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New Zealand’s .NZ administrator sues DomainTools

by — Services 13 Comments

Country code administrator says that DomainTools is violating its Whois Terms of Use.

Domain Name Commission Limited (DNCL), the group that oversees New Zealand’s .nz country code domain namespace, has sued (large pdf) DomainTools over its collection of .nz Whois records.

The company claims that DomainTools’ bulk collection of .nz Whois records violates its terms of use. Its Whois terms were updated in 2016 to explicitly prohibit publishing historical versions of Whois data. The terms also prohibit sending “high volume WHOIS queries with the effect of downloading part of or all of the .nz Register or collecting register data or records”.

It’s the publication of historical data that seems to have drawn the ire of DNCL. It recently added an Individual Registrant Privacy Option (“IRPO”) to allow some .nz registrants to keep their information private. But their historical information is available at DomainTools even once they add privacy.

DNCL reached out to DomainTools last year in an effort to resolve the issue, but it wasn’t happy with the progress it was making. It filed the lawsuit last month and is requesting a preliminary injunction against DomainTools.

The lawsuit comes at a bad time for DomainTools. It is currently coping with the fallout of GDPR, which has restricted the company’s access to Whois records across most top level domain names overseen by ICANN.

A representative of DomainTools declined to comment due to the ongoing litigation.

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15 years of Google Adsense

by — Services 4 Comments

I started using Adsense 15 years ago.

Google Adsense is 15 years old. Today Google sent an email to me with a bit of personal data:

I remember the great excitement I had when Adsense first came out. Finally, owners of niche content sites had a way to earn good money from relevant ads.

The best month–January, 20106–was bittersweet. At one point I was earning over $1,000 a day. Then I got a message from Google that some of my sites weren’t up to their quality guidelines, and the revenue dropped significantly overnight.

I still use Adsense on smaller sites for which it doesn’t make sense to do direct ad sales. But the glory days of January 2016 are long gone.

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Payoneer exits the escrow business

by — Services 10 Comments

Company throws in the towel just two years after entering escrow business.

Payments company Payoneer is informing customers that it is exiting the escrow business.

The company began offering escrow services when it acquired Armor Payments in 2016. Later in 2016, Payoneer began offering domain name escrow services.

Its domain name escrow business was aided by Brandon Abbey, who was president of Escrow.com until being let go after that company was acquired by Freelancer.com.

Payoneer made some inroads into the domain name escrow business. But as others who have tried to tackle the escrow market have learned, it’s a business of thin margins. Scale is required to run an escrow service profitably.

Losing a key domain escrow service will be difficult for many people in the domain name industry. It’s always good to have at least two strong competitors in order to keep prices down and push companies to improve their service and features.

For example, Payoneer had better “know your customer” tools than Escrow, or at least a smoother policy for implementing legal requirements surrounding them.

In an email, Payoneer Head of Enterprise Strategy & Business Development Matt Watts wrote:

While we have been excited and honored to service prospects and partners like yourself, after careful review of our product portfolio have decided to commit our focus to other areas of the Payoneer business.

As of this evening, the Payoneer Escrow site is still operating.

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Verisign patents “Methods and systems for creating new domains”

by — Services 0 Comments

Verisign patents aspects of its TLD creation and management system.

A diagram from Verisign’s patent for TLD management.

When companies started applying for new top level domain names, most of them reached out to existing registry services providers to handle the backend management of those domains. Companies like CentralNic, Neustar and Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) were eager to sign contracts with registries.

Managing lots of new top level domain names added to the complexity of existing systems, though. Registries built new management platforms or restructured their existing ones to accommodate the variety or rules these new TLDs came with..

Verisign, the .com registry, just got a patent (pdf) for certain aspects of its TLD management system.

Titled “Methods and systems for creating new domains”, U.S. Patent number 10,015,134 has 21 claims related to its domain management system. Here’s the abstract:

Systems and methods for creating a new domain, such as a top-level domain or a second-level domain, make use of a Domain Manager that enables a user to enter data that is necessary or optional to implement the creation of a new domain. Systems such as, for example, a Registry and one or more Registrars, may use the data defined by the Domain Manager to create a new domain.

Getting the patent has been a long road. It began with 30 claims back in 2011.

CIRA, the .ca domain name registry, has a pending patent for aspects of its TLD management system.

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Australia’s .Au domain names are now managed by Afilias

by — Services 1 Comment

Handover to Afilias is now complete.

It’s already July 1 in Australia, and that means that Afilias is now the backend registry service provider for over 3 million domain names ending in .Au.

.Au domain overseer auDA put the contract for managing .au out to bid, and in December of last year announced that Afilias won the contract, which had been handled by rival Neustar.

Transitioning a 3.1 million-domain namespace is unprecedented. The previous record for the size of a registry transitioned was .org back in 2003. At the time it had 2.4 million names under management. The gaining registry in that case was also Afilias.

As a result of the .au transition, Afilias now helps run 200 TLDs and more than 22 million domain names.

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