A court in India has declared Net 4 India, the country's largest independent domain name registrar, insolvent. The company was managing more than 100,000 domain names at the end of February (mainly in the .COM zone and other “old” gTLDs). At the same time, the number of company-managed names has been steadily declining of late. However, Net 4 India remains the largest ICANN-accredited Indian registrar, excluding Public Domain Registry, LogicBoxes and their subsidiaries, which are all owned by US-based Endurance International.
According to Domain Incite, in the period from 2002 to 2012, Net 4 India took out several loans from the State Bank of India. After the company failed to pay the loans back, in 2014 the debt was acquired from SBI by Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction, which demanded a recovery through court. In 2017, the outstanding debt stood at about $28 million. After the company failed to pay it back, it was suspended and recognized as insolvent.
According to ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement, ICANN can terminate registrars’ contracts if they are in insolvency proceedings for more than 30 days. This provision is already activated in respect to Net 4 India: the company is stripped of the right to register new domain names or transfer existing names to its management from June 21 to September 19. If the company does not come back into compliance after this period, ICANN can terminate the registration agreement.
