DomainIncite

Nominet has named the first six members of UK Registrar Advisory Council, and I think it’s fair to say there’s a definite tilt towards the grassroots/activist end of the ballot. Major registrars Tucows, Markmonitor and Web.com (Newfold Digital) were shunned, as members elected Rex Wickham of TwentyTwentyMedia and Arnaud Franquinet …

A California court has frozen the assets of beleaguered Chinese/American registrar OnlineNic, at the behest of Facebook, which is suing the company for alleged cybersquatting. The judge in the case Friday mostly granted Facebook’s request for a temporary restraining order, banning OnlineNic from transferring money or domains out of the …

Nominet has named its new chair as former BT Openworld CEO Andy Green, who has already laid out a suite of measures — including more blood on the boardroom floor — to address the barrage of criticisms from members who ousted his predecessor earlier this year. Green is a serial …

China’s oldest accredited registrar says it will shut up shop permanently next week after being sued into the ground by Facebook, apparently the first victim of the social media giant’s war against Whois privacy. Facebook sued OnlineNIC in 2019 alleging widespread cybersquatting of its brands. The complaint cited 20 domains …

GoDaddy may not have the raunchy public image it once promoted, but it’s now the official registry for tens of thousands of porn-related domain names. The gTLDs .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex made the move from UNR’s back-end to GoDaddy Registry this week, IANA records show. These almost certainly the …

It’s beginning to feel a little like 2011 again. The Internet Commerce Association today said it will host a Zoom webinar next month to pitch the looming second new gTLD round to prospective applicants. Moderated by Christa Taylor, the panel features domain industry jacks-of-all-trades Jeff Neuman and Jothan Frakes, and …

ICANN’s planned public meeting in Seattle will have no face-to-face component, the board of directors decided yesterday. In a resolution published last night, the board cited the global vaccine inequity and the ongoing difficulties with international travel and visas during the coronavirus pandemic. But it added that it plans to …

Public Interest Registry is planning support for seven more languages in the .org gTLD. The company has asked ICANN for permission to support seven additional internationalized domain name scripts: Croatian, Finnish, Hindi, Italian, Montenegrin, Portuguese, and Japanese. Five of these languages use the Latin script also used in English, but …

SpamHaus has revealed the most-abused TLDs and registrars in its second-quarter report on botnets. The data shows huge growth in abuse at Verisign’s .com and the fast-growing NameSilo, which overtook Namecheap to top the registrar list for the first time. Botnet command-and-control domains using .com grew by 166%, from 1,549 …

New gTLD registry MMX expects to shortly offload most of its portfolio of strings to GoDaddy Registry after receiving ICANN approvals. The company said today that its transfer requests for four of its gTLD contracts have received full ICANN approval. Another 18 have received conditional ICANN approval, and MMX believes …

ICANN said yesterday that is plans to hold a “hybrid” meeting in October with an in-person component. It’s not the Seattle public meeting ICANN 72 — no decision has been made there yet — but rather the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy. APIGA is basically a set of internet governance …

The Cambodian government is reportedly planning to create a new group to oversee its national ccTLD, .kh. According to The Phnom Penh Post, the local telecommunications ministry is considering legislation that would create KH Network Information Centre. KHNIC would be modeled on APNIC and combine domain name and IP address …

A UDRP panel has denied a complaint against .sucks cybersquatter Honey Salt on a technicality, but suggested that aggrieved trademark holders instead sic their lawyers at the .sucks registry itself. The three-person World Intellectual Property Organization panel threw out a complaint about six domains — covestro.sucks, lundbeck.sucks, rockwool.sucks, rockfon.sucks, grodan.sucks, …

Three organizations have emerged to rival EURid for the right to operate the .eu ccTLD. The European Commission has published the list of four eligible applicants — which by law must be non-profits — for the .eu registry contract. One of them is of course EURid, which has been running …

Amazon has started using its controversial dot-brand gTLD, .amazon. Six domains — ads.amazon, alexa.amazon, echo.amazon, kindle.amazon, prime.amazon and primevideo.amazon — appear to have come online in the last month or so and all resolve. Proponents of the dot-brand concept may be mildly disappointed to note that they’re all currently just …

ICANN is pinging the community for feedback on proposed Whois reforms that would change how people request access to private registrant data. The fundamental question is: given everything you know about the proposed System for Standardized Access and Disclosure (SSAD), how likely are you to actually use it? The SSAD …