.ai hits seven figures, raises prices

The .ai ccTLD recently crossed over the one million domain milestone and has raised its already substantial registration fee.

According to a social media post from the Government of Anguilla, .ai went into seven figures January 20.

For comparison, roughly a year earlier, .ai was at about 587,000 names. The growth is strong in this TLD.

The registry — technically the Government of Anguilla but outsourced to Identity Digital — has also raised the wholesale fee for .ai domains by 14.3%, according to TLDPriceChanges.com.

That means an extra 10 bucks a year. But .ai still has a two-year minimum commitment, so the price of a hand-reg has gone up $20.

Anguilla says the domain is now one of its primary sources of income and that the money is being channelled into local infrastructure projects.

Comment Tagged: ai, anguilla, idetnity digital

Typosquatter gets two years in jail

A man who used a typosquatted domain to defraud a man out of $146,000 has been given a two-year jail sentence in Australia.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Indian national Pardeep Pardeep, who was in the country on a student visa and worked as an Uber driver, registered a typo of a local law firm, which the paper did not name.

He then used the domain to email a man who was attempting to buy a house, ultimately tricking him into paying him AUD 209,000, which he then used to buy gold bullion. The victim has been unable to recover his money, the SMH reported.

Pardeep, having spent nine months on remand, will be eligible for parole in June, the paper reported.

Comment Tagged: typosquatting

Epstein low-balled registrants to get his exact-match domain

Dead rapist Jeffrey Epstein tried to secure the .com and .net versions of his name by low-balling the existing registrants over relatively trivial amounts, the latest batch of “Epstein files” published at the weekend.

Epstein had his accountants make an “exploratory offer” of $1,000 for jeffreyepstein.com in July 2013, according to emails between Epstein, his accountant and an SEO specialist.

At the same time, the accountants said they planned to make a $500 offer to the registrant of jeffreyepstein.net, who had offered to transfer the domain for just $850.

I guess you don’t get to be an (alleged) billionaire without screwing over a few little guys.

The newly published files do not show whether Epstein ever successfully secured the .com version, but it seems he did acquire the .net, which was to be used as part of a shady-sounding SEO campaign aimed at restoring his reputation online.

An Archive.org cache shows that the .net domain was listed at HugeDomains for $895 as late as 2013. The released emails show a SEO specialist acquired it on Epstein’s behalf before February 2014.

Epstein was apparently angry that the first 75 pages of Google SERPs for his name contained nothing negative information, including mugshots taken following his arrest on child sex offences.

A reputation management specialist offered a suite of services aimed at reducing his exposure to this unwelcome attention through a variety of standard SEO techniques and dodgy-sounding tactics such as exploiting EU privacy law, creating fictional Jeffrey Epstein characters who would upload food and sports content, and “hacking”.

The .com domain is currently offered at GoDaddy for just shy of $10,000, while the .net redirects to epsteinwiki.com, a wiki devoted to exposing Epstein’s crimes.

Comment Tagged: epstein

Epstein bought “mother” domains for Fergie while serving time

Dead rapist Jeffrey Epstein registered several feminist-themed domain names for former Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson while he was serving time for sex trafficking a minor girl, the latest batch of “Epstein files” reveals.

Newly released emails show that Epstein’s assistant, Story Cowles, registered mothersarmy.com and themothersarmy.com, along with the .org and .net equivalents, using Epstein’s personal credit card, April 27, 2009.

At that time, Epstein was serving a cushy 18-month prison sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution, but reportedly was allowed out of prison to hang out at his lawyer’s office on a work release program.

The Mothers’ Army was a project Ferguson had planned to help women in need around the world, including rape victims. It doesn’t seem to have accomplished much and the company was closed in 2016.

The domains were registered with Network Solutions, published invoices show, and were eventually caught on the drop after Ferguson allowed them to expire. Some are now listed with BIN prices north of $5,000.

Emails show that Ferguson contacted Epstein in August 2011 to attempt to have the domains transferred to her and was told that she’d have to reimburse him the $600 he’d so far spent on registration and renewals.

Ferguson is the ex-wife of the former Prince Andrew. She lost her title Duchess of York last year when Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, was stripped of his titles due to his involvement with Epstein.

Comment Tagged: epstein, fergie

Two former ICANN directors want back in

Gluttons for punishment? ICANN’s At-Large Community has named the first four candidates standing to join the Org’s board of directors, and two of them have form.

Sébastien Bachollet, Justine Chew, Maureen Hilyard and Lito Ibarra have all put themselves forward to replace term-limited León Sánchez, who is due to leave seat 15 of ICANN’s board in October after nine years’ service.

Bachollet and Ibarra are both former ICANN directors. Bachollet served as an At-Large appointee for four years from 2010. Ibarra served six years as a Nominating Committee appointee from 2015.

France-based Bachollet is the former chair of EURALO, the Regional At-Large Organization for Europe, and a former director of Afnic, the French ccTLD registry.

Malaysia-based lawyer Chew has extensive experience both on the At-Large Advisory Committee and the GNSO, as ALAC Liaison, and policy-making groups. She also has sat on the boards of Malaysian non-profits.

Hilyard, from the Cook Islands, is a former ALAC chair who has held senior board or advisory positions with Public Interest Registry and DotAsia and ISOC. The NGO she leads, the Cook Islands Internet Action Group, plans to apply for a new gTLD this year.

Ibarra has been in charge of the El Salvador ccTLD registry for over 30 years and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has sat on the boards of LACNIC and LACTLD.

The five RALOs will get a chance to add their own candidates to the slate next month.

At-Large has a complex structure and its electoral system reflects that, but essentially the nominees were self-selected and confirmed by a committee. The ALAC will vote with a view to announcing the successful candidate before April 22.

Comment Tagged: alac, at-large, board, election, ICANN

Former ICANN director could lose control of ccTLD

The government of Ghana has announced plans to nationalize the .gh ccTLD, taking control from a former ICANN director who has run the registry for over thirty years.

The Minister of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation reportedly said that the government intended to place the ccTLD fully under state control.

Samuel George reportedly said: “It cannot continue to sit in private custody. The state must own it.”

The ccTLD has been run by a company called Network Computer Systems, doing business as Ghana Dot Com (at ghana.com), since 1995, under the control of Nii Quaynor, who was on ICANN’s board of directors in the early noughties.

After a 2008 law called for the nationalization of the registry, the two parties have been engaged in negotiations to ensure the smooth handover of the domain.

ICANN typically does not redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the incumbent, even if the winning party is the local government, but agreement has been difficult to come by due to a dispute over money.

Ghana Dot Com wants 10% of future .gh domain sales to be donated to the local ISOC chapter indefinitely, but the government has resisted, according to documents posted by the company.

It’s not clear from local reporting whether the government and Quaynor, now 81, have made a breakthrough, but the minister is already talking about plans to give away .gh domains to newly registered companies in the nation.

Comment Tagged: .gh, ghana, ghana dot com, redelegation

UK launches “police.ai”, but does it own the domain?

The UK’s increasingly authoritarian government this afternoon announced extensive policing reforms, including what it called “Police.ai”.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood, speaking in Parliament in the last couple of hours, announced a new National Police Service and a substantial ramping up of live facial recognition technology for law enforcement in England and Wales.

“At the same time, we will launch Police.ai, investing a record £115 million in AI and automation to make policing more effective and efficient, stripping admin away to ensure officer time can be devoted to the human factor,” she added.

Police.ai appears to be the brand for a new “National Centre for AI in Policing”. But does the UK government actually own the domain police.ai? It appears not.

The domain NX’s for me, and registry Whois reveals it is registered to blockeddomains@gov.ai — that is, the Government of Anguilla, which still owns the .ai ccTLD even if Identity Digital manages it.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK government could obtain the domain, but it seems that so far it has not.

Announcing a broad, expensive, liberties-threatening, technology-driven program of policing reform while making such a basic branding error looks at face value like a worrying lack of technical nous.

The police press release announcing the project appears to have been yanked, but a Home Office white paper (pdf) goes into more detail about the plan.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, police.ai

Team Internet still in talks to sell off domains unit

Team Internet says negotiations to spin off its domains business are “progressing well” after a difficult 2025.

The company yesterday issued a trading update, saying that its 2025 revenue and profit will come in towards the top end of analysts’ expectations.

Those top-end estimates are for revenue of $541 million and adjusted EBITDA of $43 million. That’s compared to 2024 revenue of $802.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $91.9 million.

Team Internet suffered last year, laying off hundreds, due to changes in Google’s advertising policies that made it harder for the company to monetize its domain portfolio.

It was already exploring exit options before the Google changes hit, but those efforts were resurrected in November. The company said yesterday that “discussions in relation to a disposal of DIS [Domains, Identity and Software] are progressing well”

2 Comments Tagged: acquisition, earnings, team internet

NamesCon returning to Miami in November

NameCon Global will be held again in Miami, Florida, for its 2026 conference, organizers said over the weekend.

The annual two-day conference will return November 11 with the Ice Palace Studios as its venue again.

Organizers said they hope to “expand on the networking aspects of the event with a larger Expo Hall and designated networking spaces”.

Tickets are not yet available and pricing has not been announced.

Comment Tagged: namescon

“Mad Dog” politician registers nazis.us, redirects to Trump admin site

An American Congressional candidate has registered the domain name nazis.us and redirected it to the US Department of Homeland security web site.

Independent candidate Mark Davis, whose Twitter handle is @MarkMadDogDavis, confirmed the move in a tweet, saying the Republican party has gone “full fascist”:

I’m a nobody.
A dad in red Florida.

And I’m the one who bought https://t.co/Z0CG11fDsB
Because the GOP went full fascist
and the democrat establishment still won’t name it.

I’m not a senator.
Don’t have a PAC.
Not a soul in power thought to actually raise hell.

So I did.
And…

— Mark Davis for Congress (@MarkMadDogDavis) January 16, 2026

If you’re wondering about whether that’s a tone befitting a would-be US Congressperson, it’s typical of his Twitter feed, which repeatedly insults his opponents as “MAGA morons” and generally lives in the depths of the same brainless rabbit hole originally tunnelled by Venezuelan president Donald Trump.

The Whois record for the domain show it was registered on January 13 and has “markdavisforcongress.com donate” listed as the registrant. But Davis, perhaps jokingly, had first tried to pass off nazis.us as being a US government registration.

He posted a video of himself typing the domain into his browser, showing the redirect to dhs.gov, perhaps unaware that his browser autocomplete drop-down revealed that nazis.us was in his own GoDaddy control panel.

The context for this stunt is of course the ongoing chaos in some Democrat-run cities, initiated by the Trump administration, which has seen armed, masked, and unaccountable ICE agents swarm the streets looking for non-white people to deport.

It’s perhaps comforting, if bewildering, that nazis.us was until last week still available for registration.

Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy