Microsoft switches two gTLDs from GoDaddy to Nominet

Microsoft has moved two of its branded gTLDs from GoDaddy’s registry back-end to Nominet’s.

Records show that .skype and .office both recently made the switch.

Microsoft had already moved six TLDs — .azure, .bing, .hotmail, .microsoft, .windows and .xbox — from Verisign to Nominet about a year ago, and .skype and .office mean its whole collection is now on Nominet’s service.

While .office isn’t technically a dot-brand because it does not have a Spec13 exemption in its ICANN contract, it is in use — you can log in to your email and other services, at least for now, via www.office.

.skype, meanwhile, has a handful of domains that work as redirects to skype.com.

Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft

Microsoft is planning to move all of its Microsoft 365 apps off a multitude of .com domains and consolidate them all under .microsoft, its dot-brand gTLD.

The company says it will move Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 web apps to the cloud.microsoft domain. They currently use domains such as outlook.office.com, teams.microsoft.com and microsoft365.com.

It first announced the move in April last year and this week reminded developers of apps that use its cloud platform that they need to support the new domain.

Explaining the move to the dot-brand last year, the company wrote:

Consolidating authenticated user-facing Microsoft 365 experiences onto a single domain will benefit customers in several ways. For end users, it will streamline the overall experience by reducing sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps. For admins, it will drastically reduce the complexity of the allow-lists required to help your tenant stay secure while enabling users to access the apps and services they need to do their work.

Microsoft plans to launch the teams.cloud.microsoft domain in June but run the two domain schemes in parallel for a while, so as to not unnecessarily break apps in its developer ecosystem.

It’s not going to dump microsoft.com altogether, saying that it plans to use it for “non-product experiences such as marketing, support, and e-commerce.”

The cloud.microsoft domain is already one of the more visible dot-brand names out there, ranking in the top 20 most-visited, according to Majestic rankings.

Hat tip: The Register.

Nominet wins Microsoft’s dot-brand business from Verisign

Nominet has taken over back-end registry services for Microsoft’s small portfolio of dot-brand gTLDs.

The company said it’s now running .azure, .bing, .hotmail, .microsoft, .windows and .xbox TLDs, bringing the total number of gTLDs on its registry platform to 74.

Microsoft had been with Verisign to date, but Verisign told us in July that it’s getting out of the dot-brand back-end business.

Almost 100 gTLDs have left Verisign this year, the vast majority landing at Identity Digital.

Nominet also took on .sky from Verisign earlier this year.

CentralNic expects revenue up 24% in Q1

CentralNic has disclosed its earnings expectations for the first quarter, and revealed it has diversified its pool of advertising partners.

The company expects revenue for the three months to March 31 to come it up 24% at $194.9 million, with adjusted EBITDA up 15% at $21.3 million. Excluding acquisitions, year-on-year organic growth for the trailing twelve months will be about 45%.

CentralNic started off as a domain registry, acquired its way into the registrar space, and nowadays makes most of its money from traffic arbitrage — buying Facebook ads, routing visitors through intermediary web sites to advertisers.

Mostly of the money it makes from advertising comes from Google’s ad network, but the company said today it has also signed up to Microsoft’s rival Bing platform, which reduces its exposure to a single partner.

CentralNic will report its full earnings May 15.

Microsoft seizes domains Russia was using to attack Ukraine

Microsoft says it has taken control of some domain names that we being using by hackers connected to the Russian security services to launch cyber attacks against Ukrainian, US and EU targets.

Company VP Tom Burt wrote that seven domains used by a group called Strontium were seized via a US court order and redirected to a Microsoft sinkhole, disrupting these attacks.

Burt wrote that the targets were Ukrainian media organizations and US and EU foreign policy think tanks, adding:

We believe Strontium was attempting to establish long-term access to the systems of its targets, provide tactical support for the physical invasion and exfiltrate sensitive information.

One wonders why Russia would use domains under US jurisdiction to conduct such attacks.

Microsoft seizes “Russian election hacking” domains

Microsoft has taken control of six domains associated with a hacker group believed to be a part of Russian military intelligence, according to the company.
Company president Brad Smith blogged yesterday that Microsoft obtained a court order allowing it to seize the names, which it believes were to be used to attack institutions including the US Senate.
The domains in question look like they could be used in spear-phishing attacks. The are: my-iri.org, hudsonorg-my-sharepoint.com, senate.group, adfs-senate.services, adfs-senate.email and office365-onedrive.com.
Historical Whois records archived by DomainTools show they were registered last year behind WhoisGuard, the Panama-based privacy service. Now, of course, the Whois records are all redacted due to GDPR.
Smith said that Microsoft believes intended targets besides the Senate also include the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute, two conservative think-tanks.
The company believes, though it did not show evidence, that the domains were created by the group it calls “Strontium”.
Strontium is also known as “Fancy Bear”, among other names. It’s believed to be backed by the GRU, Russia’s intelligence agency.
It’s the same group alleged members of which Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted as part of his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
“We have now used this approach 12 times in two years to shut down 84 fake websites associated with this group,” Smith said in his blog post.
He added that Microsoft does not know whether the domains have been used in an attack yet.

Tech giants gunning for AlpNames over new gTLD “abuse”

A small group of large technology companies including Microsoft and Facebook have demanded that ICANN Compliance take a closer look at AlpNames, the budget registrar regularly singled out as a spammers’ favorite.
The ad hoc coalition, calling itself the Independent Compliance Working Party, wrote to ICANN last week to ask why the organization is not making better use of statistical data to bring compliance actions against the small number of companies that see the most abuse.
AlpNames, the Gibraltar-based registrar under common ownership with new gTLD portfolio registry Famous Four Media, is specifically singled out in the group’s letter.
The letter, sourcing the August 2017 Statistical Analysis of DNS Abuse in gTLDs (pdf), says there “is a clear problem with one particular contracted party”.
AlpNames was the registrar behind over half of the new gTLD domains blacklisted by SpamHaus over the study period, for example, the letter states.
The tiny territory of Gibraltar also frequently ranks unusually highly on abuse lists due to AlpNames presence there, the letter and report say.
The ICWP letter also says that the four gTLDs .win, .loan, .top, and .link were used by over three quarters of abusive domains over the SADAG study period.
The letter calls the abuse rates “troublesome” and says:

We are alarmed at the levels of DNS abuse among a few contracted parties, and would appreciate further information about how ICANN Compliance is using available data to proactively address the abusive activity amongst this subset of contracted parties in order to improve the situation before it further deteriorates.

It goes on to wonder whether high levels of unaddressed abuse could amount to violations of new gTLD Registry Agreements and Registrar Accreditation Agreements, and to ask whether there any barriers to ICANN Compliance pursuing breach claims against such potential violations.
The ICWP comprises Adobe, DomainTools, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft and Time Warner. It’s represented by Fabricio Vayra of Perkins Coie.
Other than the letter (pdf), the Independent Compliance Working Party does not appear to have any web presence, and a spokesperson has not yet responded to DI’s request for more information.
The SADAG report also singled out Chinese registrar Nanjing Imperiosus Technology Co, aka DomainersChoice.com, as having particularly egregious levels of abuse, but noted that this abuse disappeared after ICANN terminated its RAA last year.
AlpNames has not to date had any public breach notices issued against it, but this is certainly not the first time it’s been singled out for public censure.
In November last year, ICANN’s Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT) named it in a report that claimed: “Certain registries and registrars appear to either positively encourage or at the very least willfully ignore DNS abuse.”
AlpNames seems to have been used often by abusers due to its bargain-basement, often sub-$1 prices — making disposable domains more cost effective — and its tool that allowed up to 2,000 domains to be registered simultaneously.
If not actively soliciting abusive behavior, these factors certainly don’t make abuse any more difficult.
But will ICANN Compliance take action in response to the criticism leveled by CCT and now ICWP?
The main problem with the ICWP letter, and the SADAG report it is based upon, is that the data it uses is now rather old.
The SADAG report sourced abuse databases only up to January 2017, a time when AlpNames’ total gTLD domains under management was at its peak of around three million names.
Since then, the company has been hemorrhaging DUM, losing hundreds of thousands of domains every month. At the end of November 2017, the most recent data compiled by DI shows that it was down to around 838,000 domains.
It’s quite possible that AlpNames’ customer base is no longer the den of abuse it once was, whether due to natural attrition or a proactive purge of bad actors.
A month ago, in a press release connected with a $5.4 million buy-out of an co-founder, AlpNames chairman Iain Roache said he has a “10-year strategic plan” to turn AlpNames into a “Tier-1” registrar and “bring the competition to the incumbents”.

Google beats Microsoft to .docs

Google and Microsoft seem to have settled their contention set for the .docs new gTLD, with Google emerging the victor.
Microsoft withdrew its application for .docs this week.
It’s not clear how the deal was made, but Google is known to have participated in private auctions for other strings.
Google Docs is of course Google’s office document service.
Microsoft also has a Docs service, a collaboration with Facebook at Docs.com, but it seems to have been in beta since April 2010 and, by the looks of the site, isn’t what you’d call a success.

Microsoft dumps .live gTLD bid

Microsoft has abandoned its application for the .live new gTLD, leaving the erstwhile dot-brand in the hands of either Donuts or Google.
I found this quite surprising initially, as “Live” has been a core, cross-platform brand for the company, covering services such as Windows Live, Xbox Live and Office Live. The company also owns live.com.
But it recent years the brand has started to be phased out.
While Xbox Live is still a thing, Windows Live was closed down in April 2013 and Office Live seems to have suffered a similar fate in 2012, after the new gTLD application phase ended.
The withdrawal means that the .live contention set now only comprises Google’s Charleston Road Registry and a Donuts subsidiary. It’s likely headed to ICANN auction.
Unlike Microsoft, both remaining applicants propose open-registration spaces.

.nokia — a dot-brand without a brand?

Will .nokia be the next withdrawal from the new gTLD program?
It seems possible, if reports about the death of the Nokia brand are to be believed.
The news blog Nokia Power User reported yesterday that Nokia the company will be renamed Microsoft Mobile following the close of the $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft this Friday.
The blog, which may live to regret its own choice of brand, quoted from a memo from the company to business partners, reading:

Please note that upon the close of the transaction between Microsoft and Nokia, the name of Nokia Corporation/Nokia Oyj will change to Microsoft Mobile Oy. Microsoft Mobile Oy is the legal entity name that should be used for VAT IDs and for the issuance of invoices.

However, in a blog post confirming the April 25 close date, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith did not mention a rebranding.
The domain name nokia.com will live for up to a year, he said:

While the original deal did not address the management of online assets, our two companies have agreed that Microsoft will manage the nokia.com domain and social media sites for the benefit of both companies and our customers for up to a year.

What does that mean for the .nokia gTLD application?
According to the ICANN web site, Nokia is currently “in contracting” for the dot-brand.
It would not be unprecedented if it were to withdraw its application, however. Back in February 2013, the American insurance company AIG withdrew its bid for .chartis after a rebranding.