DomainIncite

Donuts is to be acquired by Ethos Capital, the private equity company that tried and failed to buy .org manager Public Interest Registry a year ago. Donuts tells me that Ethos is to purchase the controlling interest in the company from Abry Partners, which acquired Donuts two years ago. The …

ICANN will be urged to consider taking a stronger position against companies who apply for new gTLDs simply to lose them at auction or immediately flip them to others. A community working group, known as SubPro and tasked with developing rules for the next new gTLD round, delivered its final …

What do you do if you’re the government of a country without a ccTLD, because the rest of the world does not recognize you as a country? Perhaps the strangest solution to this predicament is to ask another country with a semantically meaningful ccTLD of its own if you can …

Registrars will be asked to account for abusive domain names found on their services, under a new ICANN security audit. ICANN says it will soon send requests for information to 153 registrars, asking them to provide documentation showing how they dealt with domains used for distribution of malware or spam. …

ICANN has formally confirmed that its seventieth public meeting will be online-only, disappointing restaurateurs and sex workers in Cancun, Mexico for the second year running. The meeting will also be mercifully shorter, with two days cut from its running time. The new dates are March 22 to March 25. Thankfully, …

A site for American gun enthusiasts has switched registrars, moving its domain to Epik — apparently with the consent of CEO Rob Monster — after GoDaddy turfed it out for allegedly inciting violence. According to a GoDaddy statement at the weekend, the registrar had received complaints about content on AR15.com …

ICANN’s Nominating Committee will be asked to pit two fundamentally opposed principles against each other when they pick three members of the organization’s board of directors this year. Board chair Maarten Botterman has asked NomCom to prioritize continuity — keeping experienced directors in place — while also increasing gender diversity …

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 …

ICANN CEO Göran Marby’s personality came into question when the organization’s board of directors voted to prematurely extend his contract last year, it emerged this evening. Back in October, the board voted to add two years to Marby’s current contract, which had been due to expire May 23, 2022, saying …

The ICANN working group tasked with creating policies for the next round of new gTLDs is wrapping up its work this week, setting up the battle lines for the next phase of the program’s development. Members of the cross-constituency Subsequent Procedures for new gTLDs group, known as SubPro, have until …

The Pacific island nation of Niue is loudly demanding that ICANN hand over control of its ccTLD, .nu, after two decades of bitter argument. The government has taken the highly unusual move of filing a redelegation request with ICANN’s IANA unit publicly, forwarding it to other governments and the media. …

When humanity finally confirms the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, what’s the new gTLD domain name you’d want to have in your portfolio? Why, first.contact, of course. The domain name was registered with premium pricing from Donuts in December, according to registry data published this week, and is currently listed …

Struggling Indian registrar Net 4 India has been hit by its third notice of contract breach by ICANN, in a letter delivered Christmas Eve. Net4 is on ICANN’s naughty list this time due to its alleged violations of ICANN’s transfer and expired domains policies. The breach notice is very similar …

Fuji Xerox has become the latest multi-billion-dollar company to ditch its dot-brand gTLD. The Japanese-American company, a joint venture of Xerox and Fuji, has told ICANN it wants to terminate its registry contract for .fujixerox, and ICANN has indicated its intention to let the string die. The gTLD was not …

EURid suspended about 80,00 domain names on Friday, as the UK’s 11 months of Brexit transition came to an end. All the names were registered to UK-based, non-EU citizens and organizations, which are no longer eligible under registry policy. “On 1 January 2021 we suspended around 80 000 domain names …

Women working at GoDaddy in technology roles on average make a penny more on the dollar than their male counterparts, but their bosses don’t fare nearly as well, according to the company’s latest published diversity data. The market-leading registrar said last week that on average across the company globally, women …