DomainIncite

Nominet has been charging its thousands of members annual subscription fees unlawfully for the last quarter-century, it has been claimed. Ian Mitchell KC, who you may recall was hired by a handful of members to opine that Nominet’s voting system may be illegal, has now delivered a follow-up opinion saying …

ICANN has formally adopted a policy that would enable it to remove ccTLDs from the DNS root when their associated countries cease to exist, raising the possibility of the Soviet Union’s .su being deleted. Last Thursday at ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur, the board of directors rubber-stamped the ccNSO Retirement …

Brazil’s .br ccTLD has topped five million registered domains for the first time. Stats provided by registry NIC.br show that the milestone was passed around September 14. The last million names have been added in just the last few years — .br hit four million in late March 2019 and …

ICANN has added Puerto Rico back on its list of future meeting venues after cancelling this year’s trip to San Juan due to the pandemic. The Org will summon the true believers to the Puerto Rico Convention Center from March 2 to March 7, 2024, for ICANN 79, it announced …

There’s reportedly a push in Ukraine to get registrants of Russian-transliterated TLDs to switch to their matching Ukrainian versions. Ukraine’s .ua offers domains in dozens of second-level domains, many of which correspond to the names of cities, such as kyiv.ua and .kharkiv.ua. But while pretty much everyone in the Anglophone …

Australia’s .au domains has surpassed four million registered names for the first time, boosted by second-level regs. The milestone appears to have been hit in the last 24 hours, with the total count at 4,001,440 right now, according to the registry’s web site. The ccTLD has added just shy of …

Verisign’s own gTLDs .com and .net slowed overall domain industry volume growth in the second quarter, according to its latest Domain Name Industry Brief. June ended with 351.5 million registrations across all TLDs, up 1 million sequentially and 10.4 million year-over-year. Growth would have been slightly better without the drag …

Nominet has recruited Vodafone’s head of finance to be its new CFO. The company announced today that Carolyn Bedford will join on December 1, and will also take an executive director seat on the board. She replaces Ben Hill, who was one of several directors removed from the board in …

Internet fragmentation and the rise of blockchain-based naming systems were firmly on the agenda at ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur today, with two sessions exploring the topic and ICANN’s CTO at one point delivering a brutal gotcha to a lead blockchain developer. Luc van Kampen, head of developer relations at …

ICANN is a non-political organization, but it cannot tolerate the platform of the Russian standing to be the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union. CEO Göran Marby took a fairly bellicose tone in denouncing the platform at two sessions of ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, warning that the election …

The King is dead, long live the Queen! (Too soon?) ICANN announced today that Tripti Sinha will be taking over as chair of the organization’s board of directors this Thursday, with Maarten Botterman taking an unexpectedly early bath. The news was delivered by Botterman this morning during the opening ceremony …

Public Interest Registry has revealed the launch dates for its recently acquired gTLD .giving, and it seems the former registry will also play a prominent role. PIR has told ICANN it will run .giving’s sunrise period from October 13 to December 13. It’s an “end date” sunrise, where domains are …

Nominet’s current non-executive director election may be illegal, according to a legal opinion commissioned by one of the candidates. Candidate Jim Davies, along with fellow former director Angus Hanton, say barrister Iain Mitchell KC has said that elements of Nominet’s voting practices are “clearly unlawful”, and they’ve asked Nominet to …

ICANN came out of fiscal 2022 $24 million ahead of its budget due to lower travel expenses and greater domain sales than expected, but blew $29 million on poor investments, according to financial results published today. The Org ended June having received $150 million, mostly from registries and registrars, which …

CentralNic has made yet another acquisition, this time of a young Israeli online marketing company in a deal worth up to $19 million. The company said it is buying M.A Aporia Ltd for $11.2 million, with the possibility of up to an extra $7.8 million in performance-related payouts by 2024. …

ICANN has published its game plan for rolling out a Whois Disclosure System ahead of next week’s ICANN 75 public meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The Org reckons the system will take nine months to build and will cost up to $3.3 million to develop and run for two years, although …