Sued by Meta, Freenom halts domain registrations
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
I wouldn't be surprised if they are ignoring those complaints because there's no one left to process them. They clearly struggle to keep the lights on, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555
Maybe, but Facebook is arguing otherwise:
“ According to Meta, this isn’t just a case of another domain name registrar ignoring abuse complaints because it’s bad for business. The lawsuit alleges that the owners of Freenom “are part of a web of companies created to facilitate cybersquatting, all for the benefit of Freenom.””
Happy to see other allegations aired out, especially when the consequences are a little more than squatting .tk domains (I suspect the real problem is those pesky .ml domains).
I'm looking forward to seeing them present evidence to back this alegation.
Running 0bin.net, we have complaints from outside of our jurisdiction, false claims, idiotic claims, DMCA used for censorship, and so on.
Once in a while we have a serious one, like CP or doxxing, so we read everything.
But honestly, our hosting is forcing us to delete so much content based of BS complaints it's tiring. And if we refuse, we have to make our case, which unlike complaints, cannot be automatized. 9 times out of 10, the hosting tells us we should delete the content anyway, and if we wait to much, proceed to cut the power cord until we comply.
I'm sure Meta does report some real website and phishing attempts, but I'm certain they also abuse their power like the GAFAM they are.
Does anyone have a mirror handy?
Setting that up was arguably the best technical decision I've ever made, after setting it up for my parents!
Suddenly, overnight, the DNS got updated and the account got "suspended" (thankfully only after the high school projects were done and over with). I knew it was suspended because while I seemingly wasn't allowed to iterate over the domains list, I was able to see the total amount of domains I had a registration for.
Making an alternate account to try and see if they unregistered the domain (and to see if I could rerequest it) showed them selling the domain for ~$6.
They get away with this due to some clause in their TOS that says that they're the owners of the domain and are just leasing it to you. I'm not sure if that's in-line with broader ICANN rules surrounding domain owner rights (iirc they've actually been suspended a couple times because of this sorta stint), but the company are complete scumbags.
Doesn't matter, they're ccTLDs, and if the countries-in-question didn't require that Freenom assign the names to actual users. ICANN is irrelevant here, period.
It's not one of those things where they can outright say "you can't do that", but it is one of those things where it's "if you don't cooperate we'll make your life hell in other ways".
If you need a throwaway domain for some joke project, sure, but they make their free domains as hard to use as possible to get you to pay, and once you pay, you might as well pay any of the more competent (and more likely to still be around tomorrow) competitors.
My current go-to "I need to host this somewhere with a reasonable name" is Cloudflare with its pages.dev service. You can just upload a ZIP file and get free hosting and a something.pages.dev subdomain.
But I agree with other commenter - the amount of data Meta is scraping, and time wasted to addiction, is potentially more damaging than a few domain names.
Previously this domain was unpaid and suspended for violating free TOS (need a website on the A record). I had to call this Dutch woman, we will call her Freenom lady, like 20 times for months to get her to finally unsuspend it and take my money for a paid registration. I'd say it was the worst but I have dealt with 1&1 and smaller enom resellers that disappeared.
So if my registration gets screwed with now, who do I go after? The country with ccTLD is with?
"Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit are incorporated in the United States."
I’m only familiar with the .ml and .gq TLDs and at least for those I’d like to see the respective countries allow more reputable registrars to manage them.
> The 10 Most Abused Top Level Domains
(updated daily?)
Don't the grand majority of registrar work this way? They usually don't care about unethical activities as long as it brings in profits. Cybersquatting is not illegal in most countries, and registrar themselves often do it themselves.
Very interesting to see that Meta feel that it needs to go to court for this. Does this mean that ICANN is broken / does not have the capability to properly take care of these things?
gTLDs (general TLDs, so your .com domains) give you some fairly basic rights; when you buy a domain name you will always have the right to transfer it to a new registrar at no charge and IIRC the domain registrar can't suspend you with no reason given (although any reason is sufficient, including "we just don't like you").
ccTLDs (country code TLDs, so .uk for example) on the other hand have the same rights on paper, but not in practice. This mostly comes down to the fact that ICANN as an institution doesn't want to be at the center of a diplomatic incident, so they just allow countries to do whatever they want with their TLDs.
Some run them like any old registrar (or subcontract it out for profit), others restrict purchases to just government entities, others go midway and use the TLD only for government websites while letting regular entities buy a subdomain from a known domain name (.co.uk for example).
With a ccTLD (which are the domains freenom chiefly provides), as long as the government you're getting the rights from approves of your actions, you can basically run it however you want because of this. ICANN rarely if ever moves against ccTLDs (although freenom has already been punished in the past by ICANN over their ccTLD behavior, so it does happen sometimes.)
[0]: There's also a third category which mostly just comprises .gov, which is the TLD used by the US government (why the US government gets access to that TLD instead of say, .gov.usa like all other countries, is for reasons beyond me).
1) gov.us exists (but not used) and 2) the DNS system was developed in the US intially for their academe and the military. For example, .arpa, which is now used for certain DNS and non-DNS management, is actually for ARPA (now DARPA).
You're saying this as if it's a bad thing that countries can get to make their own rules for their dedicated namespaces.
It makes some degree of sense, but the problem is that there's many countries, usually third world, that sold their namespace off to a shady registrar like Freenom, usually to either try and give their disastrous economies a financial injection or to line the pockets of some corrupt government official. (Or as is often the case, both at the same time.)
There's no process in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and it's ultimately a bad outcome for all involved. It results in the ccTLD of a country with legitimate citizens getting a bad reputation for transmitting unreasonable amounts of spam (since Freenom gives it away to anyone who asks) and it often doesn't fix the economy of said country anyway.
At least with domain names the countries in question could technically take the TLD back even if it would be a legal shitstorm - not so much with physical resources that have been removed.