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A domain registrar based in Jordan appears to have lost about a third of its gTLD domains under management after ICANN slammed it for its founder’s televised antisemitic comments.
Talal Abu Ghazaleh Intellectual Property, which goes by the name AGIP, saw a huge decline in DUM in February, a month after ICANN’s then-CEO described Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s remarks on Jordanian TV as “beyond offensive or objectionable”.
Abu-Ghazaleh had deployed some pretty clear-cut antisemitic tropes and seemed to try to justify the Holocaust in a news interview related to the war in Gaza, causing outrage from at least one Jewish ICANN community member.
After Costerton’s published chastisement, AGIP’s DUM fell from 1,371 to 930 over the space of a month. It was the first substantial decline on record, with its DUM having been on a fairly steady but slow upward trajectory.
In August, the last month for which we have records, its gTLD DUM had gone down to 695, about half its peak.
AGIP is a boutique intellectual property management registrar, likely with higher margins than your typical domain retailer. A decline of a few hundred domains could represent the loss of just a few customers.
The registrar still has its ICANN accreditation. It’s also still contracted with ICANN to run an instance of the L-root DNS root server in Amman, despite a call for it to lose that deal.
But, as Domain Name Wire noted on Friday, it’s no longer listed as providing UDRP services for ICANN. This change seems to have occurred in mid-September, judging by Archive.org records.
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