Freenom is “essentially finished as a company”

Freenom is “essentially finished as a company”.

That’s the conclusion of a truly excellent piece of reporting at the MIT Technology Review today, which takes a deep dive into the company’s ccTLD antics over the last couple of decades, particularly regarding Tokelau’s .tk domain.

The article reveals not only that all four of Freenom’s African ccTLDs have severed ties with it (we already knew about two) but that Tokelau has asked .nz operator InternetNZ to help it wrest away control of .tk, the company’s flagship.

Officials in Tokelau, a tiny Pacific island territory with extremely poor and expensive internet infrastructure, say they get very little money from Freenom and are appalled that Tokelau’s reputation has been dragged through the mud by decades of abusive .tk registrations.

Freenom’s business model is to give away domains for free and then monetize them when they expire or, more usually, are suspended for abuse. It’s seen .tk become one of the largest TLDs by volume, with at one point over 40 million names.

The company hasn’t been selling any domains in the five ccTLDs it operated since January and it seems quite likely ICANN will suspend or terminate its gTLD registrar accreditation in the coming days or weeks.

It’s also fighting a cybersquatting lawsuit filed by Facebook owner Meta earlier this year that seeks damages sufficiently large to bankrupt it.

The MIT article is long but meticulously researched and sourced and well worth your time. It’s certainly one of the best pieces of mainstream journalism about the domain industry I’ve read.

Freenom hit by FIFTH ICANN action after litany of screw-ups

Is time up for Freenom? After being sued by Facebook and losing its contracts to operate ccTLDs for at least two countries, now it also has ICANN Compliance to deal with.

Its registrar arm, Netherlands-based OpenTLD, has been hit with a lengthy ICANN breach notice that alleges the company failed to allow its customers to renew and/or transfer their domains, in violation of the registrar contract.

It’s the fifth time OpenTLD has been targeted by Compliance, following breach notices in 2020, 2017 and 2015 and a notice of suspension later in 2015. ICANN says this notice is for the same sorts of failures as in 2020 and 2017.

The latest notice covers a dozen separate cases, probably the largest number in a single breach notice to date. Some of them ICANN has been investigating as far back as January 2022.

The notice says that OpenTLD failed to allow some registrants of expired domains to recover their names under the Expired Registration Recovery Policy and that some registrants were not provided with the AuthInfo codes they need to transfer their domains to other registrars upon request, which registrars have to do under the Transfer Policy.

It goes on to describe a situation where the registrar habitually did not respond to Compliance’s calls, emails or faxes.

OpenTLD apparently has not filed its 2022 Compliance Certificate with ICANN either, which it was supposed to do before January 20 this year.

The company had almost 19,000 gTLD domain names under management at the end of May, down from a 2019 peak of almost 45,000, but it’s probably better known for being Freenom, the registry behind .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq and .tk.

Domains in these five ccTLDs — mostly representing West African nations suffering under military dictatorships or civil war — were offered for free and monetized by the registry upon expiration or suspension.

But Freenom has not offered new regs in these TLD since the start of the year. Its web site blames technical problems, but it’s widely believed to be a result of the cyberquatting lawsuit filed by Facebook owner Meta in late 2022.

Mali and Gabon, of .ml and .ga, have since severed ties with Freenom. It turned out .ga had seven million domains in its zone, most of which presumably belonged to the registry.

OpenTLD has until October 11 to give ICANN evidence that it followed policy with the renewals or transfers of dozens of names domains or risk losing its accreditation.

Verisign wipes free TLDs from the world stats

The number of domain names registered globally dropped by over 25 million in the first quarter, but only because Verisign has stopped tracking .tk and its free sister ccTLDs in its quarterly estimates.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief says that 2021 ended with 341.7 million registrations across all TLDs, substantially fewer that the 367.3 million it reported at the end of the third quarter.

But this is only because Verisign has decided to no longer count the six Pacific and African ccTLDs managed by Freenom, notably .tk, which had contributed 24.7 million names to the Q3 tally.

The report says: “the .tk, .cf, .ga, .gq and .ml ccTLDs have been excluded from all applicable calculations, due to an unexplained change in estimates for the .tk zone size and lack of verification from the registry operator for these TLDs.”

It sounds rather like there’s been another weird fluctuation in .tk’s numbers that threw off the overall trend picture again, and Verisign’s basically said “to hell with it” and decided to exclude Freenom from its reports from now on.

This means the normalized numbers for Q4 2021 — ignoring Freenom in all applicable quarters — are 341.7 million, up 3.3 million or 1.0% sequentially and up 1.6 million or 0.5% year over year, the DNIB states.

The Freenom business model is to give domains away for free, mostly, in the first instance. It makes its money by retaining and monetizing domains that either expire or, frequently, which it suspends for abuse.

.tk domains never get deleted, in other words, so counting them alongside TLDs with the industry-standard business model could give a misleading impression of the global demand for domain names.

It’s not so much that counting spam domains is bad — every TLD has a spam problem to a greater or lesser extent — but the lack of deletions can create faulty assumptions.

It’s also never been clear how Verisign and its third-party researcher, ZookNic, acquires its data on Freenom TLDs. Its .tk figure would often remain static for quarters on end, suggesting the data was only sporadically available.

I also tracked .tk’s published numbers independently for many years, and the last figure I have, from March 2019, is 41.3 million. It’s never been clear to me why the Verisign/ZookNic number has always been so much lower.

Verisign has always flagged up any oddities caused by .tk in its DNIB, and every edition has contained a footnote describing Freenom’s unusual practices.

The latest DNIB (pdf) says that .com had 160 million names, up 1.2 million, and .net had 13.4 million, down about 100,000, compared to Q3.

ccTLDs overall had 127.4 million, up about 700,000, a 0.6% sequential increase.

The ccTLD number was down by 5.3 million, or 4.0%, compared to the end of 2020, but that was due to a 9.4 million-name deletion by China’s .cn, which I noted in the second quarter and which Verisign calls a “registry-implemented zone reduction”.

Ignoring China, ccTLD names were up 4.1 million or 3.8%, the DNIB says.

Verisign only breaks out the top 10 ccTLDs separately, so the removal of .tk means that Australia’s .au is now in the top 10 list in tenth place with 3.4 million at the end of Q4. It will likely move up the ranks in the first quarter due to the release of second-level names, which has sped up its growth rate.

France’s .fr, with 3.9 million names, has now entered the overall top 10 TLDs due to .tk’s removal.

New gTLDs grew by 1.2 million names or 5.1% sequentially, but were down by pretty much the same amount annually, ending 2021 with 24.7 million names.

Domain industry SHRINKS again… except of course it doesn’t

Verisign has published its latest Domain Name Industry Brief, once again showing growth numbers thrown off wildly by a single factor.

The second quarter closed with 367.3 million registrations across all TLDs, down by 2.8 million over the same point last year, the DNIB states.

But the entirety of that decline can be attributed to a single TLD. It’s Tokelau again!

.tk was down by 2.8 million domains compared to the year-ago quarter also. This decline was first recorded by Verisign in the fourth quarter last year, where it had a similarly depressing effect on the overall picture.

The ccTLD is operated by Dutch company Freenom, which gives away most of its domains for free, often on a monthly basis, and monetizes residual traffic whenever a name expires or is suspended for abuse.

It’s quite possible that most of its names are registry-owned, so it’s in Freenom’s discretion to keep hold of its entire inventory or periodically purge its database, which may be what happened in Q4.

It’s debatable, in other words, whether .tk’s numbers is really any reflection or guide on the rest of the domain name industry. To it’s credit, Verisign breaks out the non-.tk numbers separately.

The DNIB reports a rosier quarterly growth comparison — total internet-wide regs were up by 3.8 million names, or 1.0%.

The company’s own .com did well, growing by 2.4 million names to end June at 157 million. Even .net did better than usual, adding a net of a couple hundred thousand names, to 13.6 million.

All the top 10 ccTLDs were flat sequentially after rounding, with the exception of Brazil’s .br, which was up by 200,000 names.

Total ccTLD regs were 157.7 million, up 1.2 million sequentially but down 2.4 million year-over year. Factoring out .tk, the increases were 1.2 million and 400,000 respectively.

The second quarter of last year was a bit of a boom time for many registries due largely to the lockdown bump, which saw businesses in many countries rush to get online to survive pandemic restrictions.

Tokelau can not be blamed for the whopping 8.8 million decline in new gTLD registrations between the Junes, of course.

About six million of the plummet can be blamed on heavily discounted .icu, which saw its first junk drop begin about a year ago, and another two million seem to be attributable to .top.

Quarterly, the picture was a little brighter — Verisign says new gTLDs were up by under 100,000 compared to Q1 at 22.9 million.

Domain industry shrank in Q4, but as usual there’s a big BUT

The worldwide domain name count shrank in the fourth quarter, according to newly released Verisign data, but as usual the numbers were hugely impacted by big swings in just a few TLDs.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), which is mainly compiled from zone file counts, shows that 2020 ended with 366.3 million names, down by 4.4 million or 1.2% compared to the end of the third quarter.

It’s the free and almost-free TLDs that swung the math.

Remarkably, industry wild-card .tk actually shrank during the quarter. This is highly unusual, as the registry’s business model is based on giving out names for free, never deleting domains, and monetizing the traffic to expired or suspended names.

It saw domains down by 2.8 million names over the quarter, from 27.5 million to 24.7 million.

Another big dipper was .icu, which sells cheap (usually under $1) and appeals to speculators largely in China.

While it slipped out of the top 10 TLDs, meaning the DNIB no longer breaks out its numbers, DI’s own zone file counts show its zone decline from 5.3 million to 3.4 million during Q4, a 1.9 million decline.

Notably spammy new gTLD .top, which also costs next to nothing and is popular in China, also had a role to play. Its zone count was down by about 900,000 between September 30 and December 31.

Those three TLDs alone account for a loss of 5.6 million names, far more than the 4.4 million industry-wide quarterly drop calculated by Verisign.

The impact of .icu’s continued spiral downwards is likely to be felt in Q1 2021 also. It’s lost another 2.4 million zone file names since the start of the year.

Verisign said the the universe of ccTLD domains contracted by 1.7 million of 1% during the quarter, ending the year with 158.9 million names.

The .tk shrinkage of course more than accounts for this dip. Without it, ccTLDs would be up by 1.1 million names or 1.1%. The major, top-10 ccTLDs mostly showed six-figure growth, the DNIB reflects.

New gTLDs were down 4.2 million names or 13.8% sequentially, ending the quarter with 26 million.

In addition to the aforementioned .top and .icu, this figure appears to have been affected by six-figure losses in some of the highest-volume, lowest-priced new gTLDs, including .club, .site .work and .vip.

In the main legacy gTLDs, Verisign’s own .com grew by 1.5 million names, from 151.8 million to 150.3 million, during the quarter. Its .net was again flat at 13.4 million. Public Interest Registry’s .org gained a (rounded) 100,000 names, ending the year at 10.3 million.

The annual numbers across the industry for 2020 have better optics. The DNIB shows that domain volume was up by 4.0 million or 1.1% year over year.

That breaks down into a 6.3 million increase in .com, a 1.3 million increase across the ccTLDs, and a 3.3 million decrease in new gTLDs, not all of which can be explained away by factoring out .icu and .top.

Free domains registrar gets FOURTH breach notice

OpenTLD, the company that offers free and at-cost domain names under the Freenom brand, has received its fourth public breach of contract notice from ICANN.

The alleged violation concerns a specific expired domain — tensportslive.net — which was until its expiration last November hosting a Pakistani cricket blog.

ICANN claims OpenTLD failed to hand over copies of expiration notices it sent to the former registrant of the name, which expired November 12, despite repeated requests.

The blogger seems to have been royally screwed over by this situation.

ICANN first started badgering OpenTLD for its records on December 23, presumably alerting the company to the fact that its customer had a problem, when the domain had expired but was still recoverable.

ICANN contacted the registrar four more times about the domain before February 1, when it dropped and was promptly snapped up by DropCatch.com.

The public breach notice (pdf) was published February 27. OpenTLD has apparently since provided ICANN with data, which is being reviewed.

But it’s the fourth time the registrar has found itself in serious trouble with ICANN.

It got a breach notice in March 2015 after failing to file compliance paperwork.

Later that year, ICANN summarily suspended its accreditation — freezing its ability to sell domains — after the Dutch company was found to have been cybersquatting rival registrars including Key-Systems and NetEarth in order to poach business away from them.

That suspension was fought in an unprecedented arbitration case, but ICANN won and suspended the accreditation again that August.

It got another breach notice in 2017 for failing to investigate Whois accuracy complaints, which ICANN refers to in its current complaint.

OpenTLD/Freenom is perhaps best known as the registry for a handful of African ccTLD and Tokelau’s .tk, which is the second-largest TLD after .com by volume of registered domains.

Its business model is to give the names away for free and then monetize them after they expire or are deleted for abuse. In the gTLD space, it says it offers domains at the wholesale cost.

According to SpamHaus, over a third of .tk domains it sees are abusive.

Q3 industry growth driven by .tk, .com and .icu

The domain name industry grew by 5.1 million names in the third quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign.
September ended with 359.8 million names across the board, the DNIB (pdf) shows.
Half of the growth came from Tokelau’s .tk, which is handed out for free by Freenom and is where domains never delete. It grew by 2.6 million names to 25.1 million in the quarter.
Next biggest grower was Verisign’s own .com, which grew by 1.5 million names to end September with an even 144 million. Its red-headed sibling, .net, lost 200,000 names over the same period and ended the quarter on 13.4 million.
Excluding .com and .tk leaves just one million names worth of net growth across the remainder of the industry, which comprises another 1,515 TLDs.
Taiwan’s .tw, which has been going through a bit of a spurt over the last year or so, added 300,000 domains, but .uk, which was a driver in Q2, was flat at 13.3 million.
New gTLDs grew by one million during the quarter, ending at 24 million, according to the DNIB.
That appears to have been driven almost entirely by ShortDot’s cheapo .icu, which has been flying off the shelves in China all year. Zone file records show it added over a million domains in Q3. It currently has 4.2 million names in its zone.
When these domains start to drop, it will likely be on a scale to materially affect the overall industry numbers in future DNIBs.

Emoji domains get a 😟 after broad study

Domain names containing emojis are a security risk and not recommended, according to a pretty comprehensive review by an ICANN study group.
The Country-Code Names Supporting Organization has delivered the results of its 12-person, 18-month Emoji Study Group, which was tasked with looking into the problems emoji domains can cause, review current policy, and talk to ccTLD registries that currently permit emoji domains.
The ESG didn’t have a lot of power, and its recommendations are basically an exercise in can-kicking, but it’s easily the most comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding emoji domains that I’ve ever come across.
It’s 30 pages long, and you can read it here (pdf).
Emojis are currently banned in gTLDs, where ICANN has to approve new Unicode tables before they can be used by registries at the second level, under its internationalized domain name policy, IDNA 2008.
But ccTLDs, which are not contracted with ICANN, have a lot more flexibility. There are 15 ccTLDs — almost all representing small islands or low-penetration African nations — that currently permit emoji domains, the ESG found.
That’s about 6% of Latin-script ccTLDs out there today. These TLDs are .az, .cf, .fm, .je, .ga, .ge, .gg, .gq, .ml, .st, .to, .tk, .uz, .vu, and .ws.
Five of them, including .tk, are run by notorious freebie registry Freenom, but perhaps the best-known is .ws, where major brands such as Budweiser and Coca-Cola have run marketing campaigns in the past.
The main problem with emojis is the potential for confusing similarity, and the ESG report does a pretty good job of enumerating the ways confusability can arise. Take its comparison of multiple applications’ version of the exact same “grinning face” emoji, for example:

If you saw a domain containing one of those in marketing on one platform, would you be able to confidently navigate to the site on another? I doubt I would.
There’s also variations in how registrars handle emojis on their storefronts, the report found. On some you can search with an emoji, on others you’ll need to type out the xn-- prefixed Punycode translation longhand.
In terms of recommendations, the ESG basically just asked ICANN to keep an eye on the situation, to come to a better definition of what an emoji actually is, and to reach out for information to the ccTLDs accepting emojis, which apparently haven’t been keen on opening up so far.
Despite the lack of closure, it’s a pretty good read if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

New gTLDs rebound in Q2

New gTLD registration volumes reversed a long trend of decline in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The DNIB (pdf), published late last week, shows new gTLD domains up by 1.6 million sequentially to 21.8 million at the end of June, a 7.8% increase.
That’s the first time Verisign’s numbers have shown quarterly growth for new gTLDs since December 2016, five quarters of shrinkage ago.
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The best-performing new gTLD across Q2 was .top according to my zone file records, adding about 600,000 names.
.top plays almost exclusively into the sub-$1 Chinese market and is regularly singled out as a spam-friendly zone. SpamHaus currently ranks it as almost 45% “bad”.
Overall, the domain universe saw growth of six million names, or 1.8%, finishing the quarter at 339.8 million names, according to Verisign.
Verisign’s own .com ended Q2 with 135.6 million domains, up from 133.9 million at the end of March.
That’s a sequential increase of 1.7 millions, only 100,000 more than the total net increase from the new gTLD industry.
.net is still suffering, however, flat in the period with 14.1 million names.
ccTLDs saw an increase of 3.5 million names, up 2.4%, to end June at 149.7 million, the DNIB states.
But that’s mainly as a result of free TLD .tk, which never deletes names. Stripping its growth out (Verisign and partner ZookNic evidently have access to .tk data now) total ccTLD growth would only have been 1.9 million names.

Verisign report deletes millions of domains from history

Verisign has dramatically slashed its estimates for the number of domains in existence in its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief reports, two of which were published this week.
The headline number for the end of the fourth quarter is 329.3 million, a 0.7% increase sequentially and a 6.8% increase annually.
But it’s actually a lower number than Verisign reported in its second-quarter report just five months ago, which was 334.6 million.
The big swinger, as you may have guessed if you track this kind of thing, was .tk, the Freenom ccTLD where names are given away for free and then reclaimed and parked by the registry when they are deleted for abuse expire.
It seems a change in the way .tk is counted (or estimated) is the cause of the dip.
Verisign gets its gTLD data for the report from ICANN-published zone files and its ccTLD data from independent researcher Zooknic.
Problem is, Zook hasn’t had up-to-date data on .tk for a couple of years, so every DNIB published since then has been based on its December 2014 numbers.
But with the Q3 report (pdf), Zook revised its .tk estimates down by about six million names.
In earlier reports, the ccTLD was being reported at about 25 million names (exact numbers were not given), but now that’s been slashed to 18.7 million, relegating it to the second-largest ccTLD after China’s .cn, which has 21.1 million.
I’ve asked Freenom to confirm the latest numbers are correct and will update this post if I get a response.
Verisign does not say what caused the decision to scale down .tk’s numbers, but explains what happened like this:

In Q3 2016, Zooknic reported a significant decline in the .tk zone and restated the estimated zone size of .tk for each quarter from Q4 2014 through Q3 2016 using a proprietary methodology. As a result, for comparative purposes of this DNIB to the Q3 2016 DNIB and the Q4 2015 DNIB, Verisign has applied an updated estimate of the total zone size across all TLDs for Q3 2016 of 327.0 million and Q4 2015 of 307.7 million and an updated estimate of the total ccTLD zone size for Q3 2016 of 140.1 million and Q4 2015 of 138.1 million.

Apples-to-apples comparisons in the Q4 report show the ccTLD universe was up to 142.7 million names, a 1.8% sequential increase and up 3.1% on 2015. Excluding .tk, annual growth was 6.9%.
Verisign’s own .com and .net combined grew 1.7% to 142.2 million names at the end of the year, one percentage point smaller than their 2015 growth.
The full Q4 report can be read here (pdf).