Dead dot-brands #92 and #93

Two more companies have withdrawn from the new gTLD space, asking ICANN to rip up their dot-brand contracts.

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, an Australian university, has terminated its contract for .rmit, and SwiftCover, an American insurance company, has withdrawn .swiftcover.

SwiftCover next used its gTLD, according to zone file records. Not once.

RMIT had registered a small handful of domains under .rmit, and had been using at least one of them — which wasn’t even a redirect to the uni’s main .au site — as recently as February this year.

But by May the experiment was over, with RMIT filing its ICANN papers.

These are the 92nd and 93rd dot-brand termination notices to be published by ICANN.

This company had every reason to want a dot-brand, but just killed it off

The latest dot-brand to terminate its new gTLD registry contract with ICANN could have been a case study in why dot-brands are a good idea.

Dabur India is 137 years old and makes over a billion dollars a year selling consumer goods — mainly cosmetics and personal care products, but also shady-looking Ayurvedic alternative medicines and supplements — in its home country and beyond, and it had experimented with using its .dabur gTLD over the last six years.

But it’s no longer interested, telling ICANN recently that it wants its Registry Agreement torn up, which ICANN has agreed to.

That’s despite the fact that Dabur appears to be suffering from exactly the kind of problem that dot-brands were supposed to help mitigate.

If you visit its web site at dabur.com today, you’ll be immediately presented with a very prominent pop-up warning you about scammers exploiting the Dabur trademark to grift money out of people who think they’re signing up to be official distributors.

The notice is lengthy but in part reads:

DABUR is only dealing with trade through www.dabur.com and any person claiming themselves to be taking order for the supply of DABUR products via phone/online may be cheating with you. DABUR shall not be responsible for any order placed other than on our official website www.dabur.com

One of the biggest selling points for the dot-brand concept is that customers can be taught to distrust any solicitation purporting to be legit if it does not originate from a domain in the relevant dot-brand.

If the notice on dabur.com is any guide, turns out you can do the same thing with a .com domain.

Dabur had briefly experimented with its gTLD not long after it was delegated. Current zone files show half a dozen .dabur names, but only two seem to resolve or show up in search engines. One redirects to the .com site.

Ironically, the other is doctor.dabur, in which Dabur solicits doctors to sign up to push its Ayurvedic products. Ayurveda is a form of medical quackery popular in South Asia.

Added to the recent self-termination of QVC’s .qvc, the total number of dot-brands to lose their registry contracts is now 91.

Domainers at risk as EnCirca takes over deadbeat registrar’s customer base

Customers of defunct registrar Pheenix risk losing their domains because the company was not properly escrowing its registrant data, according to the registrar taking over their domains.

EnCirca, which is taking over up to 6,000 domains previously registered with Pheenix, says the registrar’s shoddy escrow practices mean some of these domains may not be reunited with their rightful owners.

Pheenix “failed to properly escrow domain ownership information for many of the domains utilizing WHOIS proxy services”, EnCirca recently wrote, adding:

We anticipate that many domains will remain unclaimed due to bounced emails or inoperable proxy services. Locating rightful owners will be problematic since the data escrow is often devoid of any identifying ownership information.

To try to mitigate the problem, EnCirca is offering affected registrants the chance to prove ownership by filling out a form and uploading other evidence, such as Pheenix receipts or bank statements.

EnCirca added that because Pheenix disappeared still owing money to registries, the registries may be forcing renewal or restore fees that will then be passed on registrants.

If your domains were at or near expiration, restoring them could be complex and pricey or impossible.

If you’re affected, you can find information here.

Most or all Pheenix customers are likely to be domain investors. It was a drop-catcher, which once had over 500 dummy registrars in its expansive dropnet, most of which it subsequently de-accredited.

But it went AWOL last May, not responding to ICANN or paying its dues, apparently disappearing from the face of the Earth.

ICANN terminated its accreditation in May this year, and initiated a bulk transfer to EnCirca a couple weeks ago (which it only disclosed this week).

EnCirca has experience handling this kind of problem, which is presumably why ICANN gifted it the bulk transfer. In 2018 it took on the domains 49 of Pheenix’s shell registrars, which it says were suffering from the same escrow problems.

Net4 domains now parked after “fraud” ruling

The primary operating domain names of disgraced registrar Net 4 India are now parked, after the company lost its ICANN accrediation and was hit by a finding of fraud in an insolvency case.

The names net4.com and net4.in, which once hosted its customer-facing retail site, now return parking pages.

It emerged in recent court documents that Net4 paid $14,068 for net4.com in March 2011 via Sedo.

Net4 saw its ICANN termination terminated in May. All of its gTLD domains under management were transferred to PublicDomainRegistry, which also made side deals with registries to accept .tv, .me and .cc domains.

.in registrant were being dealt with by NIXI, the local ccTLD registry.

Net4 had been in insolvency proceedings for a few years before its customers started noticing serious problems renewing and transferring their names, or even contacting customer support.

Now it emerged that the insolvency court in late May found that Net4 had acted “fraudulently” in order to “defraud” its creditors.

The company had defaulted on millions of dollars in loans from the State Bank of India, debts that were subsequently sold to a debt recovery company called Edelweiss, which filed for Net4’s insolvency.

In a lengthy and complex May ruling (pdf), the Delhi insolvency court found that Net4 had transferred its primary operating assets including its domains, trademarks and registrar business to a former subsidiary, Net4 Network, in order to keep them out of the hands of Edelweiss.

Net4 had “fraudulently transferred” the assets in “undervalued and fraudulent transactions” designed to put the assets “beyond the reach of the Creditors so as to defraud the Creditors”, the court ruled.

The court ruled that the resolution professional handling the case is now free to pursue Net4 Network and its director for the money that would have otherwise have been held by Net4 proper.

ICANN to auction off first failed new gTLD

ICANN is planning to auction off .wed, the first new gTLD from the 2012 application round to fail.

The TLD has been running on Nominet’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operator platform since late 2017, when former registry Atgron suffered a critical failure — apparently planned — of its registry services.

After some lawyering, Atgron finally lost its registry contract last October.

Now, ICANN has confirmed that .wed will be the subject of an open Request For Proposals, to find a successor registry operator.

It’s the first time it’s had to roll out its Registry Transition Process mechanism. All previous gTLD terminations were single-registrant dot-brands that were simply quietly removed from the DNS root.

The RFP will basically amount to an auction. Registries will have to pass the usual technical and financial background checks, but ultimately the winner will be selected based on how much they’re willing to pay.

In ICANNese: “The RFP process will identify the highest economic proposal and utilize it as the deciding factor to proceed to evaluation.”

But the money will not stuff ICANN’s overflowing coffers. After it’s covered the costs of running the RFP, any remaining cash will go to Atgron. There’s a non-zero chance the company could make more money by failing than it ever did selling domain names.

It currently has 39 domains under management, the same 39 it’s had since Nominet took over as EBERO, and the successor registry will be expected to grandfather these names. Only 32 of the names appear to be genuine end-user registrations.

Atgron’s business model, which was almost antithetical to the entire business model for domain names, is to blame for its failure.

The company tried to sell domains to marrying couples for $50 a year, on the understanding that the renewal fee after the first two years would be $30,000.

Atgron wanted to actively discourage renewals, in order to free up space for other couples with the same names.

Unsurprisingly, registrars didn’t dig that business model, and only one signed up.

Fortunately, whichever registry takes over from Atgron will be under no obligation to also take over its business model.

ICANN said it expects to publish its RFP “in the coming months” and pick a winner before the end of the year.

Pheenix goes AWOL, gets canned

Drop-catch registrar Pheenix has had its registrar contract terminated by ICANN after apparently going AWOL.

ICANN has been chasing the company for breaches related to Whois and access to registrant data since October 2019, but hasn’t heard a peep out of the outfit for a year.

As I noted when ICANN published its first breach notice last month, ICANN hasn’t been able to connect with Pheenix via email or phone or fax since May 2020.

Since then, it’s also discovered that the company is no longer at the mailing address it has on record.

The registrar has not added any domain names since April 2020. It seems clear it no longer has any interest in doing, or perhaps ability to do, business.

The de-accredited registrar bulk transfer process will now kick in. ICANN will select a registrar to move Pheenix’s 6,000-odd domains to.

Pheenix once specialized in drop-catching, and had over 500 ICANN-accredited registrars to its name. Almost all of those were ditched in November 2017.

PDR wins beauty contest to take over Net4’s stranded customers

PublicDomainRegistry.com, part of the new Newfold Digital registrar group, has been picked to take over thousands of domain names from disgraced and defunct Net 4 India.

ICANN seems to have used the beauty contest method of picking Net4’s successor, saying that PDR was picked in part because it already operates in the region. It’s based in Mumbai.

ICANN expects PDR to start reaching out to its new customers next week with instructions on how to get access to their domains at their new registrar.

It goes without saying that Net4 customers should be wary of possible scams, which sometimes accompany this kind of event.

Customers won’t be charged for the transfers, and they won’t have to deal with transfer authorization codes, ICANN said.

PDR was part of the Endurance group until its recent merger with the Web.com group, which created Newfold.

It’s the second-largest registrar group and undoubtedly a safer set of hands than Net4, which has left thousands of customers struggling to renew, manage and transfer their domains for several months.

The bulk transfer to PDR comes after ICANN terminated Net4’s contract for multiple breaches.

Net4 nightmare almost over as court rules ICANN can shut down chaotic registrar

ICANN is finally moving to shut down Net 4 India’s gTLD domains business, after months of upheaval and thousands of customer complaints.

An Indian insolvency court this week lifted its ban on ICANN terminating Net4’s registrar contract, after ICANN appealed to it with a wealth of evidence showing how critical services such as hospitals and train services were being harmed by registrants being unable to transfer their domains away.

ICANN has now invoked its De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure, which will see Net4’s tens of thousands of gTLD domains transferred to a different, more stable registrar, according to head of compliance Jamie Hedlund.

The Org had terminated Net4’s contract in February after hearing from thousands of customers whose names had ceased to work, expired, or were locked-in to Net4 due to its broken transfers function.

But the Delhi court handling the registrar’s insolvency asked ICANN in March to delay the termination at the behest of the resolution professional attempting to extract as much value as possible from Net4 in service of its creditors.

That order was lifted orally after a hearing on Tuesday, according to ICANN.

Under the DARTP, either the dying registrar picks a successor or ICANN picks one, either from a rotation of pre-approved registrars or by rolling out a full registrar application process.

Given the timing crisis, and Net4’s irresponsible behavior to date, it appears most likely that ICANN will hand-pick a gaining registrar from the pre-qualified pool.

Hedlund blogged that ICANN expects to name Net4’s successor within two weeks, after which the gaining registrar will reach out to registrants to inform them how to proceed.

Registrants will not be charged for the bulk transfer.

Net4 had over 70,000 gTLD domains under management at the end of 2020, but this number has likely decreased in the intervening time.

ccTLDs such as India’s .in will not be covered by the bulk transfer. It will be up to local registry NIXI to minimize disruption for Net4’s .in registrants.

ICANN asks registries to freeze Net 4 India’s expired domains

ICANN has asked all domain registries to exempt from deletion expired names registered via collapsed Indian registrar Net 4 India.

The company has been in receipt of an ICANN termination notice since the end of February, but it’s in insolvency proceedings and ICANN says the insolvency court is preventing it from carrying out the execution.

Net4’s customers have been plagued with problems such as the inability to renew or transfer their domains for well over half a year, and ICANN has issued three public breach notices since December.

ICANN says it has received more than 8,000 complaints related to the registrar — which does not even seem to have a functioning web site any more — since things got real bad last September.

Today, ICANN’s head of compliance Jamie Hedlund blogged:

While we await a final order from the insolvency court, ICANN has requested that all registries not delete expired domain names registered through Net 4 India that registrants have not been able to renew or transfer.

While this may not solve every technical issue experienced by Net4 customers, it should at least prevent them permanently losing their domains, assuming a high level of registry compliance with ICANN’s request.

Registrants won’t be fully safe until ICANN is able to carry out the termination and move Net4’s domains to a stable third-party registrar.

While ICANN disputes whether the Indian insolvency court has jurisdiction over it, it is nevertheless currently complying with its instruction to delay termination until further notice.

Hedlund wrote:

ICANN org is taking actions permitted by its agreements, policies, and law to protect registrants and to facilitate the bulk transfer of the Net 4 India registrations to a functioning registrar that can service its customers. ICANN also is being respectful of the [National Company Law Tribunal’s] processes with this case, which have not yet concluded.

He wrote that the next scheduled hearing of the NCLT is tomorrow, April 27. It appears to have been called due to Hedlund recently impressing upon the court the importance of the crisis.

Net4’s “complete breakdown” is bringing India to a screeching halt, and ICANN could have prevented it

Domains belonging to hospitals, power grids, public transit services, banks, and other critical services have gone offline due to the collapse of a major local registrar whose troubles ICANN has been aware of for years.

Net 4 India, which has been slowly imploding over the last year, saw a number of its name servers stop functioning last week, leading to customers’ web sites and email services ceasing to work.

Affected customers are not only domainers, web developers, mom-n-pop stores, and small businesses. We’re talking about major players in India’s physical infrastructure, some with billions of dollars of annual revenue.

Power Grid Corporation of India, for example, has complained to ICANN that its primary web site, at powergridindia.com, has gone down, and that its email at that domain is no longer working.

That’s a government-owned company that according to Wikipedia takes in $5.4 billion per year and is responsible for transmitting 50% of the electricity generated in India, a nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

“We are facing problems with DNS of Net4India and due to non availability of email service our operations would affect badly,” a Power Grid employee told ICANN, according to papers filed with Net4’s insolvency court at the weekend.

Others to inform ICANN of outages include:

• The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, which with over four million passengers per day is India’s largest mass transit rail network.
• Multi-billion-dollar conglomerate Bharti Group, which has its fingers in pies such as telecoms, insurance and food, said its “email and other essential business services have been rendered defunct”.
• The Punjab National Bank, which had revenue of over $9 billion last year, named eight domains, seven of which were in gTLDs, that were with Net4 but no longer work.
• Global Hospitals India, a private healthcare provider that sees to 18,000 transplant surgeries per year, has seen its .com domain stop working and has been unable to secure an auth code for a transfer out.

I’ve not seen any reports of these internet-based problems spilling over into actual life-threatening issues such as power outages or failures of critical hospital functions, but one can only assume that not having functional email represents a risk of this kind of thing happening.

The customer testimonies cited above were part of a second batch (pdf) sent to the insolvency court handling Net4’s case by ICANN’s head of compliance, Jamie Hedlund, on Sunday.

And those are just a sampling of the over 2,400 complaints about Net4 that ICANN said it received between April 14 and April 16 last week.

Net4’s own web site appears to have been dark for most or all of this month.

And this is all happening as India’s struggle with the coronavirus pandemic hits a low point. Not only have many heavily-populated areas of the country been forced into lockdown in recent days, but the country seems to have spawned its own virus variant, which is raising concerns among scientists worldwide.

A major internet infrastructure crisis couldn’t come at a worse time, but ICANN not only could fix it now but could have prevented it years ago.

ICANN on February 26 told Net4 it would terminate the company’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement, after the company did not get its act together to fix three previous breach notices detailing its customers’ woes, the first of which was issued December 10.

That meant — or should have meant — that after March 13 ICANN would kick off its process of transferring Net4’s domains and customers to a third-party registrar, where none of this downtime nonsense would have occurred.

But the “resolution professional” trying to keep Net4 alive long enough to service its corporate creditors asked the insolvency court to ask ICANN to halt the termination, and the court complied.

Even though neither ICANN nor the court seems to be claiming that the court has any jurisdiction over a California non-profit and an RAA governed by California law, ICANN has nevertheless spent the last five weeks noticeably NOT terminating Net4 and saving its customers as promised.

Hedlund told the court (pdf) at the weekend:

Unfortunately, ICANN currently is not in a position to assist these individuals, businesses and organizations in transferring their domain names from Net 4 to another registrar because ICANN has no access to AuthInfo codes or the technical ability to generate them the way that registry operators, like the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), and registrars, like Net 4, can. Rather, ICANN can only assist these registrants by transitioning all of Net 4’s registrations to a functioning registrar through a bulk transfer in connection with ICANN’s termination of Net 4’s RAA, which ICANN has been prevented from doing as a result of this Hon’ble Tribunal’s Ad Interim Order of 16 March 2021

It’s not at all clear from the record why ICANN’s lawyers are allowing Net4’s customers to suffer — and its own compliance department to turn into a de facto replacement for Net4’s absentee customer service department — to abide by the suggestion of a court they claim has no power over it.

In fact, it’s not even clear why ICANN has been playing softball with Net4 since it first issued a breach notice against the firm in June 2019.

At that time, ICANN threatened to suspend Net4 for going into insolvency proceedings — the RAA gives it the right to do so unilaterally when “proceedings are instituted by or against Registrar under any bankruptcy, insolvency, reorganization or other laws relating to the relief of debtors”.

If it had wanted to, ICANN could have terminated Net4 and transferred its domains to a safe registrar in 2019, a year before its troubles (arguably exacerbated by the pandemic) started to cause serious problems for the registrar’s customers.

But ICANN did not act at that time. Instead, court filings and other documents suggest, it chose to cooperate with Net4 and the resolution professional, allowing Net4 to continue to market itself to new customers as an accredited registrar.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it’s something ICANN didn’t have in June 2019.

But now that we do have that luxury, surely we can say that the Net4 debacle is going to have to go down as one of ICANN’s all-time most humiliating and potentially dangerous failures.