One company is responsible for registering over 97% of the 9,025 .Voting new gTLD domain names.
We reported earlier today that .Voting had 9,025 domain names registered after the first day of general availability
However we see that 8,811 of the 9,025 domain names were registered by the domain name registrar, Registry Gate GmbH” which seems to be a member of the Key Drive family of registrars.
All of the domain names registered at Registry Gate were registered to the same registrant:
Registrant Name: Chief Executive Officer
Registrant Organization: innotarget AG & Co. KG
Registrant Street: Max-Stromeyer-Strasse 116
Registrant City: Konstanz
Registrant Postal Code: 78467
Registrant Country: DE
Registrant Phone: +49.363937503639
Registrant Phone Ext: 3750
Registrant Email: [email protected]
Now here is where it gets interesting
Here is the whois record for innotarget.net which is the registrants email address on the .Voting domains:
Registrant Organization: Innotarget AG & Co. KG
Registrant Street: Max-Stromeyer-Str. 116
Registrant City: Konstanz
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code: 78467
Registrant Country: DE
Registrant Phone: +49.753136393720
Registrant Email: [email protected]
Admin Name: Dirk Hamm
The email address for Mr. Hamm on the ICANN new gTLD application for .Voting is [email protected], which uses the Name Servers:
ns.namespace4you.de
ns2.namespace4you.de
These are the same Name Servers used on all of the 8,811 .Voting domain names registered to innotarget AG & Co. KG
This certainly would not be the first case of a new gTLD registry registering domains in its own extension but certainly raises the bar to a whole new level in terms of the percentage of domains registered and less than an transparent manner.
