Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Antisemitic remarks cost registrar dearly

Kevin Murphy, December 9, 2024, Domain Registrars

A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder’s televised antisemitic comments.

Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN’s then-CEO described Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s remarks on Jordanian TV as “beyond offensive or objectionable”.

Abu-Ghazaleh had deployed some pretty clear-cut antisemitic tropes and seemed to try to justify the Holocaust in a news interview related to the war in Gaza, causing outrage from at least one Jewish ICANN community member.

After Costerton’s published chastisement, AGIP’s DUM fell from 1,371 to 930 over the space of a month. It was the first substantial decline on record, with its DUM having been on a fairly steady but slow upward trajectory.

In August, the last month for which we have records, its gTLD DUM had gone down to 695, about half its peak.

AGIP is a boutique intellectual property management registrar, likely with higher margins than your typical domain retailer. A decline of a few hundred domains could represent the loss of just a few customers.

The registrar still has its ICANN accreditation. It’s also still contracted with ICANN to run an instance of the L-root DNS root server in Amman, despite a call for it to lose that deal.

But, as Domain Name Wire noted on Friday, it’s no longer listed as providing UDRP services for ICANN. This change seems to have occurred in mid-September, judging by Archive.org records.

Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China

Kevin Murphy, September 5, 2019, Domain Tech

ICANN has announced the creation of another root server instance in China, which definitely, DEFINITELY won’t let the Chinese government mess with the interwebs.
ICANN said this week that it’s opened an instance of the L-root that it manages in Shanghai.
It’s the third L-root in China but only the first outside of Beijing.
In a press release announcing the installation, which was carried out with technical support from CNNIC and Shanghai Telecom, ICANN decided to preemptively head off any concerns that putting an important piece of internet infrastructure in China comes with added security risk:

Contrary to common misconception, root servers do not control the Internet. The operation of an instance also does not provide any mechanism to alter content of the DNS. Any modification of root zone content will be mitigated by a part of the DNS protocol known as the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and if an instance fail to respond to a query, resolvers will ask the same question to another instance or root server.

It’s merely the latest of 168 L-root installations and 1,015 copies of the 13 logical root servers, which all use IP Anycast to more quickly serve DNS answers to their local users.
Given how big and populous China is, there are surprisingly few root server instances in the country, according to root-servers.org.
In addition to ICANN’s three boxes, Verisign’s J-root and Internet Systems Consortium’s F-root have three in Beijing and two in Hangzhou between them. The K, I and F roots each have one instance in Beijing.
That’s eight nodes in China proper, which has 800 million internet users. Cross the border into semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which has a population of under eight million people, and there are nine root instances.
The city of Bucharest, Romania (pop. 1.8 million) has the same number of root instances as China.