Four more gTLDs in emergency measures

ICANN has thrown four more gTLDs into the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, presumably as a prelude to terminating their registry’s contracts in a few weeks.

Asia Green IT System’s .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) are all going EBERO, meaning Nominet will take over their operation on ICANN’s behalf.

Not that they need much operation, given that all four, which all connect in some way to Iran and Iranian culture, were unlaunched and dormant, with no third-party registrations.

The four TLDs, along with AGIT’s .nowruz, which went into EBERO last week, had been running on CoCCA’s back-end, but it sounds rather like the registry forgot to pay its bills, causing CoCCA to disable its services.

That led to functions such as Whois going offline, triggering a breach of the ICANN Registry Agreement. A day of Whois downtime in one week gives ICANN grounds to get Nominet involved and move towards termination.

A breach notice issued a couple weeks ago gave AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk termination. That escalation now appears inevitable.

AGIT almost got to run .islam and .halal, but had its applications rejected after protests from governments of Muslim-majority country. Somehow, .shia did not receive the same outcry.

ICANN takes over gTLD after Whois failures

ICANN has swooped to take over operation of a new gTLD after it missed its strict thresholds for Whois availability.

.nowruz, originally operated by Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, is now in the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, meaning its essential functions will be carried out by Nominet.

The gTLD is the Latinized version of the word for the Persian new year holiday. It has barely a dozen domains under management and is the only one of AgitSys’s five gTLDs with any registrations.

The company’s other gTLDs — .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) — were also all found to have breached their registry agreements, but as they have no third-party domains where was no need for the EBERO, ICANN said.

The takeover follows a rapidly issued notice last week, in which ICANN Compliance accused AgitSys of a range of breaches of contract.

It seems AGIT went into breach with ICANN after its back-end provider, CoCCA, terminated its contract after a “breach” earlier this year. CoCCA said it had been turning off services ever since the contract ended.

.nowruz becomes the third gTLD from the 2012 round to go into emergency measures, the others being .desi and .wed, which went EBERO seven years ago.

ICANN said it planned to auction off .wed in 2021, but nothing has come of that plan yet.

Two seats up for grabs on Nominet board

The .uk registry, Nominet, has opened up its call for nominations for its 2024 non-executive director elections.

There are two seats up for grabs this year, currently occupied by Simon Blackler of Krystal Hosting and Ashley La Bolle of Tucows, both of whom were originally elected in 2021 and are eligible for reelection if they choose to stand again.

Blackler, you may recall, was the instigator of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which resulted in a boardroom bloodbath three years ago.

The seats represent half of the member-elected NEDs on Nominet’s board.

Non-members are eligible for nomination but only members may nominate and vote. Votes are weighted so the members with the most domains under management get the most votes, albeit with a cap to avoid capture by the largest players.

The deadline for nominations is July 7, and the vote takes place in September. Elections have historically reliably highlighted divisions in the .uk community.

Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle

Nominet plans to lay off as many as 70 employees to cut costs, and is preparing for a .uk price increase, after years of dwindling domain registrations and the loss of a major government contract.

CEO Paul Fletcher told members yesterday that it won’t be providing the UK government with its Protective DNS recursive DNS service, PDNS, after its contract ends later this year. He implied that the government has selected a cheaper competitor to replace it, without giving details.

The deal was with the UK National Cyber Security Centre, and saw Nominet resolve half a trillion DNS queries a year for central government and other public services.

Nominet had been banking on this “cyber” business to bolster revenue in the face of “static or reduced demand for domains”, but the contract loss means some serious belt-tightening is in order, Fletcher indicated.

In its last financial year, Nominet said its cyber business had revenue of £12.6 million but had a loss of £2.4 million

“The changes that we are proposing to give us a sustainable cost base mean that up to 70 of our current roles could be made redundant,” he told members in an email. “While this would be partially offset by some redeployment opportunities, our overall headcount will reduce.”

He added that members should expect the price of .uk domains to increase in future, without giving a timetable.

“Our pricing will remain at current level of £3.90 until at least the end of the year, extending the freeze in place since 2021,” he wrote, but added that lower volume means “prices cannot be held at the level set in January 2020 indefinitely.”

Nominet had 10,688,932 .uk domains under management at the end of January, down from 11,045,559 a year earlier (a loss of almost a thousand domains a day) and its 2019 peak of 13,348,378.

Fletcher also delivered the news that one of its longest-serving staffers, registry managing director Eleanor Bradley, will leave the company later this year.

Finally, he said the company has successfully challenged a default court judgment (pdf) ordering it to repay a member’s subscription fees, a ruling that had been put forward as proof that Nominet has been breaking the law by charging membership fees for the last quarter-century.

Fletcher said the judgment came because Nominet had no idea it had been sued, adding: “On 31 January, we successfully applied to have the default judgment set aside in the County Court, having made every effort to avoid unnecessary, costly and time-consuming court proceedings. This ruling, which the claimant is appealing, allows us to defend the original claim.”

The lawsuit came as part of a campaign operated at WeightedVoting.uk that seeks to prove Nominet’s membership and voting structure is illegal.

Police .uk domain takedowns dive in 2023

The number of .uk domain names taken down as a result of requests from law enforcement shrank substantially last year, according to the latest stats from Nominet.

The registry said today that it suspended 1,193 domains in the 12 months to October 31, down from 2,106 in the previous period. It’s a record low since Nominet started tracking the data, for the second year in a row.

As usual, alleged intellectual property violations were the biggest cause of action. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit had 717 names taken down, with the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau suspending 321 and the Financial Conduct Authority 116.

While police takedowns were low, domains suspended by Nominet’s proactive Domain Watch anti-phishing technology were up about 20%, from 5,005 to 5,911. Nominet said this is because the tech, which flags possible phishing domains for human review at point of registration, is getting better.

The number of domains suspended because they appeared on threat feeds doubled, from 1,108 in the 2022 period to 2,230 last year, the company said.

Cybersquatting cases in .uk have also been declining, Nominet reported earlier this month.

While correlation does not equal causation, it might be worth noting that .uk registrations overall have been on the decline for some time. There were 10.68 million .uk domains at the end of January, down from 11.04 million a year earlier.

UK gov takes its lead from ICANN on DNS abuse

The UK government has set out how it intends to regulate UK-related top-level domain registries, and it’s taken its lead mostly from existing ICANN policies.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said last year that it was to activate the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that allow it to seize control of TLDs such as .uk, .london, .scot, .wales and .cymru, should those registries fail to tackle abuse in future.

It ran a public consultation that attracted a few dozen responses, but has seemingly decided to stick to its original definitions of abuse and cybersquatting, which were cooked up with .uk registry Nominet and others and closely align to industry norms.

DSIT plans to define abuse in the same five categories as ICANN does — phishing, pharming, botnets, malware and vector spam (spam that is used to serve up the first four types of attack) — in its response to the consultation, published yesterday (pdf).

But it’s stronger on child sexual abuse material than ICANN. While registries and registrars have developed a “Framework to Address Abuse” that says they “should” take down domains publishing CSAM, ICANN itself has no contractual prohibitions on such content.

DSIT said it will require UK-related registries to have “adequate policies and procedures” to combat CSAM in their zones. The definition of CSAM follows existing UK law in being broader than elsewhere in the world, including artworks such as cartoons and manga where no real children are harmed.

DSIT said it will define cybersquatting as “the pre-emptive, bad faith registration of trade marks as domain names by third parties who do not possess rights in such names”. The definition omits the “and is being used in bad faith” terminology used in ICANN’s UDRP. DSIT’s definition includes typosquatting.

In response to the new document, Nominet tweeted:

The response highlights that Government recognises the work registries already do to support law enforcement agencies prevent the registration of domains to carry out illegal activity and "expect the existing voluntary arrangements to be used as the first port of call".

— Nominet (@Nominet) February 23, 2024

DSIT said it will draft its regulations “over the coming months”.

UK cybersquatting complaints hit record low

There were fewer cybersquatting complaints filed against .uk domain holders in 2023 than in any other year since Nominet started reporting its annual stats, according to the latest annual Nominet DRS report.

There were just 511 complaints filed last year, down from 568 in 2022, according to the latest report. That’s the lowest number for at least the last 14 years Nominet has been reporting its annual DRS stats. The highest number was 728, in 2015.

Just 48% of cases resulted in a domain being transferred to the complainant (compare to the 82% WIPO reported for its UDRP cases in 2023), up from 43% in 2022, Nominet said.

The number of disputed domains was 680, down from 745 in 2022, but the number of domains in .uk complained about rocketed from 26 to 122, the second-highest level since Nominet opened the second level for direct registrations a decade ago.

The number of disputed .co.uk domains was down from 686 in 2022 to 538 in 2023.

The decline in cybersquatting complaints come as .uk as a whole continues to shrink. The second and third levels combined lost a net 366,778 domains in 2023, ending December at 10,732,479 domains, according to Nominet stats.

Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services

Nominet has opened a public consultation on its plans to modernize the .uk domain registry, which will involve increased standardization around international norms and turning off some older services.

It’s an extensive consultation — 37 proposals and 92 questions spread over more than 50 pages — aimed mainly at the registrars that will have to update their systems to integrate with the new registry. But registrants will also be affected.

The plans would see changes to Nominet’s underlying registry platform that would alter how renewals, proxy registrations, grace periods and transfers between registrants and registrars are handled, and the retirement of the current Whois system, among many other items.

Nominet reckons its proposals will help it save money on ongoing maintenance and software licensing as well as eventually simplifying things for its member registrars.

The company currently runs two registry platforms in parallel: the old UK registry and the newer EPP registry, which is based on the latest technical standards and compliant with ICANN requirements.

It runs its gTLDs, such as .wales and .cymru, as well as its dozens of back-end clients, on the newer system. The plan is to shift .uk over to the newer RSP platform too.

The proposal also calls for Nominet to align with ICANN’s plans to stop requiring registrars to operate Whois services a year from now, replacing them with the newer RDAP standard, which provides the same functionality.

Other older, less-used services, such as the Domain Availability Checker, would either be retired or replaced with EPP-based equivalents.

There’s a lot to absorb in the consultation documents, but at first glance it strikes me that large international registrars that already integrate with dozens of registries probably don’t have much to worry about; smaller, .uk-focused registrars with fewer resources may show some resistance due to the amount of development work likely to be required.

But Nominet says that it is taking this into account with its timetable, saying: “If the changes go ahead, we will give considerable advance notice to Registrars to allow time for development activities”.

The consultation is open for the next three months, punctuated by five explanatory webinars.

Nominet to take over .gov.uk

Nominet says it has won a competitive tender process with the UK government and will take over the registry for .gov.uk early next year.

The registry was previously being managed by Jisc, which runs .ac.uk. Nominet was already running its DNS.

The deal refers to the domains in .gov.uk, not to gov.uk, which is a government services portal site.

The .gov.uk space is a bit of a strange one as far as government domains go — rather than a sole source, it has over 180 accredited registrars government agencies can choose from.

Nominet says it plans to take a more visible role in managing and modernizing the .gov.uk namespace.

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.