Centralnic’s merger with KeyDrive SA, parent company to Key Systems, was officially announced this morning. The deal will see Centralnic acquire KeyDrive’s entire share capital for a total of $36.5 35.8 million. KeyDrive is the parent company of Key Systems, RRP Proxy and Moniker, as well as corporate registrar Brand Shelter. While the companies, with the […]
Web.com, which is a listed company, has announced that it is to be acquired by an affiliate of Siris Capital Group, LLC. The deal is reported to be worth approximately $2 Billion USD. The company will have the ability to seek alternative offers: Web.com may solicit alternative acquisition proposals from third parties during a “go-shop” […]
An Australian company has been €1.24 million (AU$1.95 million) for duping businesses out of over AU$2.3 million via a domain slamming scam. The case was taken by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) who claim that the company in question had sent out over 300 thousand fake renewal notices to Australian businesses. For those […]
As I predicted ICANN is pursuing its case against EPAG. They’re now not only appealing the case to a higher court in Germany, but are also trying to get the entire thing referred to the European Court of Justice. In an announcement late last night ICANN made it very clear what their intentions are. While […]
Last Friday ICANN took German registrar EPAG to court in Germany. German courts seem to be pretty fast, so instead of having to wait weeks or months to see how they’d rule, we’ve already got the answer. The German court in Bonn has ruled that EPAG (Tucows) is not obliged to collect extra contacts beyond […]
As I noted over the weekend, ICANN has instigated legal action against Epag, an ICANN accredited registrar based in Germany that is part of the Tucows group. ICANN claims that the case is to “preserve WHOIS data”, but Tucows asserts in their statement that the ICANN approach is flawed. It’s not a frivolous statement, but […]
ICANN announced Friday that it is pursuing legal action in Germany against Epag. Epag is owned by Tucows, who are one of the largest registrars in the world. So what is going on? Why is ICANN taking legal action against a registrar? According to the announcement from ICANN the action is “to preserve whois data”. […]
RegistrarStats has been around for years. It was one of the better sources of information about domain registry market share, trends and, of course, statistics on registrars. It was. It hasn’t been for quite some time. When the site was first made available most, if not all, of the data was available for free. If […]
The M & A activity in the hosting and domain markets continues. Earlier today it was announced that The Hut Group has acquired UK2. The Hut Group isn’t in the hosting or domain name space directly, but as a global e-commerce company would be a big consumer of infrastructure to support its brands, which include […]
Mergers and acquisitions in the hosting and domain name business have become increasingly common over the last couple of years. As a result things have got a tad confusing and some well known brands have either ceased to exist entirely or are in flux. Case in point is Domain Monster. The company was acquired by […]
