro and 21 new gTLDs from the 2012 application round, including .global, .green, .pet, .kim and .lgbt.

It acts as the back-end registry provider for over 200 third-party TLDs, the largest of which is .org, and provides DNS resolution services for other TLDs and enterprises.

Donuts owns the largest portfolio of new gTLDs, with 242 in its stable at the last count.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, afilias, donuts