Kevin Ohashi - Entrepreneur I Love Learning New Things.

Siris Capital takes Web.com private.

It’s official: Web.com is now a private company.

Shareholders approved an acquisition by Siris Capital Group yesterday. They got a bit of a bump from when the deal was originally announced at $25.00 per share; all shareholders received $28.00 per share. The deal was about $2 billion including debt.

Web.com owns Network Solutions and Register.com, two high-priced registrars. It also owns SnapNames and a 50% stake in rival expired domain service NameJet. Web.com owns a portfolio of domain names it has captured from the expiry stream as well.

The company has struggled to find its footing of late and was facing investor pressure.

Web.com traded under the symbol WEB on the NASDAQ.

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1. Web.com: WebLock program will be opt-in, not opt-out
2. Domain search progressing, but still not ready for new top level domain names
3. Web.com to go private in $2 billion acquisition

CENTR releases data on how ccTLD managers are treating Whois under GDPR.

The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has had a big impact on the domain name business, particularly with the display of domain ownership information in WHOIS. While the long arm statutes of the law mean registries and registrars around the world must pay attention, European country code managers must be even more careful.

Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), an association for country code domain managers in Europe, published survey results today about how ccTLD managers are handling the law.

This chart shows how the ccTLDs handle collecting data and presenting it in Whois:

There is also a big difference between which data points within the contact types are published in Whois. For example, only 11% of the registries publish an individual registrant’s email address. 47% publish the email address if it’s a corporate registrant.

It’s worth noting that many EU ccTLD managers already had restricted Whois information prior to GDPR in order to conform with local laws.

The report can be downloaded here.

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1. I just fixed Whois and GDPR
2. ICANN files legal action against Tucows registrar over GDPR
3. ICANN appeals German court ruling as it seeks definitive ruling on GDPR and Whois data collection

Atallah moves from senior ICANN role to contracted party Donuts.

New top level domain name company Donuts has named Akram Atallah as its new CEO. The news was first reported on DomainIncite yesterday.

Atallah was President of ICANN’s Global Domains Division where he oversaw much of the new top level domain name program. It was Atallah who urged his former colleague Fadi Chehade to join ICANN as CEO. Chehade later left ICANN and joined Abry Partners, which acquired Donuts last month. Now Chehade had a chance to hire Atallah.

This will be the third CEO of Donuts in the past two years. Founder Paul Stahura stepped down at the beginning of 2017 and was replaced by Bruce Jaffe. Jaffe has a deal-making background. He helped Donuts acquire Rightside and a few other small businesses and facilitated the sale to Abry Partners.

It strikes me that Stahura, Jaffe and Atallah all have very different backgrounds and personalities. This latest change might be a bit jarring for Donuts staff. It will be interesting to see what changes the company makes under private equity ownership with Atallah at the helm.

There might also be a bit of controversy with this hiring given Atallah’s former role overseeing new TLDs at ICANN. There was a lot of pushback when MMX (then Top Level Domain Holdings) hired Peter Dengate-Thrush in 2011. Dengate-Thrush was the former Chairman of ICANN’s board. That hiring was particularly striking because Dengate-Thrush has just pushed through approval of the new TLD program and the application process was just beginning. I’m not sure it will be as big of an issue with Atallah given where the program is in 2018.

Atallah will join Donuts on November 12. That’s after this months ICANN meeting in Barcelona.

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1. Court denies Donuts’ request to delay .web auction
2. Donuts demands $22.5 million for .Web domain name
3. Donuts acquires BudURL, rebrands as BL.INK

Report looks and recent and historical data on domain registrations at the registrar.

Namecheap released a report today with data about its customers and their choice of top level domain names. The report includes data from the past ten years as well as more recent data incorporating new top level domains.

It can be difficult to compare registration data that doesn’t take into consideration the price of domain names; indeed, Namecheap excluded .xyz and Famous Four Media’s domains from some of its calculations.

Here’s what I found interesting:

1. .US was within the top three most-registered country code domains among Namecheaps customers from January 2017-June 2018. That’s not a huge surprise. The surprise is that it’s among the top three for registrants from Asia, Europe, Africa and South America in addition to the United States. It’s the #1 country code domain amongst Namecheap’s Asian customers. Perhaps promotions played a role.

2. Over the past ten years, June has been the most active month for domain registrations at Namecheap. November and October are #2 and #3, respectively.

3. Nearly half of Namecheap’s customers have registered just one domain with the company:

The full report is available to download on Namecheap’s website.

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1. NameCheap Sued Over WhoisGuard
2. Rightside and NameCheap ink longer term deal
3. Namecheap leaps up .com chart as PDR falls

New trade agreement includes provision for Whois of country code domain names.

The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, includes a requirement that the three member countries provide public access to Whois data for their respective country code domain names. It also mandates that the country code domains have a UDRP-like mechanism for resolving cybersquatting disputes.

Chapter 20 of the USMCA on Intellectual Property states:

Article 20.C.11: Domain Names

In connection with each Party’s system for the management of its country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) domain names, the following shall be available:

(a) an appropriate procedure for the settlement of disputes that, based on, or modelled along the same lines as, the principles established in the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy or that:

(i) is designed to resolve disputes expeditiously and at low cost,
(ii) is fair and equitable,
(iii) is not overly burdensome, and
(iv) does not preclude resort to judicial proceedings, and

(b) online public access to a reliable and accurate database of contact information concerning domain name registrants, in accordance with each Party’s law and, if applicable, relevant administrator policies regarding protection of privacy and personal data.

In connection with each Party’s system for the management of ccTLD domain names, appropriate remedies shall be available at least in cases in which a person registers or holds, with a bad faith intent to profit, a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark.

The part about a database of contact information does not seem to preclude allowing Whois privacy and proxy services.

The United State’s country code domain is .US, Mexico’s is .MX and Canada’s is .CA.

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I built USMCA.com easily thanks to GoDaddy’s wizard and Beaver Builder.

Last week I wrote about a problem with WordPress: it’s simply too difficult for the typical small business owner to figure out how to create a website using WordPress.

I mentioned that the best experience I’ve found for creating a WordPress site is GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting. The on-ramp has two key features that make it easy.

First, there’s a wizard that walks you through a quick start process that creates an initial site based on your industry.

Second, it uses Beaver Builder Lite to allow you to edit pre-designed templates to your liking without coding knowledge.

I created a site this way on USMCA.com over the weekend.

Last week the United States, Mexico and Canada announced a new trade agreement designed to replace NAFTA. It has a rather unimaginative name: United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. Shortly after the news was announced I looked up USMCA.com and found that it had a buy now price in GoDaddy’s NameFind inventory. I bought it.

This weekend I created a site on USMCA.com using GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting.

Within 10 minutes I already had a decent looking site shell that only needed me to add content and make minor adjustments:

To make what you see in the graphic above, all I needed to do was:

1. Select my industry
2. Give my site a name
3. Select from a handful of child themes under GoDaddy’s Primer theme
4. Choose from stock photos relevant to the industry I selected

From there, it’s easy to use the built-in Beaver Builder to make changes to the content blocks. Beaver Builder works similarly to many of the website builders on the market. You can make a lot of site changes without understanding how to code and without inserting widgets.

I don’t know if this is easy enough for someone who hasn’t used WordPress before, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than figuring out how to download and install a theme or framework. This is the sort of experience that needs to be offered to non-technical people creating a website. Ideally, this is combined with some sort of “WordPress lite” that doesn’t include so many options until the user is ready to unlock them.

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1. VaultPress drops its price for WordPress security and backup
2. How to reduce comment spam on your WordPress website
3. WP Engine acquires StudioPress, maker of the Genesis framework for WordPress

A lot of money is at stake in new TLD auction fund.

ICANN needs to figure out how to disburse $240M+ of auction proceeds.

How should ICANN disburse the $240 million+ it received in auction proceeds from selling off rights to new top level domain names? The working group in charge of figuring out the mechanism for doing so wants community input.

The new gTLD Auction Proceeds Cross Community Working Group (CCWG) has published its initial report and will hold a 40-day public comment period. The report doesn’t get into which specific organizations specifically should benefit, but instead on how to structure what will be a donor divvying up a large chunk of cash and general guidelines for the grants.

CCWG identified four possible mechanisms but thinks that two are the best options. One is to have a new department within ICANN handle doling out the money. The other is to set up an ICANN department that works with an existing charitable organization.

Whatever mechanism is chosen, the goals of the grants will be:

• Benefit the development, distribution, evolution and structures/projects that support the Internet’s unique identifier systems;
• Benefit capacity building and underserved populations, and;
• Benefit the open and interoperable Internet

One area that CCWG would like feedback on is if ICANN itself can be a recipient of any of the funds.

With so much money involved, this is sure to be a long process.

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1. It’s D-Day for ICANN Comments
2. ICANN Extends Public Comment Period for New TLD Guidebook
3. Four new top level domain name contracts signed

Unsurprisingly, it happens a lot.

GoDaddy has released new data on the prevalence of very small businesses being hacked, including having their website hacked.

The numbers are staggeringly high, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising. As someone who has operated WordPress websites since 2005, I’ve had my share of being hacked.

GoDaddy has unique data given its size. It analyzed 65,477 requests for help with hacked sites over one year. It found that over half of the cases of WordPress sites involved sites running outdated versions of the software. Of course, it’s not just WordPress sites that get hacked.

In 83% of cases, the hackers added backdoors that would let hackers back in even after cleaning up the offending files. As for the goal of the hackers, it seems like adding spammy/SEO pages is the most common.

The company’s average cleanup involved 110 files but reached as high as 35,057 for a single hack.

Having a technical expert available to quickly fix a hacked site is key. Not surprisingly, GoDaddy has security services including hack cleanup to sell. Personally, I have a web developer on call that can fix any issues like this. When you get hacked, time is of the essence.

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1. Security Software Every Domain Owner Should Use
2. SSL comes to landing page tools, but at a price
3. Google adds more of its top level domains to HSTS preload list

Some customers are told to pay plan fees in order to retain discounts.

Uniregistry Perks provides domain discounts in return for an annual account surcharge.

Domain name registrar Uniregistry rolled out a new discount plan at the beginning of the month that requires a monthly subscription.

I was alerted to the plan by a Uniregistry customer who says he was informed his prices would go up unless he subscribed to one of the plans. I have only 22 domains registered at Uniregistry and have not received any such notice.

The plans charge a fee to activate discounts on new and renewal billing. The cheapest plan is $108 per year.

It appears that the best plan offers .com domains for $8.59 compared to Uniregistry’s standard pricing of $10.88.

Interestingly, the plans are more expensive if you have more domains under management. GoDaddy has offered its Domain Discount Club for a long time and it charges the same fee no matter how many domains you have under management.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Uniregistry waives the discount fees on larger portfolios. I can’t imagine the company losing a 50,000 domain portfolio over a $219-per-month surcharge.

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1. Minds + Machines outsources to Nominet, deals registrar accounts to Uniregistry
2. Uniregistry backtracks on price hike on existing registrations
3. My thoughts on employee turnover at Uniregistry

What’s impacting the domain aftermarket in 2018?

Do people trust the domain name business? Does the industry market to people other than themselves? Not enough.

That’s what Marie Lanyon, VP of Marketing at domain registrar Hexonet, discovered when she entered the domain name world last year. Since then, she’s been working on ways to improve trust and knowledge of the industry. Find out what she’s doing (and what’s working) on today’s episode.

Also: Bob Parson bids adieu, Flying Dogs lie, petition against .com price increases.

Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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1. 2017 Predictions – DNW Podcast #116
2. Domain name due diligence – DNW Podcast #148
3. Soeren von Varchmin – DNW Podcast #165

Barcelona company files cybersquatting claim in abuse of the UDRP.

AUSACORP, S.L. has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking in a cybersquatting dispute it filed over the domain name Excelway.com.

The company started a brand called Excelway but didn’t inform the World Intellectual Property Organization panel about the date it originated the brand. It appears to have been sometime this decade but the owner of Excelway.com registered the domain in 2003.

AUSACORP tried to buy the domain and the domain owner responded with a counter-offer. The company then filed the UDRP but didn’t mention its overture to buy the domain. Instead, it said that the domain owner tried to sell it to them.

Given that the domain appears to have been registered before the brand existed, the domain couldn’t have been registered in bad faith. Furthermore, the panel found that AUSACORP filed the complaint in abuse of the policy (reverse domain name hijacking):

In this case, the Panel considers that the Complainant omitted or misrepresented key communications between the Complainant and the Respondent. The Complainant’s earlier offer to purchase the Disputed Domain Name was only disclosed by the Respondent. The Panel considers the Complainant filed the Complaint only after several failed attempts to purchase the Disputed Domain Name at what it considered to be a reasonable price.

The Panel considers the Complainant launched the proceedings out of desperation as its prior attempt to purchase the Disputed Domain Name from the Respondent were unsuccessful but without a reasonable chance of success and as such in the circumstances constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding.

The Complainant was represented by Herrero & Asociados. The domain name owner represented himself.

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1. Wow: check out this panelist’s scathing finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
2. Weeds, Inc, which is suing to get Weeds.com, engaged in reverse domain name hijacking
3. A reminder for UDRP filers: Mess up? You can always apologize

.Islam, .Halal and .PersianGulf rejected as top level domains.

ICANN’s board of directors has formally rejected an application for the .Islam top level domain name, as well as .Halal and .PersianGulf. The board made the decision at a special meeting last week.

Asia Green IT System applied for the three domain names as part of the massive 2012 expansion of top level domain names that gave us everything from .bible to .sucks to .wtf.

Certain religious and government groups objected to the applications on various grounds. There was never consensus advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee about the strings, but ICANN was cautious anyway.

Having seen no progress, in 2015 Asia Green filed for independent reviews of the applications being put in purgatory. It prevailed and the panels ordered ICANN to pay Asia Green’s fees for the reviews.

But that didn’t mean ICANN had to give the domains a green light.

At the special meeting on October 3, ICANN resolved:

Whereas, the BAMC [Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee] recommended this action [denying the applications] based not only on the BAMC’s extensive review of all relevant materials, but also on its consideration of and commitment to ICANN’s Mission and core values set forth in the Bylaws, including ensuring that this decision is in the best interest of the Internet community and that it respects the concerns raised by the majority of the community most impacted by the proposed .HALAL and .ISLAM gTLDs; the Board agrees.

So if there will be a .Islam domain, it won’t be until another round of new top level domain expansion.

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1. Intellectual Property Group Suggests Protections for New Domains
2. Congress Beats Up ICANN (Part 3)
3. Four new top level domain name contracts signed

Lots of app developers use .io in their names, but it’s not what it seems.

I was reviewing the top games on the Apple App Store this morning and quickly noticed a trend: .io is all the rage with app developers.

8 of the games on the top free charts have a .io at the end:

• Paper.io 2
• Hole.io
• Bumper.io
• Ping.io
• Tornado.io
• Slither.io
• Paper.io
• Beetles.io

So a boon for .io domain name owners? Not quite. It doesn’t look like the game owners all own the corresponding .io domain names used in their app names.

Rather strange if you ask me.

.Io is the country code domain name for British Indian Ocean Territory.

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1. About those .io domain names…
2. Domain reads: .Com for uptime, .Bank transitions
3. Domain names at CES 2018

University and postal company terminate domains.

Bond University in Austrailia and Deutsche Post AG are dropping new top level domain names.

Both entities have informed ICANN that they wish to terminate their agreements to run a top level domain name. Bond University is terminating .bond and Deutsche Post AG is terminating .epost.

Bond University only applied for .bond. It activated a couple of second level domains under it; both law.bond and study.bond are set up to forward to pages on bond.edu.au.

Deutsche Post AG, a German postal service, originally applied for .epost, .deutschepost, .trust and .dhl. It withdrew its application for .deutschepost and sold .trust to what is now NCC Group. It retains .DHL and has set up a few sites including logistics.dhl.

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Group behind the Heisman Trophy sues owners of domains with Heisman in them.

The organization that administers the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded to college football’s top player each year, has sued three people it says are infringing its trademark and copyright.

The lawsuit (pdf) is aimed at HeismanWatch.com and the Heisman Watch Podcast. The Heisman Trophy Trust says that one of the defendants also owns the domain names HeismanCandidates.com and HeismanWatch.com, which forward to HeismanWatch.com.

According to the lawsuit, the defendants have been infringing its marks and copyright since January 2014.

Heisman Trophy Trust does not appear to have ever filed a UDRP against a domain name.

It’s possible that the defendants didn’t understand trademark law when they registered the domains and selected the name of the podcast. There’s a lesson here for anyone creating a website or podcast about a company or trademarked name: don’t use the actual trademark in your domain name. People have learned this the hard way by using WordPress in their domain name.

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Peking University files patent for blockchain applied to DNS.

Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School has filed a U.S. patent application (pdf) for “Systems and Methods for Managing Top-Level Domain Names Using Consortium Blockchain”.

The application admits that the current domain name system is efficient but argues that it has flaws. It states that root servers in Asia are shared by many more internet users than those in North America, leading to slower domain name resolution speed.

The present disclosure has the following beneficial effects: the present disclosure is different from the DNS in that the internet DNS at all levels are centrally managed; the present disclosure is a Top-level domain name management scheme based on blockchain technology. The present disclosure decentralizes in selecting top-level domain managers (TLD nodes) and Top-level domain registrations—none of the TLD nodes in a consortium or a small group can control the entire management process. The present disclosure separates the domain name system into two layers, each corresponding to a sub-domain name system, and how the sub-domain name system is designed is determined by the holder of the Top-level domain name. Therefore, the sub-domain name system can be designed as either centralized system or decentralized system according to the institutions’ wishes.

In addition, since the information on blockchain is public and immutable, trusted agencies and even individuals can access information on blockchain and build a corresponding seed file database to store the mapping relations between the top-level and sub-domain name system. This means that all regions can set up a corresponding number of domain name servers according to their actual need in order to ensure the speed of internet access without being limited by other institutions.

It seems that there are better ways to improve DNS than applying blockchain to it, but I’m certainly open to the concept.

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1. Frank Schilling’s Defensive Patent
2. Yahoo Gets Patent for Behavioral Ad Targeting
3. Verisign gets patent for applying DNS ideas to IoT

Brewery makes “blatant and intentional misrepresentation”, panelist says.

Flying Dog Brewery was found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking. Photo from FlyingDogBrewery.com.

Craft brewer Flying Dog Brewery has been found by a World Intellectual Property Organization panel to have attempted reverse domain name hijacking.

The brewery uses the domain name FlyingDogBrewery.com but wants the domain name FlyingDog.com. That domain was registered in 1996 and used by its owner to promote his software company for many years.

The brewery first tried to buy the domain name in 2001. It invited the domain owner to tour the brewery and made a $19,000 offer to buy the domain. The owner declined.

Then, earlier this year, a broker reached out to the domain owner working on behalf of an unnamed client. He offered $15,000 for the domain. The domain owner declined and asked for $225,000. Shortly thereafter, Flying Dog Brewery filed the UDRP.

Amazingly, the Complainant stated in the filing that the Respondent retained an agent to sell the disputed domain name to the Complainant, even though it was clearly the Complainant that initiated the discussion.

Panelist William Towns wrote:

The Complainant could easily have discovered from a brief Internet search the Respondent’s historical use the disputed domain name before filing the Complaint…The Complainant either did not do so, or having done so elected to conceal from the Panel known facts unfavorable to the Complainant. The Complainant submitted a barebones complaint unsupported by any evidence, and blatantly misrepresented to the Panel that the Respondent had hired an undisclosed agent seeking to sell the disputed domain name to the Complainant at an exorbitant price. The record, however, confirms that it was the Complainant who retained a domain name broker. The Complainant’s blatant and intentional misrepresentation as described above constitutes a clear violation of section XIII, paragraph 21 of the Complaint.

The brewery was represented by Offit│Kurman. The domain owner was represented by Thomas P. Howard LLC.

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1. Telepathy gets another Reverse Domain Name Hijacking win
2. Reverse domain name hijacking in Hakoba Saree case
3. MicroStrategy defends its Glory (.com)

The big internet companies are keeping more traffic on their sites rather than referring it to yours.

Depending on social media platforms to send traffic to your website or to even give you exposure can be a losing game. All of the companies that asked people to follow them on Facebook got burned many years ago when Facebook started throttling who saw their posts.

Writing on his company blog last week, SEO expert Rand Fishkin pointed out that it’s getting worse. And it’s not limited to social media platforms. Even Google is keeping more traffic on its site rather than referring it to other sites.

What can you do? Rand has a number of suggestions, which essentially boil down to doing a bit of everything.

My take is that it’s important that you’re producing content on your own domain name and website. Your domain is yours and is a direct link to your audience. While social media platforms and search engines can change how much traffic they’re sending your way, visitors will often return to the same high-quality website without going through an intermediary like Google. Focus on the direct traffic your site gets in addition to search, social and referral visitors.

It helps if you have a short, easy-to-remember domain name to make it easier for your audience to return to your website.

Read Rand’s analysis (with data) here.

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Company filed UDRP after inquiring about buying domain name.

HAHN Kunststoffe GmbH has been found to have engaged in “Plan B” reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name Hanit.com. The company markets a high-tech plastic under the HANIT mark.

According to the decision, domain name owner Kwangpyo Kim of Mediablue Inc. in South Korea registered the domain name in 2001. At that time, the Complainant had a German trademark but did not have much of a presence in Asia.

15 years later, in 2016, the Complainant inquired about buying the domain. It received a response through Uniregistry offering the domain for $20,000.

It didn’t buy the domain then and inquired again in 2018. At that time the asking price had increased to $68,000 (then lowered to $60,000). The Respondent attached an Escrow.com screenshot from another sale for $74,980 as a comparison.

HAHN Kunststoffe filed the complaint after that.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the three-member World Intellectual Property Organization panel wrote:

Indeed, the Complaint does appear to reflect, as the Respondent concluded, the Complainant’s “Plan B” after failing to register a domain name corresponding to its brand at some point after 1993 and determining not to purchase the Domain Name when it encountered a high price in 2016 and a higher one in 2018. The Panel does not countenance abuse of the UDRP system as an alternative to dealing with the consequences of business decisions.

ESQwire.com represented the Respondent.

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1. Non-Profit Urban Logic Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
2. Telepathy scores $40,000 from reverse domain name hijacking case
3. Insurance company Allianz tries reverse domain name hijacking a domain name

Parson’s long exit from GoDaddy oversight is complete.

Bob Parsons with wife Renee. Photo from BobParsons.com.

Bob Parsons has resigned from the board of GoDaddy (NYSE:GDDY), the company he founded in 1997 that made him a billionaire.

In a press release, GoDaddy said that Parsons will spend more time on his other businesses and philanthropic ventures.

Parsons hasn’t been involved day-to-day at GoDaddy for some time. He resigned as CEO in 2011 when he sold the company to a consortium of private equity firms. Parsons was Executive Chairman of the board until 2014 when he switched to just being a board member.

Although I butted heads with Parsons a few times as he built his company, there’s no denying that his entrepreneurial success is not a fluke. He sold his first company to Intuit for $64 million. He then started what later become GoDaddy and watched his cash pile dissolve until the company started selling domain names.

He recounts the story of when the company almost went bust. He had a few million dollars left in the bank and went on vacation to figure out if he wanted to shut down the company. He saw a valet there who seemed very happy parking cars. At that point he made the decision: he’d press ahead with the company; if it failed, he could always be happy doing something else. That turned out to be an excellent decision.

Parsons is a Marine and Purple Heart recipient. His experience in the Marines impacted how he ran the company; there was a focus on physical security. The culture has changed significantly since he left. Internally, the security culture of the company has given way to a Silicon Valley-friendly environment. The company has also eliminated controversial marketing techniques that many called sexist.

Since selling GoDaddy, Parsons has invested in a variety of companies including a golf club maker, marketing firm and real estate. He has also contributed to charities through The Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation.

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