Famous Four Media (FFM), a company registered in Gibraltar, which is by some measures the largest gTLD registry may have gone bankrupt. Domain Incite’s reporter Kevin Murphy notes that last week IANA’s administrative contact for all of the company’s 16 TLDs changed from FFM’s CEO, Geir Rasmussen, to someone called Edgar Lavarello. According to Domain Incite, Edgar Lavarello is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Gibraltar who specializes in insolvency and liquidation.
This means it is highly probable that Famous Four Media has gone bankrupt, although there is no clear proof of this. Domain business representatives note that lately none of them were able to contact the company’s management. There is only one working page with contacts and information about the confidentiality policy at famousfourmedia.com. Earlier this year the company heads had a disagreement when one of them filed a lawsuit against the other.
Famous Four Media runs 16 new gTLDs, with .LOAN, .WIN and .MEN being the largest. The total number of domain names registered in FFM’s domain zones is about 4.5 million: more than any other new gTLD registry.
