ICA baffled by plan to outlaw domaining in India

The Internet Commerce Association isn’t happy about a plan to ban domain investing in India’s .in domain, saying it will “destroy a valuable and thriving secondary market”.

NIXI, the government-overseen ccTLD registry, already has a policy in its Registrar Accreditation Agreement that bans registrars from “squatting, grabbing, hoarding, infringement, auctioning, drop catch or selling of the .IN domain names at a exceptionally higher price than the published MRP”.

The registry says that registrars are using registrants as proxies to get around this rule, and is now proposing to extend the ban from registrars to registrants as well.

It’s the latest in a series of strange, Draconian policy pronouncements from NIXI, which increasingly gives the impression of being ruled by fiat. Last year, it banned people from buying more than two domains at once.

The ICA, which represents the interests of domainers, has responded to the policy proposal with 10 arguments against it, largely designed to shame NIXI for acting against the Indian government’s pro-market stance, suggesting the change may well be illegal, and pointing out it is probably shooting itself in both feet at once, financially speaking.

On that last point, ICA general counsel Zak Muscovitch wrote:

NIXI will potentially face a dramatic loss of revenue as a result of its purported policy change as affected registrants will be compelled to drop their domain names and thereby not remit any renewal fees or fees for new registrations. In effect, NIXI will be going backwards in time by greatly reducing the number of registrations and its associated revenue thereby possibly having to rely upon new government funding for its operations

The number of affected registrations could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. You would be well advised to conduct a study to determine the volume of affected registrations prior to making such a monumental decision. After changing the policy, you will likely no longer be “one of the Fastest Growing Domain in the Asia Pacific”, but rather the opposite.

While NIXI does not regularly publish its numbers, it is believed to have well over three million domains under management. It’s a big ccTLD, but relatively small compared to India’s population of 1.4 billion. The only other country with a comparable population, China, has about 20 million .cn domains.

GoDaddy could lose out as NIXI brings .in in-house

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI wants to become a back-end registry services provider for its own .in and other TLDs, and seems set to push GoDaddy out of its current role as it looks for a company to build its new infrastructure.

The company is looking to expand its current role as .in overseer and take over day-to-day operational management of the EPP registry, DNS, Whois, etc, from its current back-end. That’s been Neustar, now GoDaddy Registry, since 2019.

By the time the transition takes place, it could be the largest TLD migration in history.

NIXI currently says it has over three million domains under management. The previous biggest move was .au from Neustar to Afilias in 2018, at 3.1 million names. The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was for 2.7 million names.

NIXI basically wants a company to come in to design and build a registry system, run it for a year, and then hand over operations, and maybe staff, to NIXI before retreating into a maintenance role for seven years.

The selected provider must be established in India and preference will be given to “companies whose parent / holding company is registered in India having subsidiaries in other developing countries.”

If NIXI already has a preferred provider in mind, it certainly isn’t GoDaddy, judging by this criterion.

“This is as part of future expansion plan / business plan of NIXI,” the tender (pdf), which says several times that NIXI wants to become the back-end for ccTLDs in other developing countries, notes.

After a number of extensions, NIXI’s tender is due to expire next Monday.

India offers dollar regs to celebrate independence

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI has announced a limited-time sub-$1 promo on new .in registrations — INR 75 in local currency — to celebrate the country’s imminent 75th anniversary of independence.

The organization says it has reduced its registry fee to INR 25, and registrars that signed up had to agree to an INR 75 retail price, which works out to about $0.95 for the first year.

The promo runs from August 5 to 22, overlapping with Independence Day, which in India in August 15.

The promo also covers India’s multitude of local-script IDN ccTLDs.

There’s no list of participating registrars on NIXI’s web site, and the availability check appears to be broken, but most of the larger international registrars I checked are not offering sub-$1 prices.

.in back-end GoDaddy is currently selling for a discount, but it’s about $4. Namecheap is selling for $0.95.

In an apparent deviation from earlier controversial policy, NIXI is stating: “There is no limitation on the number of domains which can be booked by a registrant.”

Liberties group appeals NIXI’s “two domains rule” brush-off

The Internet Freedom Foundations, an Indian online rights group, says it is continuing to try to find out why local registry NIXI has implemented a highly weird “two domains” rule.

The rule, which appeared in late December, requires registrars to ask the personal permission of NIXI’s CEO if a registrant wants to register more than two .in domains.

As NIXI acts under the authority of the Indian government, IFF filed a request last month under the country’s Right To Information Act, asking under what authority the rule was imposed and how NIXI reached its decision to impose it.

The terse reply (pdf) simply refers the reader to a clause of the registry-registrar agreement stating that NIXI can roll out new rules at will.

Its February 10 response adds: “Above decision is taken with respect to National Security.”

That’s exactly what NIXI CEO Anil Kumar Jain told DI a month earlier.

Because three or four of IFF’s questions went unanswered, the group says it has appealed the response and requested more transparency.

“Repeating ‘national security’ as a mantra to defeat transparency, even when not probably emerging from the topic of policy formation, is a growing tendency in decision making,” IFF said.

“National security” cited as registry says you have to ask its CEO if you want to register more than TWO domains

India, a country with some 2.2 million ccTLD domains, has implemented perhaps the strangest and most Draconian restrictions on bulk registration of modern times.

The local registry, NIXI, informed its registrars all over the world in late December that they will have to seek formal written permission directly from the CEO if a customer wishes to register more than two .in domains.

Registrars breaking the rules face losing their accreditation, NIXI said.

A terse notice (pdf) published on the registry’s web site, signed by CEO Anil Kumar Jain, reads:

It is decided that a written approval of CEO, NIXI is required if an individual Registrant submit a request for registering more than two domains.

In case a registered accredited company try to book domains more than 100 than also a written approval of CEO, NIXI is required.

In case any Registrar is booking domains violating the above norms NIXI has right to disallow/disconnect the domains booking under that category. A process may be initiated for de-accreditation of such Registrar.

Approval will be given within 24 hours of a request, regardless of weekends or holidays, the notice reads.

Asked for clarification, Jain told DI in an email that the “new procedure is drawn after reviewing national security concerns” and that “NIXI registry is not stopping any domain registration.”

“An individual can book up to 2 domains and a company can book up to 100 domains without permissions,” he wrote. “Permission sought is given within 24 hrs.”

The new rule has registrars scratching their heads, with one describing it as “crazy”, “very vague” and very difficult to enforce.

NIXI uses GoDaddy Registry as its back-end, but GoDaddy does not appear to be playing a role in the implementation of the new policy. A spokesperson said in a statement:

At this time, the responsibilities are on the registrars and it’s a discussion between NIXI and them. As the back-end provider, we work closely with .in on any changes they would like to make at the registry level.

As Net4 goes dark, NIXI says customers won’t lose their expired domains

Indian ccTLD registry NIXI has thrown a life vest to the owners of some 73,000 .in domain names, giving them a way to transfer out of slowly sinking registrar Net 4 India.

NIXI also said that it will not cancel expired domains that registrants have been unable to renew due to Net4’s ongoing problems.

“NIXI has decided not to discontinue the .IN Services for those .IN domain end users whose renewal is due,” the company said in a statement (pdf).

It sounds rather like registrants will be able to renew directly with the registry. They’ll also be able to transfer to a new registrar by emailing NIXI from the address in the Whois or mailing proof of company identity.

Why NIXI has chosen to act now, when Net4’s troubles have been known for almost year, is not clear.

“In the recent days, NIXI was informed that Net 4 India, who is one of the registrars of NIXI for Country code domain “.IN” has some issues in maintaining domains,” its statement says.

Net4’s web site isn’t resolving right now, at least for me, which probably has something to do with it.

The company has been in insolvency proceedings since 2017, a fact ICANN discovered when it started missing payments two years ago, but it was not until mid-2020 that Net4’s customers started complaining en masse about problems renewing and transferring their domains.

ICANN has processed thousands of complaints since then.

The registrar was told last month that ICANN was terminating its accreditation to sell gTLDs. Registrants of names in .com for example should be pretty safe, with their names automatically transferred to a new registrar, should ICANN follow through on its threat.

The termination was challenged in the insolvency court shortly before it would have become effective two weeks ago.

While ICANN does not believe it is subject to the court’s jurisdiction, it has decided to wait for an official ruling on the matter.

Free domains for .in registrants

Registrants of new .in domain names will be offered a free domain in a non-Latin script, the Indian government announced today.

The National Internet Exchange of India said it will offer one free internationalized domain name, along with a free email account in the same script, when they register a .in name before the end of the month.

India has over 100 spoken languages, and NIXI runs 15 IDNs ccTLDs that it says cover the 22 official Indian languages, such as Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati, by far the most IDNs of any nation.

The offer is also available to existing .in registrants who renew their names during January.

The deal is designed to “to stimulate the adoption of भारत (IDN) domain name and proliferation of local language content”, NIXI said.

In 2017, India issued five million Hindi email addresses to government workers.

GoDaddy, PorkBun and Endurance win domain “blocking” court fight

Three large registrar groups last week emerged mostly victorious from a court battle in which a $5.4 billion-a-year consumer goods giant sought to get domains being used in huge scam operations permanently blocked.

Hindustan Unilever, known as HUL, named Endurance, GoDaddy and PorkBun in a lawsuit against unknown scammers who were using cybersquatted domains to rip off Indians who thought they were signing up to become official distributors.

The .in ccTLD registry, NIXI, was also named in the suit. All of the domains in question were .in names.

Among other things, HUL wanted the registrars to “suspend and ensure the continued suspension of and block access to” the fraudulent domains in question, but the judge had a problem with this.

He’d had the domain name lifecycle explained to him and he decided in a June 12 order (pdf) that it was not technically possible for a registrar to permanently suspend a domain, taking into account that the registration will one day expire.

He also defined “block access to” rather narrowly to mean the way ISPs block access to sites at the network level, once again letting the registrar off the hook.

Judge GS Patel of the Bombay High Court wrote:

Any domain name Registrar can always suspend a domain that is registered. But the entire process of registration itself is entirely automated and machine-driven. No domain name registrar can put any domain names on a black list or a block list.

Where he seems to have messed up is by ignoring the role of the registry, where it’s perfectly possible for a domain name to be permanently blocked.

NIXI may not have its hands directly on the technology, but .in’s EPP registry is run by back-end Neustar (now owned by GoDaddy but not directly named in the suit), which like all gTLD registries already has many thousands of names permanently reserved under ICANN’s direction.

Patel also seems to assume that NIXI doesn’t get paid for the domain names its registrar sells. He wrote:

The relief against Defendants Nos. 14 and 15, the dot-IN registry and NIEI [NIXI] at least to the extent of asking that they be ordered to de-register or block access is misdirected. Neither of these is a registrar. Neither of these receives registration consideration. Neither of these registers any domain name. The reliefs against them cannot therefore be granted.

NIXI actually charges INR 350 ($4.60) per second-level .in name per year, of which a reported $0.70 goes to Neustar.

The judge also ruled that the registrars have to hand over contact information for each of the cybersquatters.

He also ordered several banks, apparently used by the scammers, to hand over information in the hope of bringing the culprits to justice.

Neustar completes .in migration

The transfer of India’s suite of ccTLDs from Afilias to Neustar is done.
NIXI, the .in registry, announced today: “The transition of .IN to its new Neustar-backed Registry platform is now complete.”
With 2.2 million names, not counting names in NIXI’s plethora of localized transliterations, .in is the third-largest TLD migration, behind the 3.1 million .au names that made the reverse journey from Neustar to Afilias last year and the 2.7 million .org names that went from Verisign to Afilias in 2003.
The .in migration started yesterday. NIXI had expected up to 48 hours downtime at the registry EPP level, with obviously no DNS downtime.
The name servers for .in and its IDN equivalents currently all simultaneously include Afilias-owned and Neustar-owned servers.
An Afilias lawsuit against the Indian government, which claimed Neustar lacked experience with Indian scripts and attempted to block the transition, appears to have been dropped last week.
Neustar is reportedly charging NIXI $0.70 per transaction, $0.40 less than Afilias had bid to renew its contract. It won the contract after an open bidding process last August.

Despite Afilias lawsuit, Neustar names date for Indian takeaway

Neustar has named the date for the transition of the .in registry away from incumbent Afilias..
It’s due to happen February 28, according to a new web site the company has set up to publicize the handover.
The registry will be down for up to 48 hours, starting from 1830 UTC, February 17, as a result.
There will be no new adds, and registrants won’t be able to update their domains, during the downtime. DNS will not be affected, so domains should still resolve.
Neustar won the back-end contract from .in manager NIXI last year, out from under Afilias, after reportedly undercutting Afilias’ $1.10 per-domain-per-year bid with a $0.70 bid of its own.
Given the 2.2 million domains in .in, that makes the contract worth about $7.7 million over its five-year duration.
The transition appears to be going ahead despite a lawsuit filed by Afilias against the Indian government last August, which sought to block the deal.
According to Neustar, the contract was awarded, regardless, last September.
But the lawsuit seems to be still active, judging by the latest filings published on the Delhi High Court web site, which show no judgement has yet been filed.