Centralnic’s GB.COM is no longer pointing to their nameservers reports Michele Neylon on his Internet News website. Neylon also says that any domains in the zone are now being wildcarded to the main GB.COM website. Upon going to the GB.COM website, the following notice is posted: Welcome to the GB.com site You may be here because you have been sold a domain or email service using the gb.com domain that has ceased to work. You can restore that service swiftly by registering with GB.COM Ltd. GB.COM Ltd will not provide a service that you have paid others for, unless they have an arrangement with GB.COM Ltd. If you have already paid for future service and it has ceased then you should contact your supplier. If you have any queries please send us an email and we will endeavour to answer your questions. GB.COM Ltd. In response, CentralNic have posted the following notice on their website: Notice Regarding GB.COM Domains Unfortunately, the service we have been providing for domains ending .gb.com has been interrupted. We apologize for any inconvenience – the interruption was effected without warning by a third party and was out of our control. We are currently taking legal advice about this and will be taking urgent steps to restore the service. But we cannot achieve that instantly. In the interim we are taking every action possible to ensure that .gb.com websites continue to function during the temporary period before our service is restored, to mitigate any losses to our clients. Neylon, who manages registrar Blacknight Solutions , did a bit of poking around in Whois records and found the nameservers for GB.COM were switched away from CentralNic over to Bytemark earlier on the day in question. Neylon further notes that all the other Whois records seem to be unchanged. On his posting, Neylon notes several updates from CentralNic with the final one being from one of CentralNic’s staff stating: We have started creating accounts with Gb.com Ltd for our registrars, and registering their domains into them. Although we don’t believe that Gb.com Ltd has any right to do what they’ve done, we feel that this is the best course of action to get our registrant’s domains working, until we can resolve the legal issue and bring gb.com back onto our registry infrastructure. We are working in descending size order, so the largest registrar portfolios are being cleared first. As we are having to use a screen-scraping script to submit the information, it’s a slow process, taking 4-5 seconds per domain. We have already registered those domains that are directly registered with us, with no registrar. For further updates and additional information, see Michele Neylon’s Internet News blog at: www.internetnews.me/2011/07/30/centralnics-gb-com-in-dispute-gb-com-now-wildcarded

IEDR (the IE Domain Registry) announced that registrations for .IE  ( Ireland’s top level domain ) exceeded 10,000 ina three month period for the first time . More than 10,000 .IE domain names were registered in the first quarter of 2011 ,which represents a 5.5 percent increase quarter-on-quarter and an 18.5 percent increase on registrations in the last quarter of 2010 .

[news release] In light of the recent disasters that have devastated Japan, .ORG, The Public Interest Registry (PIR) today announced a plan to waive renewal fees for Japanese domain name holders who are unable to renew their .ORG domain names. Together with PIR, more than 15 participating Registrars have committed to automatically renew for one year at no cost the .ORG domain names that would unintentionally expire due to the inability of the owner in Japan to re-up their registration.  Affected names will include those with expiration dates within the March 11 – June 11, 2011 period.

An image of the notice of de-accreditation sent to Blue Gravity Inc. (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Internet and domain governing body ICANN ( www.icann.org ) issued a notice on Wednesday that it had authorized the bulk transfers of customer domains from Blue Gravity Inc. and Moozooy Media Inc.

[news release] For the fourth successive year, DNS.be conducted a satisfaction survey amongst its registrars, the network of 470 companies that register .be domain names worldwide. DNS.be again scores higher than its colleagues of the surrounding countries like .nl and .fr.

ICANN launched its Registrar Data Escrow (RDE) program in November 2007 in order to help protect domain name registrants in the event of the failure or de-accreditation of their registrars.

RegistryPro has announced it passed the 100,000 registered base domain name mark after seven years in business. It is not a huge milestone, but unlike other registries, .PRO has strict limits on who may apply for a .PRO domain name. “On behalf of the entire RegistryPro Team, we’re excited to announce that .PRO has surpassed the 100,000 registered names,” said Lucas Roh, CEO of RegistryPro in a news release.