Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders

ICANN has terminated the registrar accreditation agreements of two Chinese companies, which appear to be under common ownership, because they didn’t pay their bills.

EJEE Group Beijing and VIP Internet Industry are both losing their contracts, effective later this month. Both have common contact details, apparently run by the same person who had another registrar terminated in 2017.

EJEE does its business at category-killer domain domain.cn, though the registration storefront appears to be broken. VIP Internet’s web site appears to be down entirely.

While both companies have sold thousands of domains in their time, both have had just one or two gTLD domains under management for the last 12 months, according to my records. No registrants will be affected, in other words.

ICANN seems to have been chasing the registrars for their overdue fees since March 2023, over two years ago, according to the termination notices.

Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted

A Chinese clothing company has asked ICANN to delete its dot-brand gTLD, despite the fact that it is being used for web sites and email.

Redstone Haute Couture wants rid of .redstone, which has been in active use for almost a decade.

My database shows that it has about a dozen names, most registered in 2016 and most of which resolve, not redirect, to web sites.

Several have MX records, suggesting they are or were being used for email too.

No reason was given for Redstone’s request. The brand itself doesn’t seem have been retired, though the company is perhaps better known for its product lines such as Giada and Curiel.

The company was using ZDNS as its back-end registry services provider.

Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio

Financial services company Prudential Financial has dumped one of its three dot-brand gTLDs, which it was not using.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its contract to run .pramerica, which, despite the name, provides investment services to the Indian market. The subsidiary uses a .in domain for its web site.

While .pramerica has never had a registered domain in the eight years it’s been active, Prudential has two other gTLDs — .pru and .prudential — which are in active use.

Neither is used as the primary domains for their respective brands — both use exact-match .com names — but both have live corporate sites under domains such as pr.pru and stock.pru.

Prudential’s gTLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end registry.

Four deadbeat registrars get terminated

ICANN has terminated the contracts of four registrars that haven’t paid their accreditation fees in years.

US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology have all been canned, following public breach notices in January.

Judging by the termination notices, the registrars all stopped paying their quarterly fees between 2022 and early 2024. None of them had implemented recent ICANN policies such as RDAP adoption, the notices added.

It’s not a huge problem, as none of the four companies had ever sold a single gTLD domain name, so there are no customers to be affected.

Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

Another VW car dot-brand crashes out

Volkswagen’s patchy commitment to dot-brand gTLDs is in evidence again this week, as the company has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .bentley.

Bentley is one of VW’s luxury car brands, based in the UK. It’s exercised its option to unilaterally terminate its gTLD registry agreement, with no explanation given.

The gTLD had a single resolving domain, which redirected to a .com.

It’s the first dot-brand to terminate this year, thought the notice seems to have been filed with ICANN in December.

VW’s attitude to its original portfolio of dot-brands has been all over the place.

Its .volkswagen, which one might expect to be the flagship, was terminated four years ago, along with its Chinese version, but .seat and .audi each have thousands of active registrations.

Six more gTLDs shown the door, five may be auctioned

There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics.

Despite being contracted for a decade, none of AGIT’s TLDs had ever meaningfully launched. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of registrations.

The registry had stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, bringing it into serious breach of its Registry Agreements. It had also failed to pay its ICANN fees.

According to ICANN correspondence, after it entered into mediation with AGIT last August it came up with a secret term sheet to give the company a way out, but it breached the terms of that deal too.

All five were terminated over the Christmas period, but they could return if ICANN decides to sell them off to the highest bidder.

ICANN told the company it “will conduct an assessment and make its determination whether to transition operation of the .nowruz gTLD to a successor registry operator.”

But they all look like poison chalices. They’re all related in some way to Iran, and could raise cultural or legal sensitivities.

.shia is related to the branch of Islam, .pars is related to the language and culture of Iran and .nowruz is the Persian new year holiday.

.tci, which I can easily imagine being picked up and repurposed by a discount-names portfolio registry, was supposed to be a dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran and همراه. is the brand of its mobile phone subsidiary, meaning something like “companion”.

Neither was technically a Spec 13 dot-brand, which is usually enough to for ICANN to rule out a redelegation.

But even if ICANN decides to sell off these five dead strings to another registry under the Registry Transition Process, there’s no guarantee that will ever actually happen.

Org decided to auction failed gTLD .wed almost five years ago and there’s been no movement on that ever since. Failed .desi is in a similar situation.

.kerrylogistics was a Spec 13, and will not be transitioned, after Hong Kong based delivery company Kerry unilaterally told ICANN it no longer wished to run the TLD.

Kerry has five remaining dot-brands, including .kerryhotels and .kerryproperties, that it does not use but does not seem to want to kill off just yet.

Registrar terminated after ignoring Whois transition

A registrar has lost its right to sell gTLD domains in part due to its failure to migrate from Whois to RDAP.

Spain-based Abansys & Hostytec has had its ICANN registrar contract terminated over a litany of alleged breaches dating back to 2023, and its meager collection of domains will now be given to another registrar.

ICANN said in its termination notice that the company had failed to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol, the successor to Whois that this week became the new industry standard for domain ownership lookups.

The registrar was also past due on its fees, hadn’t given ICANN evidence the was still in good standing, hadn’t had an employee attend compliance training and was not publishing masked contact addresses in Whois results, among other things.

While its accreditation dates back to the noughties, Abansys has never had more than 600 gTLD domains under management and it seems very unlikely that it was making enough money from those domains to cover the cost of compliance.

ICANN said the termination became effective January 26, but it still wants its past-due fees paid.

Separately, Compliance has also sent breach notices to four other registrars — US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology — that cite RDAP failures as an area of non-compliance but appear to be primarily based on non-payment of fees.

All four registrars appear to have got accredited between 2019 and 2021 and stopped paying their fees not long afterwards. None of them has sold a single gTLD domain, ever, and two of their web sites suggest the companies are no longer around.

They’ve all got until February 12 to magically rectify their compliance problems or face execution.

A dot-brand that was actually used is shutting down

It’s been a slow year for self-terminating dot-brand gTLDs, but today we’ve seen our third.

Lipsy, a UK-based women’s fashion retail brand owned by Next, has told ICANN it wants to end its Registry Agreement for .lipsy, which it has operated since 2016.

What’s unusual about this termination is that Lipsy actually had quite a lot of registered domains — at least 133 over the years, of which 132 were still active a month ago.

My records show that all of its domains apart from the registry home page were deleted October 22, the day before the company sent its termination notice to ICANN.

The domains were generally product keywords which pretty much all redirected to next.co.uk or nextdirect.com; Lipsy’s own web site had also redirected to Next’s since 2018.

Almost all of its domains were registered between December 2020 and July 2022. It hasn’t registered any since.

.lipsy was on Verisign’s back-end until May 2023, when it switched to Identity Digital.

ICANN to terminate five new gTLDs

ICANN is set to terminate the registry contracts for five new gTLDs run by an apparent deadbeat registry.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have all been “Escalated to Termination Process” following a July breach notice, according to ICANN’s web site.

The first stage of the termination is mediation, which can be followed by arbitration before the contracts, which were all due to expire next month anyway, finally get torn up.

The escalation was not unexpected. All five gTLDs were migrated to the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program last month after critical systems failed to function within the contractual requirements.

It is believed that the TLDs stopped functioning properly after AGIT failed to pay its back-end provider. It also allegedly failed to pay its ICANN fees.

The gTLDs in question for the most part were not used. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of third-party registrations but the others never launched in the decade AGIT was contracted to run them.

.tci is an interesting case, a planned dot-brand that AGIT had intended to operate on behalf of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, the country’s incumbent telco.