A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
Israel-based registrar Wix is being blamed for a gory anti-Hamas web site being promoted by Israeli government officials.
A number of recent media reports — notably including this one by usually reliable news wire UPI — have said that Wix is behind the incredibly NSFW web site at hamas.com.
The site is a dark parody of a Hamas fund-raising page, containing disturbing footage of the group’s October 7 atrocities — dead bodies, terrorists taking hostages, shooting dogs and burning homes.
So I imagine Wix would be disturbed to learn it is being credited as the creator of the site, apparently purely because the domain was registered via its registrar and hosted on its hosting service.
“The Israeli software company Wix has created a website to spread anti-Hamas propaganda amid the war in Gaza,” UPI reported, sourcing a GoDaddy Whois lookup that lists Wix as the registrar but shows no registrant information.
A Whois lookup on Wix itself, which should contain information beyond the registry record supplied by GoDaddy, does not reveal any additional information — not even redacted fields — about the registrant.
Hamas usually uses hamas.ps for its web site, but it’s currently down reportedly due to cyber-attacks by pro-Israel hacktivists.
hamas.com has been parked for years by what UPI uncharitably refers to as “cybersquatters”.
Wix.com obtains ICANN accreditation — bad news for Web.com?
Web site building tools provider Wix.com has got itself an ICANN accreditation, potentially bad news for current partner Web.com.
The Nasdaq-listed, Israel-based company popped up on the official registrar list in the last day or so with the IANA ID 3817.
That means it could before long start selling gTLD domains directly from the registries rather than going through its current business partner.
According to its domain services agreement and other online sources, Wix currently acts as a reseller for Network Solutions, a Web.com company.
Its retail prices are therefore, as you might expect, rather above the market average, pretty much in line with NetSol’s.
If it does choose to go solo, it could potentially pass on savings to its customers, or just pocket higher margins on domain sales.
While Wix says it has 110 million users, obviously it has sold nowhere near that number of domains.
Its relationship with NetSol is not lucrative enough for Web.com to count the relationship as a risk factor in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, though Wix is listed as one of just a small handful of competitors.
If Web.com should lose Wix as a reseller, we won’t get to find out what impact that had on revenue; Web.com’s going private in a $2 billion deal.
Disclosure: I’ve had to listen to or skip through repetitive Wix ads on YouTube a dozen times a day for what seems like years, so I’m not naturally predisposed to like this company. Same goes for Grammarly. Grrrr!
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