Salesforce to apply for a dot-brand

Salesforce has become the most significant company to date to announce it plans to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD.

Specifically, the company plans to apply for a dot-brand, according to a disclosure made by David Lawrence, software engineering architect at Salesforce and IETF liaison on ICANN’s board of directors.

The disclosure came when the board approved the new gTLD program’s latest Applicant Guidebook at the conclusion of the ICANN 84 public meeting in Dublin last month.

While the IETF liaison is a non-voting role, he nevertheless recused himself from the AGB discussion, saying: “I work for an employer to apply for a brand TLD.”

While there are dozens of companies and organizations with public plans for new gTLDs, most of them are little-known brands associated with the blockchain space.

By contrast, Salesforce is, according to Wikipedia, the 61st-largest company in the world, with a market cap of $238 billion.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, salesforce

Team Internet looking to break up

The return of CentralNic? Team Internet this week announced that it is seeking to break up the company, selling off its various divisions to different buyers.

The move follows devastating changes to Google’s advertising services, which led to 200 layoffs and a $140 million drop in revenue in the first half of this year.

“We are in active discussions regarding the divestment or formation of strategic partnerships for substantially all parts of the business in separate transactions,” the company said in a statement to the markets.

The company said it has already received “a number of inbound approaches”, adding that “discussions are most advanced” for the sale of its Domains, Identity & Software segment, which includes its registries and registrars.

It’s not clear whether we’re talking about potential industry consolidation or another private equity deal. Google’s move scuppered the planned sale of Team Internet as a whole to a PE group in March.

Google turned off its Adsense for Domains this year, making domain monetization substantially more difficult. It’s been replaced by Related Search on Content, which requires content to function.

Team Internet said that other Google policies designed to improve the quality of advertising have also slowed down its transition to the new model. It’s looking at ways it can diversify its revenue sources.

1 Comment Tagged: centralnic, google, team internet

Noss to leave Tucows corner office

Tucows CEO Elliot Noss has stepped down after over a quarter century in the role.

He will be replaced by David Woroch, currently CEO of the Tucows Domains business, reflecting the company’s newly revealed plan to sell off its Ting ISP business.

Noss will continue as a consultant for Ting as it seeks a buyer, though the company revealed it will quite possibly sell the unit at a loss.

He has been leading Tucows since its early days as a free software download site to becoming an ICANN-accredited registrar in the first wave in the late 1999.

“We created wholesale domain registration out of whole cloth which fundamentally changed the way domain names were distributed,” Noss told analysts last week.

Woroch will continue to run the domains business. Ivan Ivanov, CFO, will also be CEO of Ting.

Comment Tagged: tucows

Rubens Kühl has died

Rubens Kühl, a mainstay of the ICANN community and prolific commentator on the domain name industry, has died tragically young.

According to Brazilian ccTLD registry NIC.br, Rubens died November 3 at the age of 55, survived by his wife and two children.

Rubens was at NIC.br for 16 years, mostly at the registrar arm Registro.br, where he was product marketing manager.

He was a regular presence at ICANN meetings and served on the GNSO Council for a term from 2016.

“Rubens was a kind person, a brilliant technical guy, always open to sharing his extensive knowledge with anyone,” one Brazilian friend wrote on social media. “He will be missed not only here but by the whole Internet community around the world.”

“We will remember Rubens as an exceptional professional and a generous colleague who greatly contributed to our community,” said LACTLD, the regional ccTLD registry association.

ICANNWiki notes that he was known by some as “Mestre dos Magos” or “Dungeon Master”, due to his “vast knowledge, sharpness, and dry humor.”

I really liked Rubens. We only met in person a handful of times but he was by far the most prolific commenter on this blog and I always enjoyed reading what he had to say, even when we disagreed. This is the first time I’ve had to write an obituary with tears in my eyes.

7 Comments Tagged: ICANN, nic.br, obituary, registro.br

Sinha angry with Chapman’s firing as ICANN vice chair

ICANN chair Tripti Sinha appears to be a little pissed off that one of her fellow directors was essentially fired by the Nominating Committee, sparking a public confrontation with NomCom’s current chair.

Chris Chapman was replaced by the independent NomCom at the conclusion of his first three-year term earlier this year, which seems have prompted Sinha to voice her frustration.

Over the course of the week at ICANN 84 in Dublin, Sinha and Chapman himself have made a number of disparaging remarks about NomCom’s work, referring to it variously as “not impressive”, “disruptive” and “unpleasant”.

It has also transpired that Sinha and Chapman both abstained in protest at the October 14 board resolution that confirmed NomCom’s leadership for the 2026 round of selections.

Sinha made her first terse remark about Chapman’s departure on the stage at the welcoming ceremony at on Monday, calling it “premature”, but expanded on her comments during a meeting with the ccNSO on Tuesday and today’s open-mic public forum.

Saying she was reading out her abstention statement — censored so far by ICANN from its web site — she told the ccNSO that she was “disappointed” that the NomCom had not returned her vice chair for the second year in a row.

She said NomCom should put “board leadership experience, longevity, and continuity” as strong enough criteria when weighing its director options. She accused NomCom of “disregarding” the board’s guidance in this regard.

She alluded to her last vice chair Danko Jevtović, who was replaced in 2024 by that year’s iteration of NomCom after six years on the board.

“I abstain in protest to these decisions in back-to-back years, and implore that the NomCom re-evaluate its criteria for returning seasoned board leaders,” she concluded.

She repeated some of her comments at today’s public forum session, and backed up by former director Edmon Chung, who lost his seat after three years in 2024 due to NomCom’s selections.

But they were challenged by Tom Barrett, who was chair-elect of NomCom when Chapman was fired and was named chair earlier this month and who pointed out that the committee is independent and suggested ICANN should keep its nose out.

“I’m not going to discuss how the 2025 NomCom made its decisions, but without knowing why and how I think it is inappropriate for any board member, especially the chair, to question its due diligence or the fact that they have chosen incorrectly,” he said.

NomCom gives the board’s guidance an “enormous amount of weight”, he said, “but it is not exclusive.”

“No one that applies to the NomCom gets a golden ticket,” he said. “Reapplying candidates do not get a golden ticket, even if they have been appointed by two previous NomComs. Board leadership does not get a golden ticket even if they have been chair or vice chair.”

As for Chapman, he gave a bitter but detail-light recounting of his NomCom experience at a session with Asia-Pacific community members on Tuesday, bemoaning the fact that he wasn’t even picked for the back-up list.

“I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the accountability for NomCom,” he said, describing the circumstances surrounding his non-selection this year as “very odd” and that his interaction with NomCom “wasn’t pleasant”.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, icann 84, nomcom

Glitch redux: ICANN screws up new gTLD security again

No lessons learned from 2012? ICANN admitted this morning that a glitch in its Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program exposed the identities of more than a dozen companies to their rivals.

The Org fessed up that some companies looking to get pre-approved as RSPs were able to see “identifiable organizational information” belonging to another user when using ICANN’s technical testing system.

“A total of 14 of 26 organizations using RST OT&E were affected. All affected organizations have been notified,” ICANN said. “No personal data was exposed, with the exception of a single minor and limited instance.”

It doesn’t sound like any gTLD application intentions were revealed — that part of the program doesn’t open until next year.

There were probably not too many surprises among the leaks. The landscape of the RSP market is well understood.

The only exceptions that spring to mind would be ccTLD registries that have not yet revealed their plans for the gTLD space, and completely new market entrants that have not yet tipped their hand.

The glitch sounds remarkably familiar for ICANN watchers with long memories. A bug discovered in 2015 exposed much more data, and about applicants themselves, but it was only exploited by one person on a handful of occasions.

That “glitch” led to allegations of hacking and trade secret theft and a long-running Independent Review Process case that wasn’t resolved until October 2023.

ICANN said it has taken down its testing environment to fix the bug and has hired an outside consultant to kick the tires.

This delay means testing will be offline for around two weeks, coming back November 12 at the earliest, and the reveal date for the list of participating RSPs has been pushed back from December 9 to an unspecified future date we realistically have to assume will be in the new year.

It’s not expected to delay the April 2026 opening of the next application round.

Comment Tagged: glitch, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, rsp evaluation program, rsps, security

CentralNic claims second-largest TLD migration ever

CentralNic today boasted that it successfully completed the migration of the .co TLD from GoDaddy to its own servers earlier this month, claiming the number two spot in the record books.

The company, part of Team Internet, said it moved more than 3.3 million .co domains to its registry back-end on October 4. The process took 29 hours, it said in a press release.

The 3.3 million number confirms .co’s place as the second-largest TLD migration, ahead of the 3.1 million .au names moved from Neustar to Afilias in 2018, but behind the four million .in names moved from GoDaddy to Tucows completed this May.

2 Comments Tagged: .co, centralnic, migration, team internet

DNS issue at Amazon takes out major apps and sites

Amazon’s AWS cloud platform has been suffering major outages for the last few hours, taking huge chunks of the internet with it, and DNS resolution is being blamed.

Affected products and services reportedly include Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Delta Air Lines, Duolingo, Signal, Reddit, Amazon’s own Ring doorbell cam service, as well as the UK tax authority and various UK banks.

Amazon first reported problems on its status page at 0711 UTC this morning. By 0901 UTC, the company had narrowed the problem down, saying it “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”

DynamoDB is a cloud-based database service Amazon offers on AWS. US-EAST-1 is an Amazon regional data center cluster.

Twenty minutes later, Amazon began to report “early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services”. Not long after, it said the recovery signs were “significant”.

At 1035 UTC Amazon said: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”

AWS underpins hundreds of top-level domains — notably, Identity Digital built its registry platform there — but there’s no word yet on any DNS or EPP issues from any registries.

Comment Tagged: amazon, aws, identity digital, outage

.io sales almost double over three years

The .io ccTLD continues to be a cash cow, with sales up 6.70% in 2024, according to the registry’s latest financial filing.

The company also faced its largest-ever UK tax bill last year, at a time when the future of .io came under sharp focus due to the imminent dissolution of the British Indian Ocean Territory to which .io is assigned.

UK-based Internet Computer Bureau last month reported revenue for 2024 of £31.6 million ($42.4 million), up from £29.6 million ($39.7 million) in 2023. Revenue has grown 93% since 2021, mostly due to a spike in 2022.

While ICB, an Identity Digital subsidiary, also runs .ac and .sh, the vast majority of its business is certainly in .io, a popular ccTLD with tech start-ups.

The company is essentially a single-employee shell, structured to pass the vast majority of its revenue to US-based parent Identity Digital. Its gross margins are barely 4%, an implausibly low number for a .com-comparable, high-volume registry business.

ICB reported operating profit for 2024 of £1.6 million ($2.1 million), reversing a loss of £1.7 million in 2023. But its bottom line was bolstered by £2 million of unspecified investment income, leading to profit after tax of £2.8 million ($3.7 million).

The UK tax bill was almost three times as large as any previous year at £807,000 ($1 million) seemingly due to this investment income.

The future of .io is still ambiguous, after the UK and Mauritius signed a treaty to transfer sovereignty over BIOT, which is also known as the Chagos Archipelago. Implementation of the treaty is currently being enacted by both countries’ legislatures.

A UK diplomatic team recently met with Mauritius’ prime minister to discuss the transfer of power, and the discussions reportedly touched on the “domaine Internet”.

A Mauritian newspaper reported that the discussions covered “l’avenir du domaine Internet, qui représente un enjeu économique intéressant pour Maurice”, which could translate as “the future of the Internet domain — which represents an interesting economic opportunity for Mauritius”.

The industry trend at the moment is for the governments of countries with popular ccTLDs to put the squeeze on their registry operators, but neither the UK nor Mauritius has a direct governance or contractual relationship with .io.

Comment Tagged: chagos, earnings, financials, icb, identity digital, internet computer bureau, io

Amazon delays book and fashion gTLDs

Two gTLD launches pencilled in for next month seem to have been delayed a year.

Amazon Registry has filed updated launch dates for two Japanese-language TLDs: .書籍 (.xn--rovu88b), meaning “book”, and .ファッション (.xn--bck1b9a5dre4c), meaning “fashion”.

Both had been previously scheduled to go to general availability in early November, but new dates published by ICANN have pushed both back to the same dates in 2026.

Both have already completed their mandatory sunrise periods, back in late 2016. If they do go GA next year, it will have been a full decade between trademark protection and free-for-all.

Amazon has been slowly releasing its long-dormant stockpile of gTLDs recently. Three — .you, .talk and .fast — went GA earlier this month. Three others — .free, .hot and .spot — launched in the first half of the year.

Comment Tagged: .xn--bck1b9a5dre4c, .xn--rovu88b, .ファッション, .書籍, amazon, new gTLDs