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Registrars selling .xyz names for pennies

Kevin Murphy, June 1, 2016, Domain Registries

XYZ.com’s campaign to keep its volumes high as .xyz approaches its second anniversary seem to have resulted in basically free registrations.
Uniregistry said yesterday that it has started selling .xyz domains for just $0.01, and NameCheap is offering them for $0.02.
The prices, which apply to first-year registrations, kicked in yesterday and expire at midnight June 3.
Over in China, Xin Net and West.cn are both pricing the domains at a relatively huge CNY 2 ($0.30).
I expect there are similar offers at other registrars too.
West.cn. the largest .xyz registrar, said last week that it is also subsidizing renewals for the month of June, bringing the cost down to $2.73.
The aforementioned registrars have big splashes announcing the offers on their home pages.
XYZ said Friday that it has put aside “several million dollars” to advertise its birthday on registrar storefronts and elsewhere.
Uniregistry said that from June 3 to June 30 the price will be just $0.18.
Uniregistry’s current .xyz volume is measured in the tens of thousands. It’s ranked just behind Go Daddy, which does not appear to be participating in this promotion, by .xyz domains under management.
.xyz went into general availability June 2, 2014.
Since August 2015, not long after its anniversary deletes have been substantially outstripping renewals, but adds have been going nuts.
It has about 2.8 million domains in its zone file right now, two million of which have been added in the last 12 months.
Despite the anniversary hoopla this time around, there was not a big spike in .xyz registrations around its first birthday last year, when it added a fairly normal 50,000 or so domains.

Delinquent top 20 registrar not delinquent after all

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2012, Domain Registrars

China’s largest domain name registrar isn’t shirking its ICANN fees, despite previous allegations to the contrary.
Xin Net, which has over 1.6 million gTLD domains under management, received a breach notice from ICANN last month which stated that the company was $2,000 in arrears with its payments.
The company was given until August 22 to correct the problem or risk losing its accreditation.
But in a subsequent compliance notice ICANN admitted that “due to an error the registrar’s account reflected a delinquent balance”.
The admission was buried deep in the notice and not immediately obvious to anyone browsing ICANN’s compliance pages.
The original notice also alleged a breach of the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy with respect to the domain names rongzhu.net, qsns.net and zuixincn.com, which was not an error.
ICANN posts breach notices to its web site fairly regularly — 84 of them since mid-2008 — and more often than not they allege failure to pay fees in addition to other problems.

ICE domain seizures enter second phase

Kevin Murphy, April 20, 2011, Domain Policy

The US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency seems to be consolidating its portfolio of seized domain names by transferring them to its own registrar account.
Many domains ICE recently seized at the registry level under Operation “In Our Sites” have, as of yesterday, started naming the agency as the official registrant in the Whois database.
ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has collected over 100 domains, most of them .coms, as part of the anti-counterfeiting operation it kicked off with gusto last November.
The domains all allegedly either promoted counterfeit physical goods or offered links to bootleg digital content.
At a technical level, ICE originally assumed control of the domains by instructing registries such as VeriSign, the .com operator, to change the authoritative name servers for each domain to seizedservers.com.
All the domains pointed to that server, which is controlled by ICE, resolve to a web server displaying the same image:
ICE seized domains banner
(The banner, incidentally, appears to have been updated this month. If clicked, it now sends visitors to this anti-piracy public service announcement hosted at YouTube.)
Until this week, the Whois record associated with each domain continued to list the original registrant – a great many of them apparently Chinese – but ICE now seems to be consolidating its portfolio.
As of yesterday, a sizable chunk — but by no means all — of the seized domains have been transferred to Network Solutions and now name ICE as the registrant in their Whois database records.
Rather than simply commandeering the domains, it appears that ICE now “owns” them too.
But ICE has already allowed one of its seizures to expire. The registration for silkscarf-shop.com expired in March, and it no longer points to seizedservers.com or displays the ICE piracy warning.
The domain is now listed in Redemption Period status, meaning it is starting along the road to ultimately dropping and becoming available for registration again.
Interestingly, most of the newly moved domains appear to have been transferred into NetSol from original registrars based in China, such as HiChina, Xin Net and dns.com.cn.
After consulting with a few people more intimately familiar with the grubby innards of the inter-registrar transfer process than I am, I understand that the names could have been moved without the explicit intervention of either registrar, but that it would not be entirely unprecedented if the transfers had been handled manually under the authority of a court order.
If I find out for sure, I’ll provide an update.