Registrar giant created as Web.com merged with Endurance

Clearlake Capital Group, which has taken Endurance International private and recently took a big stake in Web.com, has merged the two registrar stables to create a new company it’s calling Newfold Digital.

By my reckoning, Newfold has probably become the second-largest registrar group by domains under management, with around 16.5 million gTLD names across just its best-known half-dozen brands, leapfrogging Namecheap and Tucows in the registrar league table.

That number’s probably a big understatement. It doesn’t capture ccTLDs and does not take into account that the company now has hundreds of active ICANN accredited registrars, largely due to Web.com’s drop-catching business.

Its best-known registrar brands are Register.com, Network Solutions, Domain.com, BuyDomains, BigRock, PublicDomainRegistry and CrazyDomains. Its BlueHost and HostGator brands are both pretty big deals in web hosting.

Clearlake says Newfold has 6.7 million customers worldwide.

The privatization of Endurance, which sees it delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange, was announced in November and cost Clearlake $3 billion. The value of its Web.com stake, which it acquired last month, was not disclosed.

Siris Capital, which bought Web.com in 2018, continues to have a stake.

Newfold will be led by two Web.com execs — CEO Sharon Rowlands and CFO Christina Clohecy.

The deal follows Web.com’s unsuccessful attempt to buy Webcentral last year.

There’s no word on (presumably inevitable) layoffs as the two companies come together.

auDA car crash continues as director quits over foreign members

auDA director Tim Connell has quit the board over its decision to admit almost a thousand new members from the industry side of the house.
Connell, the only remaining elected “Demand class” director, said he believes auDA will now be controlled by registrars and the new back-end registry, Afilias.
In his resignation letter (pdf), Connell said: “I fear this potentially hands control of auDA over to industry and could ultimately create the situation where the independent governing body is no longer independent.”
The new member influx, which saw the ranks swell from about 320 to over 1,300 in the space of a few weeks, was largely due to three large registrars and the back-end encouraging their staff to sign up for membership.
One registrar, CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks, now apparently employs almost 40% of auDA’s members.
auDA, which seems to have nudged the companies towards this membership drive, is under pressure from the Australian government to grow and diversify its membership.
Chief critic Josh Rowe, himself a former director, has calculated, based on a non-public member list, that most of the new members are based outside of Australia, a fact alluded to by Connell in his letter.
Rowe and his fellow “Grumpies” used last month’s extraordinary auDA meeting to demand that the new membership applications be rejected on the grounds that the new members are not a part of the Australian internet community that auDA is constitutionally bound to serve.
But auDA chair Chris Leptos responded that they are members of the community by virtue of their employment.
Connell’s primary concern appears to be that the swollen member base is now heavily tilted in favor of the supply-side of the community.
He noted that an AUD 12 million marketing fund distributed to registrars in the wake of the migration to cheaper back-end Afilias could be seen as an attempt to bribe the industry to side with the auDA party line.
Grumpies have accused auDA of “cartel-like” behavior in this regard.
At the special meeting two weeks ago, motions to fire three directors including Leptos (over unrelated disagreements) were rejected due to near-unanimous opposition from the Supply-class members, despite an overall majority of voters supporting their removal.
The new members were not eligible to vote at that meeting, so the Supply-class was considerably smaller.
At the same meeting, Connell revealed that his Demand-class directorship had recently come into question due to the fact that he acted as an affiliate of a registrar.
He said he’d rectified that situation, and Leptos seemed happy with that the situation had been resolved.
Despite this, Connell says in his letter that he no longer feels that information he receives as a director is “accurate or complete”, suggesting continued tensions on the board.
For all these reasons, he said he was resigning immediately.
In a statement, auDA thanked Connell for his service and said a replacement will be sought within three months.
I’ve actually lost count of how many auDA directors have quit recently. I’ve reported on at least five, including the last chair, since I started covering the unrest there a little over a year ago.

Two companies “capture” auDA

Membership votes of the Australian ccTLD registry auDA could now essentially be captured by just two companies, potentially including new back-end provider Afilias, according to data from a disgruntled former director.
According to Josh Rowe’s analysis of auDA’s newly swollen members list, 39.2% of auDA’s members are now employees of CrazyDomains owner Dreamscape Networks, after Dreamscape signed up a whopping 527 staffers.
Assuming bloc-voting, Dreamscape would need support from only one of either Afilias (with 12.4% of members) or the registrar Arq Group (formerly Melbourne IT, with 15%) to obtain a simple majority in any member vote, judging by Rowe’s figures.
His analysis, sent out to supporters and forwarded to DI this week, was based on auDA’s official member list, which includes full contact information for each member. He had to crowdfund a couple hundred bucks to obtain the list from auDA.
Rowe told ITWire that in most cases the new members listed their employer’s address as their own.
The names-only list published on auDA’s web site currently stands at 1,345 people by my count, about a thousand more than it contained just a few days ago.
Rowe’s tally chimes roughly with my previous estimate that about 150 Afilias employees had joined auDA. Rowe makes it 166.
auDA had previously publicly thanked the three aforementioned companies, along with the registrar Ventra IP, for helping with the membership drive, which auDA says will help it diversify its membership as per the instructions of the Australian government.
The new members will not have the ability to vote in the auDA extraordinary general meeting, which is due to take place at midnight UTC tonight (1000 Friday morning in Melbourne). Their memberships should be active by the time the annual general meeting rolls around in a few months, however.
Tonight’s meeting will see the 300-odd older members vote on whether to fire auDA’s three independent directors. A fourth motion, to express no confidence in CEO Cameron Boardman, was removed from the agenda by the auDA board.
auDA was forced to called the meeting after Rowe and his allies, dismayed by what they see as policy and transparency missteps, managed to rally the support of more than the threshold 5% of the member base.
That was fewer than 20 people under the smaller membership (though Rowe’s petition obtained 22 signatures). Now it would be around 67 people.
This presumably means that Rowe’s allies — the so-called “Grumpies” — have lost their ability to shake things up in the auDA boardroom in future.
However, it presumably also means that if DreamScape, Afilias or Arq wanted to cause trouble, they could strong-arm their employees into supporting whatever flag they wanted to wave.