“Lowest Price Guaranteed!” $48 .com registrar canned

ICANN has terminated its second registrar of the week, ending the accreditation of Hong Kong-based 0101 Internet for non-payment of fees and other infractions.

The registrar, not to be confused with the unrelated 101 Domain, will lose its ability to sell gTLD domains January 29, according to a public ICANN termination notice.

The company’s roughly 1,200 gTLD domains will be transferred to another registrar, a procedure complicated by the fact that ICANN also alleges that 0101 Internet has not been escrowing its customers’ registration data as required.

The Compliance notice spells out a timeline of alleged non-responsiveness to ICANN’s emails, phone calls, mail and faxes dating back to March 2003, almost three years ago.

0101 Internet’s web page proudly declares “Lowest Price Guaranteed!”, with .com, .net and .org priced at a measly $47.88 each, which might explain why the company’s DUM has been tumbling for over a decade.

Comment Tagged: 0101 internet, compliance, ICANN, termination

No RDAP? No accreditation

ICANN has terminated its contract with another registrar after the company failed to implement RDAP, the Whois replacement protocol.

US-based Brennercom will be de-accredited January 28, according to a published ICANN Compliance notice.

The headline infraction is the fact that Brennercom failed to migrate to RDAP, but as is often the case the registrar owes ICANN money and has failed to publish some administrative details on its web site.

ICANN will now move Brennercom’s registered domains to a different registrar under its usual transition process.

That shouldn’t take long. While Brennercom’s web site claims to have handled customers with thousands of domains in their portfolios, my records show it has never had more than 133 domains under management. Right now, it has about 40.

Comment Tagged: brennercom, compliance, ICANN, rdap

Fifth-largest gTLD not dead after all

ICANN has assured users of its zone file distribution service that the .top gTLD is not dead, after an unspecified snafu earlier this week suggested it was.

On Wednesday, users of the Centralized Zone Data Service received an automated email stating: “Your zone data access for .top has been revoked… Reason: Request revoked as TLD has been made inactive.”

That would be a pretty big deal, as .top is the fifth-largest gTLD by volume and the second-largest new gTLD after .xyz, with something like 5.7 million names in its zone.

It might also carry a ring of truth for CZDS users who don’t track ICANN activities very closely, as .TOP Registry has recently been on the Compliance naughty step over DNS abuse allegations.

But affected users were assured yesterday that .top is not inactive and that an “issue” was to blame.

An email read: “an issue that temporarily marked the .TOP generic top-level domain (gTLD) as inactive… As a result, your previously approved CZDS access request for the .TOP zone file was revoked.”

The email goes on to say that users can wait for their access to be restored “in the next few days” or manually initiate a new CZDS request for the .top zone, which requires approval from the registry.

2 Comments Tagged: .top, .top registry, czds, glitch, ICANN

Half of registrar’s domains are abusive, ICANN says

A fast-growing registrar seems to be experiencing its growth spurt due to extremely high levels of DNS abuse, including phishing, according to the latest public breach notice from ICANN Compliance.

More than half of Bulgarian registrar MainReg’s domains under management are abusive, judging by the notice, which alleges MainReg’s unwillingness to investigate abuse reports in violation of its accreditation contract.

The notice is the first I can recall seeing that cites data from Domain Metrica, an ICANN service that aggregates abuse data from third-party block-lists. An unspecified third-party reporter (hands up in the comments if it was you!) is also cited.

“ICANN Domain Metrica data indicates that in November 2025 approximately 48% of MainReg’s DUMs were reported for phishing, with the figure at 45% as of 5 January 2026,” the notice says.

“The complaining party stated that its own independent analysis identified an even higher proportion of the Registrar’s DUMs engaged in scam‑related activity,” it adds.

MainReg isn’t a huge registrar, but transaction reports show that its DUM tripled between September 2024 and September 2025, from about 10,000 names to about 30,000. The company registered its first name in 2015. Almost all of its names are in .com, .net and .org.

The notice alleges other breaches, such as failing to migrate from Whois to RDAP, and gives MainReg until January 28 to come in compliance or risk termination.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, ICANN, mainreg

Burr joins PIR after leaving ICANN board

Community lifer Becky Burr has joined Public Interest Registry as senior policy advisor, the company announced today.

Burr, who at the US government was instrumental in the formation of ICANN in the late 1990s, recently completed a nine-year stint on ICANN’s board of directors, where she was one of the most active and visible participants.

Lawyer Burr previously headed policy for .biz registry Neustar, before its acquisition by GoDaddy, but she’s most recently been in private practice.

PIR, the non-profit .org registry, said Burr “will advise on a broad range of strategic policy matters and will engage with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) workstreams and global Internet governance matters.”

Comment Tagged: .org, pir

Refunds galore as gTLD losers finally bow out

There’s been a wave of withdrawals of new gTLD applications over the last couple of months after ICANN gave 15 companies their final notice that it was time to ask for a refund or lose their money forever.

But so far just seven unsuccessful applications from the 2012 round have been withdrawn, from the 19 that were eligible, according to my records.

Notably, all of the remaining applications for .mail, .corp and .home, strings that were banned on account of name collision risks, have been pulled. Google, Amazon and GMO Registry will all get partial refunds of their application fees.

Two applications for the fiercely contested .hotel have also been yanked, with Identity Digital and Radix getting their refunds. GRS Domains, Despegar and Fegistry still have not withdrawn, according to ICANN records.

ICANN had classed .hotel as a “already been delegated to other applicant” gTLD, which isn’t completely accurate. The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, however.

There are plenty of other applications from 2012 that have not been withdrawn, despite the fact that the gTLD in question is already live and freely available for registration.

L’Oreal, for example, is still clinging on to its bid for .salon, despite the fact that Identity Digital has been running it for years and has about 4,000 names in its zone.

Similarly, Planet Dot Eco, DotConnectAfrica and Commercial Connect do not appear to has asked for refunds for their respective bids for .eco, .africa and .shop, despite all three being live and run by successful rival applicants for years.

Asia Green IT System has not withdrawn its bids for .islam, .halal, and .persiangulf, which were banned following government objections. AGIT was essentially kicked out of the industry when its business with five other Middle-East themed gTLDs comprehensively failed.

The 2012 round’s most-stubborn applicant, Nameshop, still has a live bid for .idn. Indian conglomerate Tata has also not pulled its bid for .tata, which failed on geographic similarity grounds.

In a resolution passed last September, ICANN’s board decided to give all of its remaining 2012-round applicants 90 days notice that they could withdraw or lose their money. It’s not clear when that 90-day period began.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawals

.goo terminated as search engine closes down

The .goo gTLD is among a pair of dot-brand gTLDs to recently self-terminate.

goo was a 1990s-style search portal focused on the Japanese market and owned by local incumbent telco NTT. It eventually lost relevance and finally closed down for good at short notice last November.

Despite the similar branding, goo was unrelated to Google and in fact predated Google’s foundation by about a year, according to some accounts. It eventually turned to Google to power its search functionality.

NTT has asked ICANN to terminate its .goo registry contract and ICANN has given it the nod.

There was one active .goo domain, www.goo, which redirected to goo.ne.jp, its primary domain.

Joining .goo in self-termination is .wolterskluwer, one of those gTLDs that really makes me scratch my head for having never noticed its existence despite my daily exposure to vast amounts of gTLD data.

It’s owned by Wolters Kluwer, a large Dutch company that provides software for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unlike goo, the company appears to be in robust health but it never used its gTLD.

Comment Tagged: .goo, .wolterskluwer, dot-brands, ICANN, termination

GoDaddy to offer domain blocking to people who don’t have trademarks

GoDaddy’s registry arm wants to offer registrants the ability to block others from registering their brands in other TLDs, even if they don’t own a registered trademark.

In what could be a game-changer for the industry, the company has proposed a service called Domain Options, which could allow registrants to eventually claim rights to their domain across dozens or hundreds of gTLDs.

“The service will allow registered name holders to prevent registration of certain labels,” GoDaddy explained in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN just before Christmas.

“Labels will be an exact match of the registered name holder’s second-level domain name label,” the RSEP says. “The number of labels a registrant can protect under Domain Options is limited to the following: only exact match labels, and only for registered domain names held by the registrant.”

Simply put, if you have registered example.beer, you would be able to pay a fee to prevent other people from registering domains such as example.biz, example.cooking and example.photo.

The latest RSEP covers 34 GoDaddy-run gTLDs: .abogado, .beer, .biz, .blackfriday, .boston, .casa, .club, .compare, .cooking, .courses, .dds, .design, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .gay, .health, .ink, .law, .luxe, .miami, .photo, .rodeo, .select, .study, .surf, .tattoo, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .wiki, .work, and .yoga.

But ICANN has already approved the Domain Options service for use in GoDaddy’s .horse gTLD, which was floated (presumably humorously) as a trial balloon earlier in December. The .horse contract has already been amended to include the service.

Registrants would be able to convert the blocked domains into actual registrations at a later date, or cancel the service altogether.

Third parties would also be able to request blocked domains to be unblocked through worryingly unspecified means.

Domain Options appears to be essentially a simplified clone of two-year-old GoDaddy-led service GlobalBlock, known in ICANN contractual parlance as the Label Blocking Service.

GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay substantial fees — from $6,499 a year at 101domain, for example — to block their marks across 710 extensions as a cheaper alternative to buying 710 defensive registrations at full price.

Registry pricing for Domain Options is not revealed in the RSEP, but it’s hard to imagine it enormously undercutting and therefore cannibalzing GlobalBlock.

Now that ICANN has given GoDaddy the nod for .horse, it seems inevitable that the other 34 gTLDs will also be approved, and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a wave of similar RSEPs from other registries over the coming months.

2 Comments Tagged: domain options, globalblock, godaddy, ICANN, rsep

Happy new year expected for domain industry, says ICANN

ICANN’s revenue for 2026 is expected to be significantly above its earlier predictions, and it isn’t just because the Org cranked up its registry and registrar fees last year.

The budget for fiscal 2027, published shortly before Christmas, paints a picture of a much healthier domain industry than earlier thought.

The budget revises expectations for the Org’s current fiscal 2026 upwards in terms of transactions (meaning registrations, renewals and transfers) for gTLDs both new and old.

ICANN now expects legacy gTLD transactions for FY26, which ends June 30, to come in 7.7 million or 4.3% ahead of the predictions contained in the budget for the period its board approved last May.

Transactions are now expected to be 187.5 million versus the earlier estimate of 179.8 million.

It’s a similar story in new gTLDs, where transactions are now predicted at 43.1 million versus 33.1 million, a 10 million or 30.2% difference in estimates December versus May.

ICANN says in its draft FY27 budget (pdf) that the uptick became apparent about a year ago:

Beginning in the second half of FY25 [about a year ago], domain name transaction volumes began to increase, which was unexpected at the time of budgeting for FY25. Continued transaction volume growth and upward guidance from the industry resulted in an increased funding forecast for FY26, a trend that is expected to continue in FY27.

Due to this bullishness, the Org has no plans to raise its fees in FY27.

The growth spurt means that ICANN now thinks FY26 funding for operations will come in $11.6 million ahead of budget — $161.4 million compared to the $149.8 million it budgeted for six months ago.

The Org also expects to end its FY26 with about 400 more accredited registrars and about 20 more contracted registries than it thought. Likely due to drop-catcher registrars and dot-brand registries.

None of these figures include the upcoming new gTLD application round, which will not create any new fee-paying registries for some time.

For FY27, which begins July 1, ICANN is expecting transactions to hit 191.9 million and 44.4 million, growth of 2% and 3%, for legacy and new gTLDs respectively. That’s compared to the newly updated FY26 guidance.

ICANN is budgeting for $161.1 million in operations funding for FY27, down a bit on the $161.4 million it’s now predicting for FY26, due to lower application fees from new registrars seeking accreditation.

The draft budget is open for public comment until February 12.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN

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