Domainer AI slop crackdown on the cards in Oz

Startling rule changes have been proposed for Australia’s .au domain, potentially making it much tougher and more expensive to register names to monetize or resell.

If implemented, the proposed new rule “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark” in the .com.au and .net.au namespaces.

The recommendation, one of 10 to come out of a yearlong Policy Advisory Panel review, would remove the part of .au’s eligibility rules that currently acts essentially as a catch-all allowing people to register domains for any purpose.

The change seems to be squarely aimed at making it harder for domain investors to populate the namespaces with large amounts of low-quality monetized domains, particularly now that generative AI has trivialized the practice.

Local registry auDA said its board of directors has approved the panel’s recommendations and will create an implementation plan that will be published for public consultation before coming into effect.

The decision to restrict who can register what domains was the most controversial of the recommendations, with four of the seven-person panel voting in favor of the change, with two votes against and one abstention (who later sided with the minority view).

The panel unanimously voted against the idea of banning domain monetization outright, but said it “reached a different majority view on the use of monetisation to satisfy the allocation rules”.

The panel found that allowing registration purely for monetization “may disproportionately benefit domain investors and weaken trust in the allocation framework”.

The current rule was “viewed either as a legitimate source of flexibility or as a self-fulfilling loophole enabling monetisation”, the panel wrote.

It noted: “The consumer harm identified in submissions was most acute where monetisation was used to achieve allocation. Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it easier to create payper-click websites for this purpose.”

A minority of the panel issued a 10-point rebuttal to the majority view, saying they had failed to identify any harms created by the current rules and that the change could make it harder for the likes of schools or charities to register domains.

The panel attempted to measure how many .au domains are currently in the hands of investors, by assuming that anyone owning more than 50 names was a likely domainer, and found that well over half a million of .au’s 4.4 million domains could be in domainer hands.

It said: “auDA data shows that 3,386 registrants hold more than 50 Domain Name Licences across com.au, net.au and .au direct, out of 1,702,174 registrants in those namespaces. Together, those registrants hold 582,895 domain names.”

The full report of the panel can be read here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: .au, auda

Team Internet still expects over $160 million for domains business

Team Internet is continuing talks to sell off its domain name business and seems confident it could close a deal worth $160 million or more before the end of the year.

The company has been talking all year about disposing of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) division, recently saying it expected to be able to announce a deal “in the first half of Q3”.

With the rough deadline now passed, Team Internet said yesterday:

The strategic review is at an advanced stage, with discussions ongoing with a view to reaching a transaction in the near term, while the Board remains engaged with multiple parties interested in all or parts of the division. The Board reaffirms its expectation of a valuation materially exceeding USD 160 million; any agreed transaction is expected to complete around the year end. There can be no certainty that a transaction will be agreed.

“The deal will happen when we get the right value,” CEO Michael Riedl told analysts yesterday. “We can sell DIS only once, and that is why we are optimizing for price and not for timeline.”

The $!60 million figure is used because it was the company’s market capitalization on the London Stock Exchange when it first announced the strategic review almost a year ago. Today, its market cap is the GBP equivalent of roughly $140 million today.

From Riedl’s commentary, it sounds rather like the company has multiple parties interested in all or parts of DIS, but that selling off one chunk for a high valuation may scupper bids for the remaining chunks.

DIS operates in the registry, registrar and registry services provider parts of the domain industry.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, team internet

Newfold settles Meta cybersquatting lawsuit

Newfold Digital says it has settled a cybersquatting lawsuit with Facebook owner Meta, and will make an undisclosed payment to Meta as a result.

Judging by the registrar’s press release, it’s pretty much bent over for Meta without actually admitting any wrongdoing.

Meta is to get “trusted notifier” status at Newfold following the settlement, meaning it gets a fast-track to take down domains it believes infringe its trademark or are engaging in other nefarious schemes.

The lawsuit was filed in 2021 against New Venture Services, a subsidiary of Newfold, then known as Web.com.

Meta had claimed that NVS was in the business of registering expired domains, at least 78 of which infringed Meta’s trademarks, and then monetizing or trying to flip them.

All the domains at issue in the case will be transferred to Meta, and Newfold said it “recognizes Meta’s legitimate interest in enforcing Meta’s intellectual property rights”.

It further said it is “improving its processes for all DNS abuse and trademark abuse in the domain name aftermarket, including for trademark holders to report infringing domain names to stop abusive registration practices”.

One of the largest registrar groups, Newfold is the holding company for brands including Network Solutions, Register.com, and SnapNames.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, dns abuse, meta, newfold

DropCatch acquires 300 more registrars

Almost half of all ICANN-accredited registrars are now under the control of a single business, after DropCatch.com owner TurnCommerce bought 300 more accreditations.

Numbered shell LLCs named DropCatch.com 1546 LLC through DropCatch.com 1845 LLC were recently approved for Registrar Accreditation Agreements, according to ICANN records.

This brings the total number of registrars operating under the DropCatch brand to over 1,500, or almost 47% of the total ICANN currently advertises as 3,323.

It was almost 10 years ago when DropCatch last upped its registrar count, acquiring 500 accreditations in December 2016.

More registrars means more registry connections and a greater chance to re-registered expired domain names when they drop.

Competitor Newfold Digital, owner of the SnapNames brand, has over 500 accreditations.

Comment Tagged: dropcatch.com, dropcatching, namebright, newfold, turncommerce

Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD

Helsinki has become the third of the world’s capital cities to decide that it doesn’t want to run its city gTLD after all.

The City of Helsinki has notified ICANN that it wants to terminate its registry contract for .helsinki, which it had experimented with but never fully embraced with gusto.

Curiously, the termination notice was filed in May, but the city specifically requested that ICANN not end the contract before the August 12 cut-off date for new gTLD applications.

Presumably, Helsinki was keen that nobody else applied for .helsinki in the current round — if it was still in the DNS root zone, an applicant would have to be mad to apply for it.

Helsinki becomes the third capital, after Budapest and Doha, to terminate their city gTLD contract.

Comment Tagged: city gtlds, helsinki, ICANN, new gTLDs, termination

“Bulletproof” registrar takes a bullet to the head

ICANN has terminated a rogue registrar that claimed it offered “bulletproof” domain registrations services.

Fewmoretaps, which went by the ironic d/b/a Trustname.com, will lose its right to sell gTLD domains names on September 11, having repeatedly failed to chase up abuse reports over many months.

In an ICANN Compliance termination notice, the Org alleged that Trustname dragged its feet when responding to reports of its customers impersonating banks and a government tax agency — phishing in other words.

The Estonia-based registrar had bragged about being “bulletproof” and a “registrar built for businesses in competitive niches that often face false or bad-faith abuse reports.”

Its web site said it would disregard DMCA takedown notices and would only remove domains if it received court order from each of the three jurisdictions in which it operated — the US, Estonia, and Saint Kitts & Nevis.

That would be a tall order for any abuse reporter, but unfortunately for Trustname the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement now requires registrars to take prompt action on valid abuse reports.

It was not doing so, according to ICANN, and the registrar’s promises to come into compliance proved inadequate.

Trustname had received three public breach notices over the last few months, though Compliance had been trying to get it to clean up its act behind the scenes since at least February this year.

Comment Tagged: abuse, compliance, fewmoretaps, ICANN, phishing, termination, trustname

.net prices going up

Verisign is exercising its option to raise the price of a .net domain, capped by contract with ICANN by 10%, starting about six months from now.

The company told the markets yesterday:

On August 27, 2026, VeriSign, Inc. announced an increase to the registry-level wholesale price for new and renewal .net domain names from $10.91 to $12.00, effective March 1, 2027, per its agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

It will be the first .net price increase to go into effect since February 2024.

Under its registry agreement with ICANN, Verisign is allowed to raise its wholesale fee by 10% per year, most of which is high-margin profit.

.net has about 12.4 million domains in its zone file, and the number doesn’t tend to fluctuate much despite regular price increases.

Comment Tagged: .net, verisign

Robles to join ICANN board

ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization has selected Oscar Robles to serve an abridged term on ICANN’s board of directors.

He will serve until the end of ICANN’s public meeting in November 2027, serving the remainder of the term of Alan Barrett, who died recently.

He was selected from a shortlist of two by the ASO’s Address Council under emergency procedures that than the usual rather lengthy election process, the ASO said.

Robles is very active in the industry in the Latin America region, involved in the creation of LACNIC and LACTLD and working for Mexican ccTLD registry NIC Mexico.

His selection is subject to normal ICANN Empowered Community approval, which is usually a formality.

Comment Tagged: aso, ICANN

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle dies

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle has died unexpectedly, according to friends and colleagues paying tribute to his life this week.

La Chapelle served on the ICANN board between 2010 and 2013, at the behest of the Nominating Committee, during a period when directors were navigating ICANN through the tricky dual problems of approving the new gTLD program and the then-controversial .xxx TLD.

Even after his directorship ended, he was a frequent, vocal, eloquent, often flamboyant, and arguably iconic presence at ICANN public meetings.

La Chapelle came from the worlds of technology and diplomacy, representing his native France during the World Summit on the Information Society and sitting for a period as vice-chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

Friends and colleagues on social media variously described him as “thoughtful”, “charming”, “purposeful”, “witty” and “inspirational”, and expressed their shock at his sudden loss.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

Fifty-six orgs get 85% off their gTLD fees

ICANN has revealed the final statistics for its Applicant Support Program, the deal that sees non-profits and others get up to 85% off their $227,000 new gTLD application fees.

The number of qualified, fully confirmed applicants topped out at 56, from 78 submitted applications. Four were withdrawn, three were found ineligible for support, and 15 were “terminated” for failing to pull the final trigger before the August 12 cut-off date.

The major question arising from the final stats is whether ICANN met its ambition of bringing in more applicants from less-developed economies, particularly those in the Global South or indigenous peoples.

Only one application was approved from the Latin America and Caribbean region — which includes every nation in the western hemisphere south of the US-Mexico border. That applicant fit into the “Micro/Small Business From a Less-Developed Economy” category.

That’s the kind of statistic likely to raise eyebrows when ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee meets to dissect the results of the program.

There was also only one approved applicant in the “Indigenous/Tribal People’s Organization” category. That applicant came from the Asia-Pacific region, which could indicate any number of minority ethnic groups in dozens of countries.

Africa fared a little better, with six small businesses and one non-profit getting approved for the discounts. Asia-Pac had a total of 30, split almost evenly between for-profit and non-profit.

North America, a region covering not much more than the USA and Canada, accounted for 14 approved applications, while Europe accounted for four.

The final stats of the ASP can be found here. The full details of the applicants and their strings will come on Reveal Day in October.

2 Comments Tagged: applicant support program, asp, ICANN, new gTLDs