In the domain business, the era of the Dutch company Freenom is coming to an end. Its representatives announced that the company would leave the domain market. For many years, Freenom was primarily known as the registry for Tokelau's country code .TK. At one time, this domain zone was the second largest after .COM, with about 40 million registrations at its peak. The company also acted as a registry of country code domains for several African countries: Equatorial Guinea .GQ, Central African Republic .CF, Gabon .GA and Mali .ML.
The secret of the company's success was that domains were distributed to registrants for free and were never deleted: neither after the registration period expired, nor in case of blocking for one reason or another. On the one hand, this attracted a huge number of attackers who used domain names for illegal purposes. On the other hand, it generated income for Freenom itself: names that had become ownerless remained parked, and advertising links were placed on their pages. And if you consider that we are talking about millions of domains, it is clear that there was an economic sense in this.
But this business model no longer corresponds to the values of today, and the decisive blow to it was dealt by the Meta company (recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation). She filed a lawsuit against Freenom: lawyers counted at least 5 thousand domain names in the registry’s assets that violate the rights of Meta (for example, faceb00k.ga and many similar ones). For each such domain, the company demanded compensation of $100,000, bringing the total amount of the claim to $500 million.
Freenom's lawyers tried to prove that most of the domains had been deleted even before the lawsuit was filed, and that Meta also had the technical ability to independently delete the disputed domain names. But in the end, Freenom decided it would be better not to bring the case to trial. The company chose to enter into a pre-trial agreement with Meta and pay a certain amount to settle the claims. At the same time, Freenom announced that it had decided to leave the domain business.
As Domain Incite notes when reporting this news, the ending looks as expected. Late last year, ICANN terminated its agreement with the domain registrar OpenTLD, which was part of Freenom, due to numerous violations of contractual obligations. All African countries whose domains were managed by the Freenom registry have already refused its services, and Tokelau will soon follow their example (negotiations between the authorities and the New Zealand operator InternetNZ are already in full swing). The era of the domain business, as Freenom envisioned it, has truly come to an end.
