.basketball domain emerges under GoDaddy with fewer hoops

The .basketball gTLD has finally had its coming-out party, with the registry announcing general availability this week.

Fédération Internationale de Basketball has outsourced management of the gTLD to sports marketing agency Roar Domains, doing business here as Roar.Basketball, which in turn is using GoDaddy Registry for the technical registry functions.

The domain has been in a seemingly interminable series of qualified launch programs, community priority registration phases and sunrise periods for the last four years, but FIBA said yesterday .basketball is now open to all-comers.

Technically, it’s been in general availability for a few months, but the broader marketing effort only began this week.

Right now, it’s being marketed via Roar’s site at be.basketball, where the base registration price is $50 a year. Premiums are available at higher prices.

Roar appears to be using Australian registrar Bombora Technologies, which GoDaddy acquired as part of its Neustar deal last year, as its primary — possibly exclusive — registrar.

Roar’s FAQ states that be.basketball “is the only site where you can register and manage a .basketball domain name”.

Other registrars are accredited, and almost 20 have a handful of presumed sunrise regs, but currently Bombora holds 80% of the 600 domains currently under management.

Weirdly, GoDaddy itself does not appear to currently sell .basketball names through its primary storefront.

Roar/FIBA originally had MMX as its partner, with CentralNic as its back-end, but that changed earlier this year when GoDaddy acquired most of MMX’s assets, including the .basketball relationship.

Man with broken shift key sues ICANN and GoDaddy over Bitcoin domain

Sometimes I wonder if all they teach you at American law schools is how to correctly use upper-case letters.

A Georgia man who lost a cybersquatting case with Sotheby’s, concerning his registration of sothebysauctionbitcoin.com, has taken the auction house, along with ICANN, GoDaddy, and ADR Forum to court.

Harris’ case is filed pro se, which is Latin for “he doesn’t have a lawyer, his complaint makes no sense, and the case is going to get thrown out of court”.

He claims a UDRP decision that went against him recently was incorrect, that ADR Forum is corrupt and biased, and that the UDRP itself is flawed.

The domain was registered with GoDaddy, and ADR Forum was the UDRP provider.

He wants his domain back, along with root-and-branch reform of the UDRP and “self-regulating lumbering Monopolistic Behemoth” ICANN, which is apparently still working under the auspices of the US Department of Commerce.

Here’s a flavor of the filing (pdf), which was filed in a Georgia District Court yesterday:

We are ASKING THE Court to find the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure) #FA2108001961598 (Sotheby’s and SPTC v Harris) Arbitration process and resulting ruling was Fatally Flawed; whereas ICANN failed to properly parse the “Provider” and we believe allowed Sotheby’s Counsel of Record in those proceeding to have specifically chosen ADR Form ADR FORUM whose history is tainted by a Consent Decree in their previous corporate iteration as an arbitration Provider for bad behavior and is also known to be a pro Claimant Provider.

In the version published to PACER, the complaint ends abruptly mid-sentence and seems to have one or more pages missing.

The decision in the original UDRP case is equally enlightening. Harris apparently sent nine responses to the complaint, many of which seemed to argue that Sotheby’s should have made an offer for the domain instead of “intimidating and bullying” him.

Harris apparently argued that the registration was a “legitimate investment”, thereby conferring rights to the domain.

Sole panelist Neil Anthony Brown seems to have taken pity on Harris, who had declared that Sotheby’s citation of previous UDRP cases was “irrelevant”, by deciding the case (against him, of course) without direct reference to prior precedent.

It was basically a slam-dunk decision, as I expect this lawsuit will also be.

.club — the whole TLD just went down

GoDaddy Registry’s .club gTLD appears to have been down for the last few hours.

At time of writing, no .club domain names are resolving, instead returning NXDOMAIN errors to browsers, and the registry is reportedly working on fixing whatever ails it.

The .club registry accounts for over a million domains, so the problem is affecting a lot of people.

At 1107 UTC, the registrar Namecheap wrote that “the DNS information cannot be queried for the domains”, updating half an hour later to say the registry is “working to resolve the issue within the nearest time possible.”

Cloudflare, also alerted by its customers, said on Twitter that it had “identified the name resolution problem on upstream Registry.”

Tucows confirmed that the problem is preventing customers from registering or managing their .club domains.

It appears to be a DNS issue. The gTLD’s name servers, which are all found at get.club, are not currently responding. All six official names servers use the same IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

It appears that .hsbc, the dot-brand for the global bank HSBC, is suffering identical problems. It also runs on the GoDaddy back-end. Other gTLDs on the same infrastructure I checked appear to be working normally.

This is highly unusual. Entire TLDs do not typically just drop off the internet like this.

Like all gTLDs, .club has a DNS availability service level agreement of 100% uptime baked into its ICANN Registry Agreement, which it clearly has failed to meet this month.

The .club gTLD was acquired by GoDaddy from .CLUB Domains earlier this year, raising the possibility of some kind of handover-related problem. However, .club was already running on the old Neustar back-end, which GoDaddy acquired last year.

UPDATE: As of 1325 UTC, domains in .club and .hsbc appear to be resolving again (at least from where I’m sitting in the UK) after at least two and a half hours of downtime.

After the incident was resolved, the registry tweeted:

This morning there was a DNS service disruption impacting .Club websites. The issue has now been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

— .CLUB Domains (@getDotClub) October 7, 2021

GoDaddy Registry tweeted:

This morning there was a DNS service disruption impacting .club websites. The issue has now been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

— GoDaddy Registry (@GoDaddyRegistry) October 7, 2021

UltraDNS, the massively redundant DNS resolution service still owned by Neustar, identified the problem starting at 1030 UTC and being fixed by 1415 UTC. It did not specify what caused it, and suggested (contrary to the experience of some internet users) that it was restricted to Asia and Europe.

I’ve reached out for comment, and will update as we discover more…

Tucows buys UNR’s registry business as Schilling bows out

Tucows has acquired UNR’s registry business, the latest in the piecemeal sale of the old Uniregistry by founder Frank Schilling.

The Canadian registrar said it is taking on the technology platform as well as 10 UNR staffers.

Not many details of the deal, not even the purchase price, have been revealed.

“While I am slowly getting out of the industry, it’s important to me to know that my businesses are being left in the best hands,” Schilling said in a brief Tucows press release.

The deal gives Tucows a registry component to match rival GoDaddy, which acquired Neustar’s registry business last year, and makes the company the latest to throw itself into the vertically integrated domain space.

GoDaddy acquired Uniregistry’s registrar business last year also.

The UNR registry was originally Internet Systems Consortium’s but was acquired by UNR towards the beginning of the current new gTLD cycle.

It’s not currently clear which TLDs, if any, continue to run on the UNR platform. The company auctioned off 20 gTLDs in May, making $40 million, but did not disclose the buyers and none of the ICANN contracts have yet changed hands.

Certain ICANN approvals are needed before the deal closes, Tucows said.

Neither company answered DI’s questions about which TLDs are making the move, but Tucows VP Dave Woroch told us:

We are purchasing their registry platform and technology/intellectual property. In addition to servicing a number of registry operators, this platform will be applicable or beneficial to our broader registrar business, and we are looking at how we can implement some of that technology into our registrar platform. Along with this purchase of the registry platform, we have the unique opportunity to bring on a very experienced team of software engineers with specific expertise, and that will benefit our domain business at a time when it has been particularly challenging to add talent…

Tucows will be actively marketing itself as a backend registry provider, both for gTLDs and ccTLDs, and if there is another round of new gTLDs, we would fully expect to participate there as well.

Nothing but losses ahead for MMX

Former new gTLD registry MMX has delivered its latest set of financial results and warned that, without any operating business, it will be loss-making for the foreseeable future.

The company today reported a first-half loss of $783,000, compared to a loss of $1.25 million in the year-ago period.

That’s calculated from its ongoing operations, which since the $120 million sale of its registry business to GoDaddy comprises no revenue-generating activities but substantial costs keeping the company running and maintaining its listing on the AIM stock market.

Profit from discontinued operations was $3.38 million, compared to $2.68 million.

It still has small “RSP” business, providing non-technical back-office management services to a few former gTLD partners, but this will be wound down or sold off.

CEO Tony Farrow said in a statement:

We are now in the process of delivering the transition services agreed with GoDaddy Registry and disposing of, or otherwise winding down, our RSP Business. Whilst the transition services are being provided on a cost recovery basis, the Company’s ongoing administrative and other public company costs will result in operating losses for the Group going forward.

When the winding down of existing businesses is done, MMX will look for acquisition opportunities or act as a vessel for a reverse takeover.

It’s currently returning $80 million of its GoDaddy cash to investors with a buyback, but this is not enough to clear all of its shares.

MMX to return GoDaddy cash to investors

Former new gTLD portfolio registry Minds + Machines (MMX) said Friday that it has started returning most of its recent GoDaddy windfall to shareholders.

It has launched a tender offer to buy back £58 million ($80 million) worth of shares, after selling off its wedge of 20-odd ICANN contracts to the registrar giant.

The offer price is 9.6p ($0.13) per share. MMX said that’s a premium of 12.9% on its September 8 closing price and 13.1% over the average between August 11 and September 8.

It’s roughly the same price shares were trading for at the start of 2012, when ICANN opened the last new gTLD application window, but substantially lower than its peak when it started making new gTLD money a couple years later.

The proposal does not cover all of its shares; over 31% will remain in shareholder hands after the tender offer expires October 1.

The company has about $110 million in cash right now, and expects to spend $24 million of that on the GoDaddy transition, taxes, employee payments, professional services and the like, as it winds down over the fourth quarter.

MMX will retain its listing on AIM in London after the wind-down of operations, making it a vessel for a potential reverse-takeover, in which another company (not necessarily in the domains business) could back into it for an easier way into the public markets.

The company sold its registry portfolio to GoDaddy for about $120 million, and has wound down its registrars.

MMX drops two registrars

MMX has dumped two registrar contracts with ICANN, as the company’s asset-sale to GoDaddy nears completion.

ICANN records show that Minds and Machines LLC and Minds and Machines Registrar UK Limited both entered “terminated” status over the last few days, meaning they’re no longer accredited to sell gTLD domains.

But they weren’t doing any selling of domains anyway. The UK company had 108 domains under management and the US on had none at the last count.

The US accreditation was the one used primarily by the company under its original business model of a “triple-play” registry/registrar/back-end, when it was still going by Minds + Machines, which was abandoned five years ago.

The registrar peaked at about 50,000 names, which were then transferred over to Uniregistry. The back-end business was also abandoned, with Nominet taking over technical management of most of its gTLDs.

MMX is currently in the process of getting out of its sole remaining third business, that of gTLD registry.

GoDaddy has already taken over most of its 27 gTLDs under a $120 million deal announced earlier this year. Four TLDs remain, and will be transferred subject to approval from government partners.

GoDaddy and MMX delay closure of $120 million gTLD deal

GoDaddy and MMX have extended the deadline for final closure of their $120 million gTLD acquisition deal by a couple weeks.

MMX said this week the delay is to give them more time to seek approvals from business partners in the four gTLDs that have not already made the move, believed to be .bayern, .boston, .miami and .nrw.

These are all geographic strings that require local government sign-off to complete the transfers.

The deadline had been August 7. It’s now August 23.

GoDaddy Registry has already taken control of 23 of MMX’s gTLDS.

GoDaddy welcomes four porn TLDs

GoDaddy may not have the raunchy public image it once promoted, but it’s now the official registry for tens of thousands of porn-related domain names.

The gTLDs .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex made the move from UNR’s back-end to GoDaddy Registry this week, IANA records show.

These almost certainly the TLDs that MMX was talking about last week when it said it had ICANN approval to reassign four contracts, which it did not name.

IANA records still show the sponsor as ICM Registry for all four, suggesting the deal was structured a little differently to the 20-odd other gTLDs in MMX’s portfolio, which are still with MMX.

MMX said earlier this year that it was selling its entire portfolio to GoDaddy for at least $120 million.

.xxx, which launched the earliest — pre-2012 — is the largest of the TLDs, with around 55,000 names under management. .porn has about 10,000 and the other two have about 8,000 each.

MMX gets nod to sell 22 gTLDs to GoDaddy

New gTLD registry MMX expects to shortly offload most of its portfolio of strings to GoDaddy Registry after receiving ICANN approvals.

The company said today that its transfer requests for four of its gTLD contracts have received full ICANN approval.

Another 18 have received conditional ICANN approval, and MMX believes it has met these unspecified conditions.

Another five of its stable that are not fully owned and operated still require the nod from its partners.

MMX said in April that it planned to sell its entire portfolio to GoDaddy, after which it is expected the company will be wound down.

The company did not break down which transfer have received full approval, conditional approval, or are still waiting for approval.

It gTLDs are: .cooking, .fishing, .horse, .miami, .rodeo, .vodka, .beer, .luxe, .surf, .nrw, .work, .budapest, .casa, .abogado, .wedding, .yoga, .fashion, .garden, .fit, .vip, .dds, .xxx, .porn, .adult, .sex, .boston, .london and .bayern.