DomainIncite

ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee has accused ICANN of being aggressive, intimidating and insensitive by demanding attendees at next month’s public meeting in the Netherlands sign a far-reaching legal waiver. In a remarkable submission to the ICANN board of directors, ALAC says the waiver, which basically amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card …

Another of UNR’s portfolio auction winners has emerged. This time it’s .link, UNR’s low-cost volume play, and the buyer appears to be a veteran domain investor named Yonatan Belousov. ICANN records for .link were updated today to name a Maltese company called Nova Registry, an individual named Emanuel Debono, and …

ICANN’s board of directors has approved a huge batch of its own meeting minutes, covering the period from July 15 last year to March 10 this year, raising questions about its commitment to timely transparency. The board approved the minutes of its last 14 full-board meetings in one huge batch …

The far-right propaganda site The Daily Stormer has lost yet another domain name, after the Chinese ccTLD registry deleted dailystormer.cn. The Daily Stormer was among the sites the suspect in this weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo reportedly cited as sources of his radicalization to a violent white-supremacist ideology. Whois records …

Registries and registrars are not shutting up shop as fast as ICANN expected, according to CEO Göran Marby. According to his latest report (pdf) to his board, the number of accredited registrars and contracted registries is substantially ahead of what had been predicted in the current budget, meaning over a …

ICANN’s board of directors addressed a number of existential threats at its latest workshop, including the perception that it’s simply “not getting things done.” Chair Maarten Botterman disclosed the discussions, which took place at the end of April, in a blog post Friday. He described how the board broke up …

BestTLD is planning to introduce a trademark-blocking service covering its single new gTLD, .best. The company has asked ICANN for permission to launch what it calls the Best Protection service, which would provide domain blocks in lieu of defensive registrations in .best. The service is similar to Donuts’ Domain Protected …

The industry newcomer run mainly by veterans, Dot Hip Hop said today it will slash the price of .hiphop domains by 80% in an effort to reinvigorate the languishing gTLD. That appears to mean a wholesale fee reduction from $100 to $20 a year. The price cut will be married …

Three gTLDs are set to lose the trademark protection coverage at the end of the month, following their sale from Donuts to Public Interest Registry. As noted by corporate registrar Com Laude recently, .charity, .gives and .foundation will no longer fall under Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List service as of …

Tucows has become the latest domain name company to confirm it’s experiencing the post-pandemic blues, and said that it plans to revitalize the Tucows brand. Reporting basically flat-to-down domain numbers on Thursday night, the company said that it plans to “more closely connect the Tucows parent and the registrar brands” …

The internet could be fragmented and made less secure by the proliferation of blockchain-based naming systems, according to a recent position statement from ICANN’s chief technology officer. The report, “Challenges with Alternative Name Systems” (pdf) worries aloud about systems such as Namecoin, Ethereum Naming Service, Unstoppable Domains, and Handshake. It …

ICANN has issued another breach notice against the registry for .gdn, which seems to be suffering technical problems and isn’t up-to-date on its bills. Navigation-Information Systems seems to have experienced about 36 hours of Whois/RDDS downtime starting from April 22, and is past due with its quarterly ICANN fees, according …

ICANN has issued breach-of-contract notices to two small registrars, potentially reducing the number of accredited registrars in two countries to just one. It’s sent notices to Tecnologia, Desarrollo Y Mercado S de RL de CV, one of two accredited registrars based in Honduras, and to Innovadeus, one of only two …

It’s looking rather like Top Level Design has been outed as one of the winners of UNR’s April 2021 gTLD auction. ICANN records have started to show that the company has taken over the contract for .tattoo, which was one of the 23 contracts UNR said it sold off as …

Neustar is having a bummer of a year for getting involved in major political scandals. First, its execs were linked to allegations of an attempt to show Donald Trump was involved in “collusion” with Russia, and now it’s found itself in the middle of a corruption slash child sex abuse …

ICANN is likely to put SSAD, the proposed system for handling requests for private Whois data, on the back-burner in favor of a simplified, and far less expensive, temporary fix. But now ICANN is warning that even the temporary fix might be problematic, potentially delaying unrelated work on the next …