Nominet wants to fight shrinkage without self-abuse

Nominet has acknowledged that .uk has been shrinking for some time and wants to do something about it without accidentally inviting hordes of spammers and scammers into its zone.

The registry said this week that it is responding to calls from its registrar members by introducing a new .UK Growth Programme, set to launch June 3.

.uk peaked at 13,348,378 domains in July 2019 (that number includes second and third-level registrations) but it’s lost three million since then, reporting 10,371,270 names at the end of March.

Nominet is throwing money at the problem, saying the new program will offer registrars “either a .UK price promotion or marketing campaign funds”. Public details are scant, but the company said:

The marketing option would be competitive, with campaigns selected on their ROI potential, with caps to ensure a variety of members can take part. The promotions route would offer a discount on new registrations across the .UK family for the first year, during a specific month.

But Nominet acknowledged that discounts often lead to increased abuse and/or reg spikes followed by junk drops, and says it want to design its program to minimize these negate effects. How? The registry didn’t say.

Amazon sells three gTLDs to Identity Digital

Amazon appears to have offloaded three of its dormant gTLDs to Identity Digital, judging by ICANN records.

While no formal notices of registry contract reassignment have yet been posted, elsewhere ICANN shows the official registry for .circle, .got, and .jot is now Jolly Host LLC.

Jolly Host is a new Identity Digital affiliate that appeared last year and already took over the .onl gTLD contract from iRegistry a couple months ago.

.circle, .got and .jot are all greenfield namespaces. Unlaunched, they have no registered names beyond the mandatory nic.example domain. They are unencumbered by legacy dot-brand restrictions, which should make for smoother launches.

Amazon appears to have originally intended .circle to play somehow with its Circle brand of home parental control technology, but the 2012 applications for .got and .jot don’t give much of a description of its plans beyond boilerplate text.

The transfers are likely slightly bad news for Nominet, which is Amazon’s primary back-end registry services provider. Identity Digital runs its own back-end (appropriately, on Amazon’s AWS).

Nominet reveals first DNS tech funding recipients

Nominet has revealed the five organizations set to receive a share of up to half a million dollars of grants to fund their DNS software projects.

The recipients of the “up to £370,000” tranche of funding are all infrastructure plays that provide foundational infrastructure but generally find it difficult to find financial backing.

Nominet said the funded projects, many of which will be very familiar names to those in the industry, are:

• Internet Systems Consortium. The money will be used to improve performance and scalability of the popular BIND 9 name server software.
• OARC . The money will fund development of the Validns zone file validator.
• OpenSSL Foundation. Funding will steer development of the OpenSSL open-source library.
• NLnet Labs. The cash will help fund development of Cascade, a DNSSEC signing package currently in alpha.
• Quad9. The funding will help pay for the operation of the Quad9 recursive DNS service.

Nominet has previously said that its DNS Fund, paid for out of .uk domain sales revenue as part of the registry’s public benefit commitments, will operate in multiple rounds, but dates for subsequent rounds are not yet published.

.pn relaunches — you’ll never guess what they say it means

Two years after Nominet took over the management of the Pitcairn Islands’ ccTLD, .pn, the domain has modernized and is ready to relaunch, with a predictably inventive take on what the two-letter domain could, if you squint, represent.

.pn domains are to go on sale today from 1200 UTC, according to one of the registrars signed up to sell them, repurposed as a global generic along the same lines as .ai, .io, .tv and .co.

But what are the letters PN supposed to represent? Pretty much anything you want, provided it has a connection to cutting-edge technologies such as crypto, AI, or quantum computing.

Registrar EnCirca, which is strongly promoting the relaunch, suggests the following: Prompt Network, Protocol Native, Payment Node, Photonic Network, Peer Network, Private Node, Precision Numerics, Pioneer, and Panem.

(That last one is a reference to the fictional country from the popular Hunger Games books and movies. Some existing .pn domains are used for that purpose already.)

As far as I can tell, none of those backronyms is in common usage, but I guess it’s not impossible one or more could catch on. We seem to be in “professional web” rather than “artificial intelligence” territory here, however.

While .pn has been around since the 1990s, registration was a painful manual process. But since Nominet took over in 2023, the registry infrastructure and policy framework has been modernized.

The ccTLD now operates on an automated EPP platform and has a standard registration lifecycle that incorporates policies such as the UDRP, as well as Nominet quirks such as a prohibition on names that imply sexual violence.

Domains are available at the second level or third (under .co.pn, .org.pn and .net.pn) with no local presence requirements.

For Pitcairn, a British island territory in the Pacific with fewer than 40 (not a typo) inhabitants, the relaunch has the potential to be transformative, due to its tiny size and the relatively high registration fees.

The islands have a GDP of the equivalent of just $127,000, according to Wikipedia, much of which comes from selling postage stamps to overseas collectors.

Nominet is charging $100 a year at the second level and $50 at the third. EnCirca is charging $129 retail. While Pitcairn’s cut is not public, it seems likely only a few thousand names would need to be sold to double the territory’s GDP in a very short space of time.

“Premium pricing keeps speculative bulk registration out and maintains namespace quality,” EnCirca CEO Tom Barrett said.

Pitcairn is probably best-known for being the place where the mutineers from the eighteenth-century “mutiny on the Bounty” incident, made famous by the 1984 Mel Gibson movie, sought refuge with a group of Tahitians. Most residents today are descended from these original settlers.

EnCirca has put together a lengthy (if somewhat sanitized) history of the territory and the ccTLD at about.pn.

Nominet opens $500,000 fund for open source projects

Nominet plans to grant almost half a million dollars worth of funding to DNS-related open source projects.

The .uk registry said it has opened the Nominet DNS Fund, which will make up to £370,000 available to eligible projects in its first year of operation.

In a press release, Nominet explained the need to fund such projects, but the rationale I think can best be encapsulated by this famous xkcd cartoon:

The DNS Fund is intended to thank that broke Nebraskan, assuming their project is DNS-related. Larger projects are also welcome to apply. There is no minimum funding request.

Nominet said that proposals “must benefit the public and respond to core DNS needs”. In addition, all funded source code must be released under a licence approved by the Open Source Initiative or the Free Software Foundation.

A panel of experts from Nominet members, ICANN, Sovereign Tech Agency, Linux Foundation has been assembled to judge the proposals, the first tranche of which must be submitted here by October 26.

Golding challenges McCarthy for Nominet board seat

Nominet has revealed the names of just two candidates who are standing in its non-executive director election this year.

Rob Golding of Astutium is on the ballot again, this time challenging incumbent Kieren McCarthy, who is standing for re-election for a second three-year term.

Golding stood last year and came a very close third place when there were two seats available. McCarthy won his seat in 2022 with a more comfortable margin, but only after a second round of voting.

Voting this year opens September 26 and the winner would take his seat in October at Nominet’s AGM.

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

UK intros global domain takedown law

The UK government has introduced legislation that would give police the power to order registries and registrars outside the country to take down domain names being used for serious crime.

The new Crime and Policing Bill (pdf), published yesterday, is a sprawling piece of proposed legislation, covering everything from mobile phone theft to antisocial behavior.

But it includes a section that would codify the police’s ability to demand domain names and IP addresses to be suspended for the first time.

The law would allow the police to ask a judge for a “domain name suspension order”, applicable for up to a year, where they believe the domain is being used to commit “serious crime”.

That’s defined as “the use of violence” or conduct that “results in substantial financial gain” or that would reasonably be expected to carry a jail sentence of three years or more.

Today, the UK police have voluntary relationships with local companies on takedowns. Nominet suspends many thousands of domains every year, most related to intellectual property crime, on the advice of police.

But according to the explanatory notes provided by the government, the law will not replace these deals. It says:

The government strongly supports these voluntary arrangements, and they will continue to be the first port of call for any activity in this space.

However, most domain name registries and registrars are situated outside of the UK and require a court order before they will action requests. These orders (an IP address suspension order or a domain name suspension order) will therefore primarily be served internationally, to ensure that any threat originating from outside the UK can be effectively tackled.

If overseas registries/registrars declined to enforce the court order, UK police could use “police-to-police cooperation and Mutual Legal Assistance” to get it done, the notes say.

The bill has to follow the usual parliamentary process before it becomes law.

Registries have started shutting down Whois

Nominet seems to have become the first major registry services provider to start to retire Whois across its portfolio, already cutting off service for about 70 top-level domains.

Queries over port 43 to most of Nominet’s former Whois servers are no longer returning responses, and their URLs have been removed from the respective TLDs’ records on the IANA web site.

The move follows the expiration last month of ICANN’s contractual requirements to provide Whois in all gTLDs. Now, registries must use the successor protocol RDAP instead, with Whois optional.

A Nominet spokesperson tells us the shut-off, which affects large dot-brand clients including Amazon, happened after consultation with ICANN and clients on January 29.

TLDs Nominet was supporting under ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program are also affected.

The registry spokesperson said that the gTLDs .broadway, .cymru, .gop, .pharmacy, and .wales are still offering Whois, due to an interoperability issue:

“The sole reason for the retention of these gTLD WHOIS services is for interoperability with the Brand Safety Alliance (BSA) service integration, which does not yet support RDAP,” she said.

The BSA is the GoDaddy-backed project that offers the multi-TLD GlobalBlock trademark-blocking service.

Nominet’s flagship .uk is also still offering Whois, because Nominet discovered that some of its registrars were still using it, rather than EPP, to do domain availability checks.

The fact that a GoDaddy service and some .uk registrars still don’t support RDAP, even after a years-long ICANN transition plan, is perhaps revelatory.

I’ll admit the only reason I noticed Nominet’s Whois coverage was patchy was that I’d neglected to update one of my scripts and it started failing. Apparently I was not alone.

While RDAP can be fairly simple to implement (if I can do it…), actually finding each registry’s RDAP server is a bit more complicated than under the Whois regime.

All gTLD registries were obliged to offer Whois at whois.nic.[tld], and IANA would publish the URLs on its web site, but RDAP URLs are not standardized.

It’s not super obvious, but it seems instead you have to head over to IANA’s “Bootstrap Service” and download a JSON file containing a list of TLDs and their associated base RDAP URLs.

Nominet names directors after tight election

Ashley La Bolle and Rex Wickham have been named Nominet non-executive directors after an election that saw the top three candidates finish with very close numbers.

Nominet said La Bolle, who works for Tucows, and Wickham, who works for 2020Media, were elected after three rounds of votes and took their seats immediately at the company’s AGM yesterday.

La Bolle was an incumbent, having been originally elected three years ago amid one of the most fractious periods in Nominet’s history.

Wickham replaces Simon Blackler, who won his seat in 2021 as lead of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which managed to oust key members of management and board and force Nominet to refocus its business the same year. He did not stand for reelection.

Voting results shared by the company show that Rob Golding of Astutium came a close third in the race, receiving a third-round total of 272,213 votes, compared to Wickham’s 287,794 and La Bolle’s 297,258.

Turnout was 10.6%, the lowest level in the last few years, perhaps indicating a lack of displeasure with Nominet’s current direction.