DomainIncite

“ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.” That’s ICANN’s response to Ukraine, which earlier this week asked for Russia to lose its top-level domains and IP addresses, to help prevent propaganda supporting its invasion …

Namecheap will offer “free anonymous domain registration and free web hosting” to anti-war protest web sites based in Russia or Belarus. The registrar said in a statement today that the move is in response to imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s call for war protests in Russia. The offer modifies …

CENTR, the association of European domain registries, has kicked out the Russian ccTLD operator due to the war in Ukraine. In a brief statement today, the organization said: The CENTR Board is following Russian military actions in Ukraine with concern and strongly condemns the violation of international law and Ukraine’s …

Ukraine has asked ICANN to take down Russia’s top-level domains. Andrii Nabok, the Ukrainian official on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee made the request, asking the Org to “Revoke, permanently or temporarily, the domains .ru, .рф and .su” in a widely circulated email last night. He also asked for DNS root …

Namecheap has banned all Russians from its services in a comprehensive, surprising, and unprecedented expression of solidarity with Ukraine, the invaded country where most of its support staff are based. CEO Richard Kirkendall said yesterday that Namecheap, which has over 14 million domains under management, “will no longer be providing …

Tucows is putting pressure on its outside bankers, lawyers and accountants to come clean about their relationships with Russian oligarchs. In a series of tweets on Saturday, CEO Elliot Noss said he’d emailed these longstanding partners to ask them about their policies with regards with regard oligarchs’ “essentially laundered” money. …

Ukraine’s ccTLD registry has moved its servers out of the country to avoid disruption due to the Russian invasion. Hostmaster said that servers responsible for “the operability of the .ua domain” have been moved to other European countries, seemingly with the assistance of other registry operators. The company’s technical operations …

Like I’m sure a great many of you, I spent much of yesterday listening to the news and doom-scrolling social media in despair, anger and helplessness. War has returned to Europe, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia yesterday invading Ukraine on a flimsy pretext, in an apparent effort to begin to recreate …

The number of cybersquatting complaints, and the number of successful cybersquatting complaints, were down in .uk last year, according to new data from local registry Nominet. Nominet said that its Dispute Resolution Service, which has a monopoly on .uk disputes, handled just 548 cases in 2021, the lowest number in …

Five companies are bidding for the contract to run the back-end for South Africa’s .za domains, which is expected to be awarded shortly. Local ccTLD overseer ZADNA has named ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC), Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium, GoDaddy Registry, The Bean App & GMO Internet Group, and Catalytic Peter …

A Chinese registrar group has been accused by ICANN of shirking its UDRP obligations for the second time this year. ICANN has put Hong Kong-based DomainName Highway on notice that is in breach of its contract for failing to transfer the domain 1ockheedmartin.com to defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The domain …

Costa Rica no longer has any in-country accredited registrars, after ICANN terminated Toglodo for non-payment of fees. ICANN told the company last week that its accreditation is terminated effective February 23. It seems Toglodo owed ICANN thousands of dollars in past-due fees. The Org says had been chasing it for …

GoDaddy Registry is to raise the base price of three of its recent acquired gTLDs and lower the price on three others. The company is telling registrars that the prices of .biz, .club and .design domains are going up later this year, while the prices of .luxe, .abogado and .case …

A lawsuit fighting for control of the .nu ccTLD can go ahead, the Supreme Court of Sweden has ruled. The court confirmed last week that the Government of Niue has standing to sue, despite a lower court ruling in favor of .nu registry IIS’s claims to the contrary two years …

The Internet Freedom Foundations, an Indian online rights group, says it is continuing to try to find out why local registry NIXI has implemented a highly weird “two domains” rule. The rule, which appeared in late December, requires registrars to ask the personal permission of NIXI’s CEO if a registrant …

As the world waits nervously to see whether Russia’s weeks-long troop build-up on the Ukrainian border will result in an invasion, ICANN is embroiled in an infinitely more trivial conflict between the two nations. As well as overseeing domain names, IP addresses and protocol numbers, a decade ago ICANN took …