On 20/07/2025 01:29, David Conrad via NANOG wrote:
I believe the majority of registrars are used for drop catching, so many of those 2400 are associated with around 200 registrar “families” (last I looked, it’s sort of hard to be exact since families aren’t official).
The majority of ICANN accredited registrars are used for drop catching. The drop catching aspect is only part of the market and the number of registrars operated by a drop catcher operation increases the chances of catching a newly deleted domain name. In addition to tracking domain name hosting history, I've got the ICANN registrar transactions data back to July 2001. Drop catching has been going on for a long time. The bulk of registrations are on retail registrars and brand protection registrars. Drop catching is an important part of the business and is highly competitive. Multiple registrar accreditations increase the chances of a drop catcher catching a newly deleted domain name. From monthly website IP surveys, approximately 9.57% of .COM is on sale. The drop catcher process generally involves the domain names being moved to a sales/auction website or a website created with a "for sale" landing page. The rate of new ICANN accredited registrars has slowed and the ccTLDs have become more important in their own markets with the effect that businesses are more likely to become ccTLD registrars in their local ccTLD and outsource gTLD registrations to larger gTLD registrars that provide reseller accounts and services. If you peruse https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/accredited-registrars/list-of-ac... you’ll see obvious signs of affiliated companies (e.g., look at “namepal” to pick one example). It might be more useful to look at the market share of the registrars and see which of those registrars default to “redacted for privacy”. A quick way of grouping some of the drop catcher operations is to look at the registrar URL or contact details for the registrar in the ICANN registrar data. From the February 2025 ICANN data, the market shares for the top individual registrars are: Godaddy : 27.60% Namecheap : 8.04% Tucows : 4.30% Squarespace II (formerly Google Domains) : 3.30% GMO Internet : 2.37% Dynadot : 2.21% Netsol : 2.16% Gname : 2.12% The effect of the GDPR mess is cumulative because new registrations since May 2018 often have their details redacted by default. Some registrars have taken the opportunity to redact everything including data not covered by GDPR (GDPR applies to personal information). Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief website (dnib.com) commissioned Interisle to estimate the number of domain names affected by WHOIS privacy and redaction. Approximately 90% of gTLD domain names are affected. https://www.dnib.com/articles/interisle-report-examines-domain-name-contact-... The problem is much worse on some European ccTLDs were all contact and ownership details are redacted by default. GDPR and ICANN's implementation of "privacy" made a mess of things for the gTLDs. The bureaucrats in Brussels have come up with NIS-2 and it tries to undo some of the damage caused by GDPR on WHOIS/RDS data. It requires that registrants be contactable. While registrant data is often available to the registries with European ccTLDs, the registrant data for gTLD registrations is not centralised in the same manner. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com