Researcher Jim Yan has surprised the domain community with a study of the .ngo and .ong namespaces. They are managed by Public Interest Registry (PIR) and are designed to serve non-governmental organizations only. However, Jim Yan identified almost 500 domains in these namespaces, which appear to be registered for gambling activities.
Launched in 2012, the .ngo and .ong domains have set serious restrictions for registrations. Initially, PIR required organizations to undergo a verification process before activating .ngo and .ong domains by proving that they are NGOs. However, very few registrars have been willing to work with domain zones with strict requirements of this kind, since they are the ones who must carry out these verifications. This prompted the registry to shift to a self-certification model in 2020.
Major registrars like Namecheap and GoDaddy offer a telling example of how this works. On their websites they say that to register an .ong or .ngo domain, registrants must act in public interest and meet certain eligibility requirements, without explaining what this means. In other words, registrants can simply tick the relevant box to complete this self-certification process. Therefore, the fact that there are domain names like bet365.ngo or 333win.ong should not come as a surprise – these are the actual domain names discovered by Jim Yan, among others.
Of course, 500 is not a very big number of the domain space. However, there are just approximately 10,000 registrations in these two domain namespaces, which means that 5 percent of all the domains that are supposed to serve NGOs are gambling websites. According to Domain Name Wire, PIR has claimed that it has a scheduled audit process in place for monitoring domain registrations and will review the names identified by Jim Yan in terms of their compliance with the requirements. However, it remains unclear what this regular schedule is, since some of the flagged domains were registered more than a year ago. The registry also promised to explore new avenues for verifying new registrations in the .ngo and .ong domains.
