Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS

March saw the lowest number of requests for private Whois data via ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service since the system launched in late 2023.

ICANN’s latest stats show that there were just 91 requests last month, compared to February’s 143 and the previous low, from last November, of 103.

The dip can probably attributed at least in part to the departure of eight companies from the pool of participating registrars.

Notably, Tucows pulled its four accreditations from the service. Four shell registrars belonging to Tracer (Focus IP) also withdrew because their accreditations have been terminated.

Of the 1,307 domain lookups via RDRS in March, also a new low, 19% were for domains at non-participating registrars. That was up slightly from 17% in February and compares to 25% from the service’s launch.

The average time for a request to be approved was 3.3 days, the second-lowest of any monthly reporting period to date. Denials took on average just over a week. Both metrics were well below the lifetime average.

Intellectual property owners and law enforcement are still the largest categories of requestor, together accounting for almost half of requests in March.

Interestingly, UK cops have now submitted more requests for private data than police from any other country, including the US. Law enforcement requests since last October now stand at 30 for the UK and 29 for the US.

Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service pilot.

The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate.

RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed to gather data that will help ICANN decide whether to deploy a more permanent and probably more expensive long-term solution.

The service is essentially a clearinghouse that connects people who want to request private Whois data with the registrars that manage domains of interest.

Tucows said in a blog post:

Given that the RDRS Standing Committee has enough data to complete its report, as well as the customer experience challenges and data privacy concerns we’ve outlined above, Tucows Domains has decided to end our participation in the RDRS.

The move makes Tucows the highest-profile registrar to pull out of the service to date. Across its various brands (such as Ascio, Enom, EPAG, and OpenSRS) it has around 10 million domains under management.

As of the end of January, RDRS had 94 registrars on board, covering 60% of all registered gTLD domains.

Tucows said it will continue to offer its TACO service, which also allows entities such as intellectual property interests to request private Whois data but charges requesters at least $3,000 a year, which it calls a “cost recovery fee”.

The TACO fee can be waived for “single-use and non-commercial requestors”, Tucows noted. It has updated its terms accordingly.

Largest back-end switch EVER as GoDaddy loses deal

It’s going to be the largest ever migration of a single TLD between back-end registry service providers, but it was announced without fanfare late last week.

On page four of Tucows CEO Elliot Noss’s prepared fourth-quarter remarks to analysts last week, he revealed the company has beaten GoDaddy to take over the contract to run India’s .in ccTLD:

Tucows Domains was recently selected to be the technical services provider for the .IN country code domain, operated by the National Internet Exchange of India. Our teams are closely collaborating and we are establishing a dedicated team in India to support this initiative

Noss said that the migration involves “approximately 4 million domains” and will take place “later this year”.

While NIXI does not publish its registration numbers, Verisign’s Domain Name industry Brief put .in at 4.1 million names at the end of 2024.

Even accounting for upwards rounding by Noss, 4 million names would make the migration the largest in the history of the DNS.

The current record was set in 2018, when Afilias (now Identity Digital) took over Australia’s .au from Neustar (now GoDaddy. There were 3.1 million names in .au at that time.

When Neustar/GoDaddy took over .in from Afilias/Identity Digital in 2019, it was reportedly because it had bid $0.70 per domain, undercutting the incumbent’s offer of $1.10

But, while the deal is surely worth many millions (maybe $10 million over five years if we guess at a $0.50 bid) to Tucows’ top line, it may not be especially profitable.

Noss said in his remarks to analysts: “The pricing and margin contribution for this piece of business is typical of a large, high volume customer.”

But a demonstrable track record of handling large migrations often comes up in registry RFPs, so the .in deal puts Tucows in a strong position in future contract opportunities.

.my global relaunch starts slowly despite cheapo prices

Malaysia’s .my ccTLD has so far failed to attract the hoped-for thousands of new registrations since it relaunched to a global audience a few months ago, according to registry statistics.

MYNIC puts the total number of .my domains, including third-levels under the likes of .com.my and .biz.my, at 313,588 at the end of August, barely 3,500 above the end of May number.

Second-level domains directly under .my grew by about 3,000 over the same period to end August at 149,273.

June was when .my was due to go to general availability with scrapped local presence restrictions and a worldwide registrar channel under partnership with Internet Naming Co and Tucows.

Previously, .my domains were only available to Malaysia-based entities. Third-level domains continue to be available only to Malaysians.

MYNIC told the local Malaysian press in April, before the global launch was announced, that it hoped to hit the 400,000-domains mark by the end of the year. Its best monthly number so far was about 341,000, back in June 2018.

There’s not a great deal of retail registrar coverage outside of Asia right now, judging by the registry’s web site, but those registrars actually selling it are selling it cheap — around the $2 mark for the first year at Spaceship and Namecheap.

Tucows reports 2023 results

Tucows reported a domains business that was slightly stronger in the fourth quarter, as the company’s overall revenue grew by over 10%.

The registrar said its Tucows Domains unit grew by 2.6% at $61.8 million in the period, compared to Q4 2022. Gross profit was up 2.5% at $18.9 million and adjusted EBITDA was $10.8 million, up 2.1%.

For the full year, Domains brought in revenue down slightly at $242.1 million from $243.2 million in 2022. Gross profit was down from $78.2 million to $66.7 million and adjusted EBITDA was down to $42.6 million from $44.8 million in 2022.

CEO Elliot Noss said that he expects EBITDA for the domains business in 2024 to be $43 million.

Tucows’ domains under management was up at bit at the end of December, with 24.56 million names compared to 24.54 million at the end of Q3 and 24.39 million at the end of 2022.

Domains represents about 31% of the company’s overall business, with its Ting internet access services and Wavelo telecoms software unit making up the rest.

The company’s total revenue for Q4 was flat sequentially at $86.9 million, up from $78 million in the year-ago period. Full-year revenue was $339.3 million, up from $321.1 million in 2022.

Tucows and GoDaddy see weakness in big-ticket aftermarket sales

Two of the industry’s largest registrars saw weakness in their first-quarter revenues which they attributed largely to a lack of high-priced secondary market sales.

This lumpier and less-predictable side of the market saw Tucows overall domains revenue down 4% in the period, while GoDaddy saw its “core platform” revenue down a million bucks or 0.2%.

GoDaddy said a 5% increase in domains revenue was “offset by tough compares for our aftermarket business as well as the continued uneven flow of large transactions.”

Tucows said it has “experienced a weaker aftermarket for domain sales, most notably at the higher end of the price range”.

GoDaddy’s core services revenue was down to $698 million from $699.6 million a year ago. Overall revenue was $1.036 billion, up 3.3%. Its net income was down 30% at $47.4 million.

Tucows’ overall revenue was down 0.8% at $80.4 million, with a net loss of $19.1 million compared to a loss of $3 million a year ago.

Registrars CAN charge for Whois, ICANN grudgingly admits

ICANN is powerless to prevent registrars from charging for access to non-public Whois data, the Org has reluctantly admitted.

In a recent advisory, ICANN said it is “concerned” that registrars including Tucows have been charging fees to process requests for data that would otherwise be redacted in the free public Whois.

But it said there’s nothing in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, specifically the Temporary Specification governing Whois in the post-GDPR world, that bans such services:

While the RAA explicitly requires access to public registration data directory services to be provided free of charge, the Temporary Specification does not specifically address the issue of whether or not a registrar may charge a fee for considering requests for access to redacted registration data.

So basic Whois results, with all the juicy info redacted, has to be free, but registrars can bill organizations who ask for the veil to be lifted. ICANN wrote:

ICANN org is concerned that registrars’ imposition of fees for consideration of requests for access to nonpublic gTLD registration data may pose an access barrier. Access to registration data serves the public interest and contributes to the security and stability of the Internet

The advisory calls out Tucows’ Tiered Access Compliance and Operations system, TACO, as the primary example of a registrar charging for data, but notes that others are too.

Not long after the advisory was published, Tucows posted an article in which it explained that the fees are necessary to cover the cost of the “thousands” of automated requests it has received in the last four years.

Charging fees for compliance with other forms of legal process is not uncommon in the industry, and the vast majority of requests for registration data (approximately 90%) continue to come from commercial litigation interests and relate to suspected intellectual property infringement.

Facebook, now Meta, was at first, and may still well be, a frequent bulk filer.

Tucows said that it “frequently” waives its fees upon request for “single-use requestors and private parties”.

New new gTLD registry in town as Rostam buys UNR

UNR, the former Uniregistry, has emerged under new ownership, new leadership, and with another new name, apparently finalizing Frank Schilling’s piecemeal exit from the domain name industry.

The nine gTLD contracts remaining with UNR following its fire-sale auction 18 months ago are now owned by Internet Naming Company, which like UNR is based in Grand Cayman.

The new company, which appears to be a continuation of UNR yet promising a “clean slate”, is owned and run by Shayan Rostam, who was UNR’s chief growth officer and previously worked for XYZ.com and Intercap.

INC’s portfolio comprises .click, .country, .help, .forum, .hiv, .love, .property, .sexy, and the unlaunched .trust, which together have over 350,000 registered domains.

Registry-recommended retail pricing varies wildly between TLDs, from the .com-competitive, such as .click at $9.99, to the wallet-busting, such as .sexy at $2,999 and .forum at $1,199.

INC is also offering consulting, auction and management services for other TLDs, including dot-brands.

The emergence of INC means we now know where all 23 of the gTLDs UNR auctioned off last year ended up. XYZ.com wound up with 10, with GoDaddy, Top Level Design, Nova Registry and Dot Hip Hop all grabbing one or two each.

UNR sold its registrar business to GoDaddy and its registry back-end business to Tucows (which is supporting INC’s portfolio) last year, giving INC the ability to talk about going “back to basics”, unencumbered by any conflicts of interest.

The new company is using inaming.co for its web site. The individual TLDs’ sites still use UNR landing pages.

Stop me if you’ve heard this…

The collective noun for wildebeest is “an implausibility”.

In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re ever confronted by a large group of these majestic bovine quadrupeds, that’s how you should describe what you see.

An implausibility of wildebeest.

I tell you this not because it’s relevant to anything else that appears in this article, but because a series of unfortunate and unavoidable circumstances have kept me offline for the last few weeks, and you may find this round-up piece tells you lots of things you already know.

If that’s the case for you, I can only apologize, with the caveat that you probably didn’t know about the wildebeest thing, so at least this post has provided some value.

Let’s start with ICANN, shall we?

My ICANN announcements feed contains 20 unread articles this morning, and as far as I can tell from a cursory glance over the headlines, the Org has done almost nothing of consequence recently.

It’s mostly outreach-this, engagement-that, review-the-other. If official announcements were any guide, ICANN would look like an entity far more concerned with promoting and promulgating its own increasingly debatable legitimacy, rather than doing the stuff it was originally set up to do.

Like new gTLDs, for example…

While ICANN continues to fart around with its working groups and consultations and Dantean layers of bureaucracy, the blockchain/crypto/web3 crowd are continuing to bolster their efforts to eat the Org’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Most notably, blockchain-based alt-root naming services including Unstoppable have launched the Web3 Domain Alliance, which, even if it misses its goals, promises to make the next new gTLD round an even bigger litigation clusterfunge than the last.

The alliance intends to among other things “advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.”

In other words, if some well-financed crypto bro creates .example on some obscure blockchain root and gets a little bit of traction, ICANN shouldn’t be allowed to create .example on the authoritative consensus root.

This has the potential to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a parking ticket hearing and I take some comfort from the fact that I’ll most likely be long dead before the lawsuits from the next new gTLD round have all played out.

The Web3 Domain Alliance is promising imminent pledges of support from “web2” companies, and it will be interesting to see if any company in the conventional domain name industry is ready to break ranks with ICANN and sign up.

In actual gTLDs…

Another thing that will likely post-date my death is the launch of the last gTLD from the 2012 application round. Many still lie dormant, but they do still continue to trickle out of the gates.

While I’ve been offline, we’ve witnessed the general availability launch of Google’s .boo and .rsvp — the former criminally missing the increasingly lengthy and bewildering Halloween season and the latter probably a little late for the Christmas party season — while non-profit .kids went GA a couple of days ago.

In the world of ccTLDs…

GoDaddy is formally relaunching .tv, the rights to operate it won in a bidding process earlier this year after incumbent registry Verisign declined to compete.

It’s talking about a “a complete rebrand and marketing makeover”, with a new, very colorful, destination site at TurnOn.tv.

Many years ago, a senior Verisign exec described .tv to me as “better than .com”, and in a world where any shouty teenage pillock can essentially launch their own TV show for the price of an iPhone and broadband connection, that’s probably never been truer.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster isn’t going to let the little matter of an ongoing Russian invasion interfere with its 30th birthday celebrations and the 12th annual UADOM conference.

It’s being held remotely for obvious reasons. It starts tomorrow, runs for two days, and more details can be found here and here.

In other conference news, NamesCon has also announced dates for its 2023 NamesCon Global conference. According to Domain Name Journal, it will return to Austin, Texas, from May 31 to June 3 next year.

DomainPulse, the conference serving the Germanophone region of Europe (albeit in English), has set its 2023 event for February 6 and 7 in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Scoop of the month…

By far the most interesting article I’ve read from the last month came from NameBio’s Michael Sumner, a reverse-exposé of the successful .xyz domain investor who goes by the name “Swetha”.

This area of the industry is not something I spend a lot of time tracking, but I’ll admit whenever I’ve read about this mononymed India-based domainer’s extensive, expensive .xyz sales, I’ve had a degree of skepticism.

It turns out that skepticism was shared by some fellow industry dinosaurs, so Sumner did the legwork, amazingly and ballsily obtaining Swetha’s Afternic login credentials (with her consent) and hand-verifying years of sales data.

He concluded that the sales she’s been reporting on Twitter are legit, and that she’s a pretty damn good domainer, but understandably could not fully disprove the hypothesis that some of her buyers are .xyz registry shills.

Elliot Silver later got a comment from the registry in which it denied any kind of collusion and implied skepticism was the result of sexism and/or racism, rather than the sketchiness sometimes displayed by anonymous Twitter accounts and the registry itself.

Earnings, M&A, IPOs…

• The otherwise-consolidating industry is getting its first IPO in some time, with United-Internet pitching a public markets spin-off of its IONOS group, which includes brands such as Sedo and InternetX, to potential investors. DNW pulled out some of the more interesting facts from its presentation.
• Industry consolidator CentralNic reported a strong Q3, though its growth is no longer dependent on its domain name business.
• Tucows reported modest growth (pdf) for Q3, hindered by flat-to-down results in its domain name business.
• GoDaddy, which no longer breaks out numbers for its domains business, reported a billion-dollar quarter.
• Smaller, faster-growing registrar NameSilo reported turning a loss into a profit in the quarter.
• In M&A, Namespace, owner of EuroDNS, announced it has acquired fellow German registrar Moving Internet.

And finally…

The DNS turned 35. So that’s nice.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 600 unread emails to deal with…

Cancelled misogynist Andrew Tate moves domain to (drumroll)… Epik!

Andrew Tate has become the latest high-profile controversy magnet to move his domain to Epik, at the end of a week that saw him thoroughly “cancelled” over reportedly violently misogynistic speech.

Tate, a former kick-boxer and reality TV contestant who made his money through a large social media following and an online course called Hustler’s University, reportedly told Fox News host Tucker Carlson yesterday:

When they go to cancel you, ladies and gentlemen, it comes hard and fast. You lose your Facebook, then your Instagram, then your Gmail, your Discord, then your website hosting, your domain name, like then your payment processor, and your bank.

Tate reportedly had his accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok deleted this week. He was getting banned so much it briefly became a meme.

The domain name in question appears to be cobratate.com, based on his apparent nickname “Cobra”, and it appears to still be in his possession, although he has changed registrars.

Up until an hour or two ago the name was managed by Tucows, via United-Internet-owned reseller Fasthosts, but the Whois record now shows it’s with Epik.

It’s not clear right now whether he jumped or, as he implied to Fox, was pushed. Tucows tells me it had not received any complaints about the site, had not investigated, and had not asked Tate to leave. I’ve asked United for comment.

Epik has over the last few years become the safe-haven registrar of choice for people and groups who become internet persona non grata, typically those with far-right or violent views, such as Infowars, 8chan, Gab and The Daily Stormer.