Seychelles company scoops up .help.
ICANN has published the assignment agreement for .help, one of the domains Frank Schilling’s UNR auctioned last year.
Innovation Service Ltd, a Seychelles company, acquired the top level domain. I can’t find any information about the company online, but the assignment agreement (pdf) lists Heng Lu as the company’s CEO. The address on the agreement is for a company that assists with offshore business formation.
The .help namespace has about 20,000 domains. About 20% of those domains are at Namecheap. Hostinger and Hexonet each have over 1,000 .help domains registered.
.Help peaked at 55,000 domains in July of 2016, although many of those registrations were probably premium domains registered by Uniregistry for resale. The number fell to 20,000 one year later.
Wholesale prices are around $20 per year.
UNR auctioned its portfolio of top level domains in April 2021. Transfers were held up due to ICANN’s concerns about how the names were marketed.
Matt says
Wait a minute, is that the same Heng Lu who owns (or owned) Cloud Innovation Ltd which is suing AFRINIC over disputes involving millions of IPv4 addresses? Or someone else with the same name?