CentralNic gets 680,000 AlpNames domains for free, kinda

CentralNic has emerged as the gaining registrar for AlpNames’ entire portfolio of gTLD domains.
The company announced late last week that three registrars in its stable — Moniker, Key-Systems LLC and Key-Systems GmbH — will take over roughly 680,000 domains that were left stranded when AlpNames management went AWOL.
US-based Key-Systems LLC appears to be the biggest gainer. It will be taking over domains in every gTLD except .biz, .com, .info, .net, .org, which are going to Moniker, and .pro, which are going to the German Key-Systems division.
While most registrars see their domains under management concentrated in these legacy gTLDs, by volume AlpNames had far more registrations in new 2012-round gTLDs.
It had just 19,000 .com DUM at the last count, compared to hundreds of thousands in new gTLDs such as .top and .gdn.
CentralNic said in a press release that ICANN selected its registrars after a competitive bidding process, which I’ve previously outlined here, but that it did not pay for the names. So AlpNames, presumably, won’t be getting the payday it could have received under the rules.
The transfer won’t be entirely cost-free, of course. CentralNic is going to have to provide support to its incoming customers — who will all be emailed with the details of their new Moniker accounts — for starters.
There’s also the issue of abuse. AlpNames was notorious as a haven for spammers and the like, due to its cheap prices and bulk-registration tools, so CentralNic may find itself having to deal with this legacy.
But CentralNic said it expects these incidental costs to be “minimal”.
The transfers are a big boost for CentralNic’s registrar volume, at least in the short term. The three selected registrars had a combined total of roughly two million gTLD domains at the last count. CentralNic says it acts as registrar for over seven million domains across its 13 accreditations.
For every AlpNames domain that gets renewed, CentralNic gets paid. But if AlpNames’ own track record is any guide, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of drops over the coming year.
UPDATE August 12 2020: AlpNames former CEO Iain Roache recently wrote to DI and stated the following:

Alpnames itself worked closely with ICANN for months to arrange for its exit from the Registrar business and with a number of Registrars to arrange for the transfer of the customers. Your article does not reflect the detail of what transpired and is inaccurate.

Root servers whacked after crypto change

The DNS root servers came under accidental attack from name servers across the internet following ICANN’s recent changes to their cryptographic master keys, according to Verisign.
The company, which runs the A and J root servers, said it saw requests for DNSSEC data at the root increase from 15 million a day in October to 1.15 billion a day a week ago.
The cause was the October 11 root Key Signing Key rollover, the first change ICANN had made to the “trust anchor” of DNSSEC since it came online at the root in 2010.
The KSK rollover saw ICANN change the cryptographic keys that rest at the very top of the DNSSEC hierarchy.
The move was controversial. ICANN delayed it for a year after learning about possible disruption at internet endpoints. Its Security and Stability Advisory Committee and even its own board were not unanimous that the roll should go ahead.
But the warnings were largely about the impact on internet users, rather than on the root servers themselves, and the impact was minimal.
Verisign is now saying that requests to its roots for DNSSEC key data increased from 15 million per day to 75 million per day, a five-fold increase, almost overnight.
It was not until January, when the old KSK was marked as “revoked”, did the seriously mahooosive traffic growth begin, however. Verisign’s distinguished engineer Duane Wessels wrote:

Everyone involved expected this to be a non-event. However, we instead saw an even bigger increase in DNSKEY queries coming from a population of root server clients. As of March 21, 2019, Verisign’s root name servers receive about 1.15 billion DNSKEY queries per day, which is 75 times higher than pre-rollover levels and nearly 7 percent of our total steady state query traffic.

Worryingly, the traffic only seemed to be increasing, until March 22, when the revoked key was removed from the root entirely.
Wessels wrote that while the root operators are still investigating, “it would seem that the presence of the revoked key in the zone triggered some unexpected behavior in a population of validating resolvers.”
The root operators hope to have answers in the coming weeks, he wrote.
The next KSK rollover is not expected for years, and the root traffic is now returning to normal levels, so there’s no urgency.

Another dot-brand bites the dust

Honeywell International, a $40-billion-a-year US conglomerate, has become the last major company to dump its dot-brand gTLD.
The company informed ICANN in February that it no longer wishes to run .honeywell, and ICANN yesterday published its preliminary decision not to transition the TLD to a new owner.
Honeywell never used .honeywell, which has been in the DNS root since June 2016, beyond the contractually mandated placeholder at nic.honeywell.
It becomes the 46th new gTLD registry to request a termination since 2015. Almost all have been dot-brands.
The company’s request is open for public comment until April 14. To date, there have been no public comments on any voluntary registry termination.
Honeywell is involved in the aerospace, building and consumer goods sectors. It has 130,000 employees and reported revenue of $40.5 billion for 2018.
It’s the first new gTLD termination request of 2019.

The DNS’s former overseer now has its own domain name

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which for many years was the instrument of the US government’s oversight of the DNS root zone, has got its first proper domain name.
It’s been operating at ntia.doc.gov forever, but today announced that it’s upgrading to the second-level ntia.gov.
The agency said the switch “will make NTIA’s site consistent with most other Department of Commerce websites”.
Staff there will also get new ntia.gov email addresses, starting from today. Their old addresses will continue to forward.
NTIA was part of the DNS root management triumvirate, along with ICANN/IANA and Verisign, until the IANA transition in 2016.
The agency still has a contractual relationship with Verisign concerning the operation of .com.

UDRP complaints hit new high at WIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization handled 3,447 UDRP cases in 2018, a new high for the 20-year-old anti-cybersquatting policy.
The filings represent an increase of over 12% compared to the 3,074 UDRP cases filed with WIPO in 2017. There were 3,036 cases in 2016
But the number of unique domains complained about decreased over the same period, from 6,370 in 2017 to 5,655 domains in 2018, WIPO said today.
The numbers cover only cases handled by WIPO, which is one of several UDRP providers. They may represent increases or decreases in cybersquatting, or simply WIPO’s market share fluctuating.
The numbers seem to indicate that the new policy of redacting Whois information due to GDPR, which came into effect mid-year, has had little impact on trademark owners’ ability to file UDRP claims.
UPDATE: This post was updated a few hours after publication to remove references to the respective shares of the UDRP caseload of .com compared to new gTLDs. WIPO appears to have published some wonky math, as OnlineDomain noticed.

.vu to relaunch under mystery new registry

Vanuatu is to attempt to broaden the appeal of its .vu domain globally by switching to a new shared registry system.
The changes were initiated last week in Kobe, when the ICANN board of directors gave the final stamp of approval on the redelegation of the ccTLD.
.vu is now delegated to country’s Telecommunications Radiocommunications and Broadcasting Regulator (TRBR), having been managed since 1995 by Telecom Vanuatu Limited (TVL). The government passed a law in 2016 calling for the redelegation.
Under its new management, the market for .vu domains will be opened up at the registrar level. To date, TVL has operated as a sole source for .vu domains. From now on, it will just be one registrar among (presumably) many.
A registry back-end has already been selected, after tenders were received from nine companies, but it’s still in contract talks and TRBR is not ready to name the successful party just yet.
The Vanuatu government wants to encourage local ISPs and web developers to consider signing up as registrars or resellers, but the SRS will also be open to established international players.
Brand protection registrars and TLD completionists will no doubt begin to carry .vu directly as soon as they’re able to plug in to the new system.
But off the top of my head, I’m struggling to think of a strong global sales pitch for the string, other than a phonetic similarity to “view”.
It doesn’t stand for much as an acronym, doesn’t seem to work well in English as a domain hack, and doesn’t seem to mean much in other widely spoken languages (other than French, where it means “seen”, as in “déjà-vu”).
We can only hope the new management doesn’t attempt to market it with some kind of pathetic backronym.
Domains in .vu currently cost $50 (USD) per year when bought from TVL. I have no current data on how many .vu domains are registered.
InternetNZ’s Keith Davidson assisted in the redelegation and is handling comms during the handover.
Vanuatu is a Pacific archipelago nation, previously known as the New Hebrides, that gained independence from the UK and France in 1980. It had roughly 272,000 inhabitants at the last count.

AlpNames could get PAID for abandoning its customers

So it turns out selling domain names for peanuts to spammers isn’t a viable business model. Who’d have thunk?
As you’ll have no doubt already read elsewhere, ICANN has shut down AlpNames, the deep-discounting registrar with an unenviable reputation for attracting abusive registrants.
But there’s a chance that the company might actually get paid for its customer base, under ICANN rules.
ICANN today terminated AlpNames’ contract, effective immediately, having discovered the “discontinuance of its operations”.
It’s a rare case of ICANN going straight to richly deserved termination, skipping over the breach notice phase.
The former registrar’s web site has been down for the best part of a week, resolving to a Cloudflare error message saying the AlpNames web server is missing its SSL certificate.
But it appears its customers may have been experiencing problems accessing their accounts even earlier.
Judging by ICANN’s termination notice, the organization has had just about as much luck contacting AlpNames management as DI, which is to say: none.
CEO Iain Roache appears to have simply stopped paying attention to the company, for reasons unknown, allowing it to simply fade away.
At least three members of senior staff have left the company over the last several months, with former COO Damon Barnard telling DI he was asked to leave as a cost-cutting measure as Roache attempted to relocate the company from Gibraltar to the UK.
I gather that Roache is also currently tied up in litigation related to the failure of his old registry management business, Famous Four Media, which was removed by gTLD portfolio owner Domain Venture Partners last year.
So what happens now to AlpNames customers?
Fortunately, most of them should suffer only minor inconvenience.
ICANN has initiated its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure, which will see all of AlpNames’ domains forcibly transferred to another registrar.
This often uses the data that registrars are obliged to periodically escrow, but in this case AlpNames uses LogicBoxes as a registrar back-end, so presumably LogicBoxes still has fresh, live data.
AlpNames had 532,941 domain names across all gTLDs on its IANA tag at the last official count, at the end of November. It’s believed to be closer to 700,000 today.
In November, its top two gTLDs were .top and .gdn, which had 280,000 names between them. It had over 19,000 .com names under management
Almost 700,000 names is a big deal, making AlpNames a top 40 registrar, and would make a nice growth spurt for any number of struggling registrars.
The portfolio could be a bit of a poisoned chalice, however, containing as it likely does a great many low-quality and some possibly abusive registrations.
At least one registrar, Epik, has publicly stated its desire to take over these domains, but due to the volume of AlpNames DUM it could be a competitive bidding process between multiple registrars.
Under the ICANN rules (pdf), a “full application process” is generally favored for defunct registrars with over 1,000 domains, when the de-accredited registrar has not named a successor.
The scoring system used to pick a winner has many criteria, but it generally favors larger registrars. They have to show they have the scale to handle the extra technical and customer support load required by the transition, for example.
It also favors registrars with breadth of gTLD coverage. They have to be accredited in all the gTLDs the dead registrar was. AlpNames supported 352 gTLDs and had active domains in 270 of them, according to November’s registry reports.
Language support may be an issue too, in case for example a substantial chunk of AlpNames business came from, say, China.
All applying registrars that score above a certain threshold are considered tied, and the tie-breaker is how much they’re willing to pay for the portfolio.
Unlike gTLD auctions, ICANN does not receive the proceeds of this auction, however. According to the policy (with my emphasis):

This procedure is not intended to create a new form of revenue for ICANN. To the extent payment is received as part of a bulk transfer, ICANN will apply funds against any debt owed by the registrar to ICANN and forward the remaining funds, if any, to the de-accredited registrar.

That’s right, there’s a chance AlpNames might actually get a small windfall, despite essentially abandoning its customers.
Think about it like the government using eminent domain to buy a house it wishes to demolish to make way for a new road. Except the house’s cellar is full of kidnapped children. And it’s on fire.
Of course, this might not happen. ICANN might decide that there’s not enough time to run a full application process without risk to AlpNames’ customers and instead simply award the dead registrar’s portfolio to one of the registrars in its pre-approved pool of gaining registrars.
That choice would be partly based on ICANN judgement and partly on which registrar is next in the round-robin queue of pre-qualified registrars.
Here’s a handy diagram that shows the procedure.

UPDATE August 12 2020: Roache recently wrote to DI and stated the following:

Alpnames itself worked closely with ICANN for months to arrange for its exit from the Registrar business and with a number of Registrars to arrange for the transfer of the customers. Your article does not reflect the detail of what transpired and is inaccurate.

O.com might be a one-off for Verisign

Verisign today was finally given approval to auction off o.com, the first single-character .com domain to hit the market since the early 1990s.
The ICANN board of directors voted to approve a contractual amendment that will lift the ban on single-character .coms in this instance, but it may not necessarily mean more will be sold in future.
The resolution passed in Japan states that the approval is “limited to the unique circumstances of this particular domain name, and the approval of the amendment does not establish a precedent that applies in other circumstances.”
So if Verisign decides it wants to sell off the remaining 22 one-letter .com domains in future, it’s going to have to go through the same lengthy approval process again, with no guarantee that ICANN will give it the nod.
Still, if the o.com proposal is hunky-dory this time around, I fail to see why ICANN would reject an identical proposal to sell a different domain.
As I explained in a blog post a week ago, Verisign will only get $7.85 a year for the domain, regardless of how many millions it raises.
The rest of the money will be distributed to non-profit causes by an independent third party.
While the auction has already cost Verisign far more money than it will make, it’s a nice PR win for the next time its .com price-raising powers are questioned.
Overstock.com, which has been lobbying ICANN and Verisign for the release of o.com for years is a virtually guaranteed bidder.
Former ICANN bigwig Kurt Pritz said recently that Overstock offered to pay ICANN $1 million to $2 million for the domain (somewhat shadily, it has to be said) over a decade ago.
Other O trademark owners that may show up include sporting goods vendor Oakley and future President of the United States Oprah Winfrey.
I hope bidders have to sign a no-suing covenant, as this is the kind of thing that could easily wind up in court.

Andruff escalates Disspain feud, asks ICANN to ban him from chair

Domain consultant and former registry boss Ron Andruff has asked ICANN’s board of directors to ban Chris Disspain from becoming chair at the end of the year.
Writing on CircleID today, Andruff’s anti-Disspain message is veiled, but only thinly.
While not naming Disspain directly, Andruff wrote: “I call on the Chair and ICANN Board to ensure that no candidate who may be standing under a cloud of any type be considered for the highest position and authority within ICANN.”
Current chair Cherine Chalaby is out in October, when his nine-year term on the board comes to its bylaws-mandated end.
Disspain, who is currently vice chair and has always struck me as an obvious choice for the top job, has another year left on his term.
The “cloud” Andruff believes Disspain is standing under relates to longstanding allegations of “financial irregularities” at Australian ccTLD registry auDA, during the period Disspain was CEO.
It’s known that an unpublished audit of auDA by PPB Advisory in 2016 makes claims about some sloppy financial management, but there have never been any published allegations of wrongdoing by Disspain himself.
Andruff has been fighting for years with the Australian Information Commissioner to get this report, and other documents he believes might cast Disspain in a bad light, released under Aussie freedom of information law.
He was initially rebuffed, in November 2017, but appealed. After much back-and-forth, he was told two weeks ago that the Department of Communications and the Arts’ refusal to hand over the documents was in part “incorrect”. The Department is due to respond to that finding tomorrow.
It’s not at all clear what information, if any, the Department is going to release.
Andruff also notes that there’s an “ongoing police investigation” into the same “irregularities”.
The only such investigation I’m aware of involved “several” former auDA directors being referred to Victoria Police by auDA’s new management last April. There were 48 former directors at the time, and the names of those referred were not released.
Andruff is known to have beef with Disspain, who he holds responsible for his being passed over for the job as chair of the Nominating Committee in 2015.
ICANN typically does not name its new chairs until much later in the year, so it’s quite possible this is a storm that will have blown over by the time the board comes to picking Chalaby’s replacement.

ICANN plays tough over Amazon dot-brands

ICANN has given Amazon and the governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization less than a month to sort out their long-running dispute over the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors voted on Sunday to give ACTO and the e-commerce leviathan until April 7 to get their shit together or risk not getting what they want.
But both parties are going to have to come to an agreement without ICANN’s help, with the board noting that it “does not think that any further facilitation efforts by ICANN org will be fruitful”.
Attempts by ICANN to meet with ACTO over the last several months have been agreed to and then cancelled by ACTO on at least two separate occasions.
The eight ACTO governments think the string “Amazon” more rightfully belongs to them, due to it being the English name for the rain forest region they share.
Amazon the company has promised to safeguard culturally sensitive terms in .amazon, to assist with future efforts to secure .amazonas or similar for the Amazonian peoples, and to donate services and devices to the nations concerned.
Now, the two parties are going to have to bilaterally decide whether this deal is enough, whether it should be sweetened or rejected outright.
If they can’t come to a deal by ICANN’s deadline (which could be extended if Amazon and ACTO both ask for more time), ICANN will base its decision on whether to approve .amazon based on how Amazon unilaterally proposes to address ACTO’s concerns.
While a rejection of the .amazon application is still on the table, my read is that this is a bigger win for Amazon than it is for ACTO.