Two former ICANN directors want back in

Gluttons for punishment? ICANN’s At-Large Community has named the first four candidates standing to join the Org’s board of directors, and two of them have form.

Sébastien Bachollet, Justine Chew, Maureen Hilyard and Lito Ibarra have all put themselves forward to replace term-limited León Sánchez, who is due to leave seat 15 of ICANN’s board in October after nine years’ service.

Bachollet and Ibarra are both former ICANN directors. Bachollet served as an At-Large appointee for four years from 2010. Ibarra served six years as a Nominating Committee appointee from 2015.

France-based Bachollet is the former chair of EURALO, the Regional At-Large Organization for Europe, and a former director of Afnic, the French ccTLD registry.

Malaysia-based lawyer Chew has extensive experience both on the At-Large Advisory Committee and the GNSO, as ALAC Liaison, and policy-making groups. She also has sat on the boards of Malaysian non-profits.

Hilyward, from the Cook Islands, is a former ALAC chair who has held senior board or advisory positions with Public Interest Registry and DotAsia and ISOC. The NGO she leads, the Cook Islands Internet Action Group, plans to apply for a new gTLD this year.

Ibarra has been in charge of the El Salvador ccTLD registry for over 30 years and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has sat on the boards of LACNIC and LACTLD.

The five RALOs will get a chance to add their own candidates to the slate next month.

At-Large has a complex structure and its electoral system reflects that, but essentially the nominees were self-selected and confirmed by a committee. The ALAC will vote with a view to announcing the successful candidate before April 22.

Comment Tagged: alac, at-large, board, election, ICANN

Former ICANN director could lose control of ccTLD

The government of Ghana has announced plans to nationalize the .gh ccTLD, taking control from a former ICANN director who has run the registry for over thirty years.

The Minister of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation reportedly said that the government intended to place the ccTLD fully under state control.

Samuel George reportedly said: “It cannot continue to sit in private custody. The state must own it.”

The ccTLD has been run by a company called Network Computer Systems, doing business as Ghana Dot Com (at ghana.com), since 1995, under the control of Nii Quaynor, who was on ICANN’s board of directors in the early noughties.

After a 2008 law called for the nationalization of the registry, the two parties have been engaged in negotiations to ensure the smooth handover of the domain.

ICANN typically does not redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the incumbent, even if the winning party is the local government, but agreement has been difficult to come by due to a dispute over money.

Ghana Dot Com wants 10% of future .gh domain sales to be donated to the local ISOC chapter indefinitely, but the government has resisted, according to documents posted by the company.

It’s not clear from local reporting whether the government and Quaynor, now 81, have made a breakthrough, but the minister is already talking about plans to give away .gh domains to newly registered companies in the nation.

Comment Tagged: .gh, ghana, ghana dot com, redelegation

UK launches “police.ai”, but does it own the domain?

The UK’s increasingly authoritarian government this afternoon announced extensive policing reforms, including what it called “Police.ai”.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood, speaking in Parliament in the last couple of hours, announced a new National Police Service and a substantial ramping up of live facial recognition technology for law enforcement in England and Wales.

“At the same time, we will launch Police.ai, investing a record £115 million in AI and automation to make policing more effective and efficient, stripping admin away to ensure officer time can be devoted to the human factor,” she added.

Police.ai appears to be the brand for a new “National Centre for AI in Policing”. But does the UK government actually own the domain police.ai? It appears not.

The domain NX’s for me, and registry Whois reveals it is registered to [email protected] — that is, the Government of Anguilla, which still owns the .ai ccTLD even if Identity Digital manages it.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK government could obtain the domain, but it seems that so far it has not.

Announcing a broad, expensive, liberties-threatening, technology-driven program of policing reform while making such a basic branding error looks at face value like a worrying lack of technical nous.

The police press release announcing the project appears to have been yanked, but a Home Office white paper (pdf) goes into more detail about the plan.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, police.ai

Team Internet still in talks to sell off domains unit

Team Internet says negotiations to spin off its domains business are “progressing well” after a difficult 2025.

The company yesterday issued a trading update, saying that its 2025 revenue and profit will come in towards the top end of analysts’ expectations.

Those top-end estimates are for revenue of $541 million and adjusted EBITDA of $43 million. That’s compared to 2024 revenue of $802.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $91.9 million.

Team Internet suffered last year, laying off hundreds, due to changes in Google’s advertising policies that made it harder for the company to monetize its domain portfolio.

It was already exploring exit options before the Google changes hit, but those efforts were resurrected in November. The company said yesterday that “discussions in relation to a disposal of DIS [Domains, Identity and Software] are progressing well”

2 Comments Tagged: acquisition, earnings, team internet

NamesCon returning to Miami in November

NameCon Global will be held again in Miami, Florida, for its 2026 conference, organizers said over the weekend.

The annual two-day conference will return November 11 with the Ice Palace Studios as its venue again.

Organizers said they hope to “expand on the networking aspects of the event with a larger Expo Hall and designated networking spaces”.

Tickets are not yet available and pricing has not been announced.

Comment Tagged: namescon

“Mad Dog” politician registers nazis.us, redirects to Trump admin site

An American Congressional candidate has registered the domain name nazis.us and redirected it to the US Department of Homeland security web site.

Independent candidate Mark Davis, whose Twitter handle is @MarkMadDogDavis, confirmed the move in a tweet, saying the Republican party has gone “full fascist”:

I’m a nobody.
A dad in red Florida.

And I’m the one who bought https://t.co/Z0CG11fDsB
Because the GOP went full fascist
and the democrat establishment still won’t name it.

I’m not a senator.
Don’t have a PAC.
Not a soul in power thought to actually raise hell.

So I did.
And…

— Mark Davis for Congress (@MarkMadDogDavis) January 16, 2026

If you’re wondering about whether that’s a tone befitting a would-be US Congressperson, it’s typical of his Twitter feed, which repeatedly insults his opponents as “MAGA morons” and generally lives in the depths of the same brainless rabbit hole originally tunnelled by Venezuelan president Donald Trump.

The Whois record for the domain show it was registered on January 13 and has “markdavisforcongress.com donate” listed as the registrant. But Davis, perhaps jokingly, had first tried to pass off nazis.us as being a US government registration.

He posted a video of himself typing the domain into his browser, showing the redirect to dhs.gov, perhaps unaware that his browser autocomplete drop-down revealed that nazis.us was in his own GoDaddy control panel.

The context for this stunt is of course the ongoing chaos in some Democrat-run cities, initiated by the Trump administration, which has seen armed, masked, and unaccountable ICE agents swarm the streets looking for non-white people to deport.

It’s perhaps comforting, if bewildering, that nazis.us was until last week still available for registration.

Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy

“Lowest Price Guaranteed!” $48 .com registrar canned

ICANN has terminated its second registrar of the week, ending the accreditation of Hong Kong-based 0101 Internet for non-payment of fees and other infractions.

The registrar, not to be confused with the unrelated 101 Domain, will lose its ability to sell gTLD domains January 29, according to a public ICANN termination notice.

The company’s roughly 1,200 gTLD domains will be transferred to another registrar, a procedure complicated by the fact that ICANN also alleges that 0101 Internet has not been escrowing its customers’ registration data as required.

The Compliance notice spells out a timeline of alleged non-responsiveness to ICANN’s emails, phone calls, mail and faxes dating back to March 2003, almost three years ago.

0101 Internet’s web page proudly declares “Lowest Price Guaranteed!”, with .com, .net and .org priced at a measly $47.88 each, which might explain why the company’s DUM has been tumbling for over a decade.

Comment Tagged: 0101 internet, compliance, ICANN, termination

No RDAP? No accreditation

ICANN has terminated its contract with another registrar after the company failed to implement RDAP, the Whois replacement protocol.

US-based Brennercom will be de-accredited January 28, according to a published ICANN Compliance notice.

The headline infraction is the fact that Brennercom failed to migrate to RDAP, but as is often the case the registrar owes ICANN money and has failed to publish some administrative details on its web site.

ICANN will now move Brennercom’s registered domains to a different registrar under its usual transition process.

That shouldn’t take long. While Brennercom’s web site claims to have handled customers with thousands of domains in their portfolios, my records show it has never had more than 133 domains under management. Right now, it has about 40.

Comment Tagged: brennercom, compliance, ICANN, rdap

Fifth-largest gTLD not dead after all

ICANN has assured users of its zone file distribution service that the .top gTLD is not dead, after an unspecified snafu earlier this week suggested it was.

On Wednesday, users of the Centralized Zone Data Service received an automated email stating: “Your zone data access for .top has been revoked… Reason: Request revoked as TLD has been made inactive.”

That would be a pretty big deal, as .top is the fifth-largest gTLD by volume and the second-largest new gTLD after .xyz, with something like 5.7 million names in its zone.

It might also carry a ring of truth for CZDS users who don’t track ICANN activities very closely, as .TOP Registry has recently been on the Compliance naughty step over DNS abuse allegations.

But affected users were assured yesterday that .top is not inactive and that an “issue” was to blame.

An email read: “an issue that temporarily marked the .TOP generic top-level domain (gTLD) as inactive… As a result, your previously approved CZDS access request for the .TOP zone file was revoked.”

The email goes on to say that users can wait for their access to be restored “in the next few days” or manually initiate a new CZDS request for the .top zone, which requires approval from the registry.

2 Comments Tagged: .top, .top registry, czds, glitch, ICANN

Half of registrar’s domains are abusive, ICANN says

A fast-growing registrar seems to be experiencing its growth spurt due to extremely high levels of DNS abuse, including phishing, according to the latest public breach notice from ICANN Compliance.

More than half of Bulgarian registrar MainReg’s domains under management are abusive, judging by the notice, which alleges MainReg’s unwillingness to investigate abuse reports in violation of its accreditation contract.

The notice is the first I can recall seeing that cites data from Domain Metrica, an ICANN service that aggregates abuse data from third-party block-lists. An unspecified third-party reporter (hands up in the comments if it was you!) is also cited.

“ICANN Domain Metrica data indicates that in November 2025 approximately 48% of MainReg’s DUMs were reported for phishing, with the figure at 45% as of 5 January 2026,” the notice says.

“The complaining party stated that its own independent analysis identified an even higher proportion of the Registrar’s DUMs engaged in scam‑related activity,” it adds.

MainReg isn’t a huge registrar, but transaction reports show that its DUM tripled between September 2024 and September 2025, from about 10,000 names to about 30,000. The company registered its first name in 2015. Almost all of its names are in .com, .net and .org.

The notice alleges other breaches, such as failing to migrate from Whois to RDAP, and gives MainReg until January 28 to come in compliance or risk termination.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, ICANN, mainreg