More gloom predicted for .com

Verisign is predicting more shrinkage at .com and .net in 2025, despite a few notes of optimism from its CEO.

The company said last night that its two flagship gTLDs shrunk by a combined 3.7 million domains in 2024, a 2.1% decrease, as I flagged up a couple weeks ago, and that its growth this year will be between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The quarterly loss was around 500,000 domains. Verisign ended the quarter with 169 million domains under management.

CEO Jim Bidzos again told analysts that the shrinkage was partly due to weakness in China and partly due to American registrars concentrating on profit margins over customer acquisition.

Growth was positive in the EMEA region, he said, without quantifying it.

Bidzos said that marketing programs the company recently launched show early signs of adoption by registrars, and that he expects registrars to refocus on customer acquisition as part of a cyclical trend.

He pointed to the fact that two registrars — presumably GoDaddy and Squarespace — have taken out pricey Super Bowl TV ads this weekend as an encouraging sign.

He said that Verisign is “considering looking at” applying for new gTLDs next year and is “looking at the potential for applications”.

The company reported Q4 net income of $191 million, down from $265 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 3.9% at $395 million.

For the full year, Verisign had net income of $786 million versus $818 million in 2023, on revenue that was up 4.3% at $1.56 billion.

Comment Tagged: .com, .net, earnings, financials, verisign

These are the .gov domains Trump has deleted so far

US government domain names covering policies on child support benefits, law enforcement accountability, and clean energy are among over a dozen deleted by the Trump administration since January 20.

The deletions, some of which seem to be linked to the overturning of former Presiden Biden’s executive orders, may give some insight into the new administration’s priorities.

Notably, childtaxcredit.gov has been deleted from the .gov zone file, based on a comparison of the January 19 and February 6 zone files.

The domain previously redirected to a page on whitehouse.gov that espoused the virtues of the Child Tax Credit, which since 1997 has provided tax breaks to American families currently worth $2,000 per child.

That page has also been deleted, though versions can be found on Archive.org.

Also deleted is nlead.gov, the domain for the Biden-created National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which sought to make records of police misconduct available to LEA recruiters. The web site is now down.

The domains build.gov, invest.gov and others that promoted the Biden-era $568 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, are also gone.

Also deleted, publicserviceloanforgiveness.gov and pslf.gov, which promoted Biden’s student loan forgiveness project, and cleanenergy.gov, which promoted his environmental investment policies.

Here’s the list of domains that have been deleted since January 20. I’ve excluded names that appear to have been owned by state and local governmental registrants.

build.gov
buildbackbetter.gov
childtaxcredit.gov
cleanenergy.gov
economicopportunity.gov
invertir.gov
invest.gov
investinamerica.gov
investinginamerica.gov
nlead.gov
pslf.gov
publicserviceloanforgiveness.gov
unitedwestand.gov
whitehousedrugpolicy.gov

The domains in most cases are still registered, according to Whois records, so they could come back online at a later date, but the fact they have been deleted from the .gov zone file means they no longer resolve.

As DomainGang notes, the domains dei.gov and waste.gov are among those that have been registered since Trump’s inauguration, though neither currently resolve.

About 150 .gov domains have entered the zone file since January 20, but almost all appear to represent small towns around the country, rather than the federal government.

Comment Tagged: .gov, trump

Did Trump just create the world’s next ccTLD?

Could there be a .gz?

I’m sometimes happy that DI has such a narrow beat. Today, it means I don’t have to discuss the legal, political, moral or ethical implications of US President Donald Trump’s just-announced plan for Gaza.

At a press conference last night, Trump said he wants the Palestinians to leave Gaza, to be resettled elsewhere in the region, and for the US to “take over” the territory and have a “long-term ownership position” on it.

The details of Trump’s aspiration are not immediately clear. Is he talking about a military occupation? Annexation? Does he just want to build another golf course?

It’s almost certainly too early to speculate, so let’s speculate.

With Trump talking about US ownership of Gaza, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Gaza’s future, should his plan come to fruition, is as a US territory, or something very much like one.

Populated territories of any nation in general get their own ccTLD. Puerto Rico’s .pr and Guam’s .gu are two examples of US territories with their own ccTLDs.

The US annexation of Gaza would not necessarily even have to be legal under international law or recognized by America’s peers in the United Nations to create the possibility of a new ccTLD.

The path to the root involves a lot of buck-passing and at no point includes a qualitative evaluation of whether a territory is legal or otherwise deserving of recognition.

As you may know, ICANN’s IANA department is responsible for adding and removing ccTLDs from the DNS root, but it takes its cues from the International Organization for Standardization.

Under long-standing IANA convention known as ICP-1, any territory with a two-letter code on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list qualifies for a ccTLD. If a registry can show technical nous and local support, it can claim the TLD.

But the ISO takes its cues in turn from the Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat, and its M49 standard, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”.

A territory appears on that list as a matter of “statistical convenience” for the UN, and does not imply that the UN or its member states recognize that territory politically.

Palestine itself was granted its ccTLD, .ps, a quarter-century ago, as “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, despite the legal status of the territory being disputed, because UN Stats and ISO decided to put it on their lists.

So Gaza could possibly get its own ccTLD if the US takes it over and splits it from the West Bank, even if it becomes a contested hell-hole where the luxury beachfront hotels are bombed to rubble faster than Trump can build them.

.gz is available, assuming Gaza is not renamed Trumpland or Disneyworld East or something.

Comment Tagged: gaza, iana, ICANN, iso, palestine

$3,000 to do a Whois lookup?

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service cost hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars every time it was used in its first year, according to an analysis of official stats.

RDRS is the system designed to connect entities such as trademark owners, security researchers, and law enforcement with registrars, allowing them to request private domain registration data that is usually redacted in Whois records.

It’s running as a two-year pilot, in order to gauge demand and effectiveness, and its first full month of operation was December 2023.

ICANN has been publishing monthly transparency reports, including data such as number of requests and outcomes, and we know how much it cost the Org to develop and operate, so it should be possible to make some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much each request costs the ICANN taxpayer.

The cost could range from about $300 to over $3,000 per request, even using some fairly generous assumptions.

RDRS cost $1,647,000 to develop, which is pretty much a shoestring by ICANN standards. Most of that was internal staffing costs, with some also being spent on external security testing services.

The total operational cost for the first 10 months was $685,000. Before ICANN publishes its calendar Q4 financials later this month, we could extrapolate that the first 12 months of operation was around $800,000, but let’s be generous and stick with $685,000 for this particular envelope’s backside.

While there were 7,871 registered requesters at the end of November 2024, they had collectively only submitted 2,260 requests over the same period.

Only 2,057 of those requests had been closed at the end of the period, and only 23% of closed requests resulted in registrar approval and data being fully handed over to the requester.

That works out to 474 approved requests in the first year.

With the most-generous assumptions, $685,000 of ops costs divided by 2,260 requests equals $303 per request.

If we only count approved requests, we’re talking about $1,445 per successful Whois lookup equivalent.

But we should probably switch to an envelope with a larger rear end and include the $1.6 million development costs in our calculations too.

If we factor in half of those costs (it’s a two-year pilot), we’re looking at about $666 per request or $3,181 per successful request in the first 12 months.

If the system was more widely used, the per-request cost would of course fall under this calculation, but there’s no indication that usage is significantly on the increase just yet.

These are only the costs incurred to ICANN. Registrars on one side of the service and requesters on the other also bear their own costs of working with the service.

Dealing with RDRS is not the same as doing a Whois lookup. You have to deal with a much lengthier form, add attachments, make a reasoned legal case for your request, etc. It eats work-hours and staff need to be trained on the system.

It may seem that $3,181 to do a Whois lookup is too expensive for the ICANN taxpayer.

And maybe it is, if it’s being predominantly used to assist (say) Facebook’s trademark enforcement strategy.

But if those Whois lookups help law enforcement more quickly nail a gang of fentanyl dealers or child sexual abuse material distributors, maybe the costs are more than justified.

At the end of November the number of requests from law enforcement was 15.6% of the total, while IP holders accounted for 29.7%, ICANN stats show.

ICANN’s board of directors will decide towards the end of the year whether the RDRS pilot has been successful and whether it should continue indefinitely.

Comment Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, privacy, rdap, rdrs, whois

PIR to join GlobalBlock, but its crown jewel won’t

Public Interest Registry is set to join GlobalBlock, the multi-TLD trademark blocking network, following approval of a series of ICANN registry contract amendments.

It will become easily the largest registry operator, by domains under management, to sign up for the service. But its crown jewel, .org, will not be included, I’m told.

.charity, .foundation, .gives, .giving, .ngo and .ong, along with four translations in non-Latin scripts, will become part of GlobalBlock, meaning trademark owners will get to block their brands rather than defensively register them, saving a bit of money.

But the protections will not extend to .org, which with over 11 million domains is the third-largest gTLD. This is probably quite telling.

GlobalBlock says it currently blocks domains in 634 “extensions”, by which it means a mix of gTLDs, ccTLDs, and second-level domains in the consensus DNS, as well as some newer blockchain-based namespaces.

Comment Tagged: .org, globalblock, pir

LA wildfire victims get domain deletes delay

Victims of the recent wildfires in the Los Angeles area have been offered special relief from renewing their expiring domains, according to an ICANN note to registrars.

Registrars were told last week that they “will be permitted to temporarily forebear from canceling domain registrations that are unable to be renewed because of the impact of the fires in Los Angeles, California, on domain name registrants.”

The LA fires reportedly destroyed or damaged 18,000 buildings, killed 29 people, and turned 200,000 into evacuees.

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement gives ICANN the discretion to allow its registrars to keep domains alive beyond their usual lifespan due to “extenuating circumstances”.

That’s been taken to mean natural disasters including hurricanes Maria, Helene and Milton, the earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria in 2023, the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The idea is to help victims of disasters keep their domains — and therefore often their livelihoods — after the usual renewal date if their credit cards are buried under a pile of rubble and they have more important things on their minds.

Los Angeles is the home of ICANN’s corporate headquarters.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN

.free domains to finally arrive as Amazon reveals three gTLD launches

Amazon Registry has revealed launch dates for three of its long-dormant gTLDs, and they have the potential to be the most popular of its patchy portfolio.

.free, .hot and .spot are to go to sunrise April 2, according to a notice on Amazon’s web site and paperwork filed with ICANN.

The Trademark Claims period, which pretty much always coincides with the start of general availability, is set for May 12.

Details of pricing and any possible registration restrictions have not been published.

All three gTLDs have been in the root since 2016, just sitting there doing nothing. Amazon has 54 gTLDs in total, 10 of which are dot-brands, but most of the generics remain stubbornly unlaunched.

Its half-dozen Japanese-script domains have been around the longest, but its biggest success to date has been .bot, which has about 14,000 names in its zone file.

Amazon launched .deal and .now last year but the former has yet to hit 10,000 names and the former still hasn’t hit 1,000.

Amazon had to pay off four other applicants for the right to run .free.

Comment Tagged: .free, .hot, .spot, amazon, ICANN, new gTLDs, sunrise

Six more gTLDs shown the door, five may be auctioned

There are to be six fewer gTLDs on the internet, after ICANN terminated its registry contracts with two companies.

Asia Green IT System’s agreements for .pars, .shia, .tci, .nowruz and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) have been cancelled, after a lengthy compliance process, while Kerry Trading Co self-terminated .kerrylogistics.

Despite being contracted for a decade, none of AGIT’s TLDs had ever meaningfully launched. The Iranian new-year-themed .nowruz had a handful of registrations.

The registry had stopped paying CoCCA, its back-end provider, bringing it into serious breach of its Registry Agreements. It had also failed to pay its ICANN fees.

According to ICANN correspondence, after it entered into mediation with AGIT last August it came up with a secret term sheet to give the company a way out, but it breached the terms of that deal too.

All five were terminated over the Christmas period, but they could return if ICANN decides to sell them off to the highest bidder.

ICANN told the company it “will conduct an assessment and make its determination whether to transition operation of the .nowruz gTLD to a successor registry operator.”

But they all look like poison chalices. They’re all related in some way to Iran, and could raise cultural or legal sensitivities.

.shia is related to the branch of Islam, .pars is related to the language and culture of Iran and .nowruz is the Persian new year holiday.

.tci, which I can easily imagine being picked up and repurposed by a discount-names portfolio registry, was supposed to be a dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran and همراه. is the brand of its mobile phone subsidiary, meaning something like “companion”.

Neither was technically a Spec 13 dot-brand, which is usually enough to for ICANN to rule out a redelegation.

But even if ICANN decides to sell off these five dead strings to another registry under the Registry Transition Process, there’s no guarantee that will ever actually happen.

Org decided to auction failed gTLD .wed almost five years ago and there’s been no movement on that ever since. Failed .desi is in a similar situation.

.kerrylogistics was a Spec 13, and will not be transitioned, after Hong Kong based delivery company Kerry unilaterally told ICANN it no longer wished to run the TLD.

Kerry has five remaining dot-brands, including .kerryhotels and .kerryproperties, that it does not use but does not seem to want to kill off just yet.

1 Comment Tagged: agit, asia green it system, compliance, ICANN, termination

Registrar terminated after ignoring Whois transition

A registrar has lost its right to sell gTLD domains in part due to its failure to migrate from Whois to RDAP.

Spain-based Abansys & Hostytec has had its ICANN registrar contract terminated over a litany of alleged breaches dating back to 2023, and its meager collection of domains will now be given to another registrar.

ICANN said in its termination notice that the company had failed to implement the Registration Data Access Protocol, the successor to Whois that this week became the new industry standard for domain ownership lookups.

The registrar was also past due on its fees, hadn’t given ICANN evidence the was still in good standing, hadn’t had an employee attend compliance training and was not publishing masked contact addresses in Whois results, among other things.

While its accreditation dates back to the noughties, Abansys has never had more than 600 gTLD domains under management and it seems very unlikely that it was making enough money from those domains to cover the cost of compliance.

ICANN said the termination became effective January 26, but it still wants its past-due fees paid.

Separately, Compliance has also sent breach notices to four other registrars — US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology — that cite RDAP failures as an area of non-compliance but appear to be primarily based on non-payment of fees.

All four registrars appear to have got accredited between 2019 and 2021 and stopped paying their fees not long afterwards. None of them has sold a single gTLD domain, ever, and two of their web sites suggest the companies are no longer around.

They’ve all got until February 12 to magically rectify their compliance problems or face execution.

Comment Tagged: abansys, breach, compliance, ICANN, mixun, nerd origins, termination, zoo hosting

$10 million ICANN giveaway winners picked

ICANN has picked the beneficiaries of up to $10 million it plans to give away in the first year of its Grant Program.

The board of directors approved the final slate of applicants, which will now have to sign contracts with ICANN, at its retreat this weekend.

While the recipients will not be publicly named until March at the earliest, ICANN has previously said it expects to give an average of $200,000 to about 50 applicants.

The applications — there were 247 in this round — were all expected to be funding requests for projects that align with ICANN’s technical stability and internet governance missions.

The Grant Program is funded by the proceeds of auctions for contested new gTLDs, notably .web, up to a decade ago. The fiscal 2025 budget sees the fund start with $217 million in the bank.

The program is expected to cost $2 million to administer this year, with the cost covered by expected investment gains on the principle sum.

Comment Tagged: grant program, ICANN