.com is back as Verisign discounts bear fruit

Verisign’s .com returned to growth in the first quarter after the company offered its registrars marketing programs that substantially discounted the retail price of domains.

The company ended the quarter with 169.8 million .com and .net domains under management, a 777,000-name increase on the end of 2024. It’s the first time it’s reported quarterly DUM growth in almost two years.

While the company did not break out the split between the two TLDs, my records show that .com’s zone file grew by about 800,000 names during the quarter, while .net’s shrank by about 100,000.

Verisign has now upgraded its guidance for DUM growth this year to between a 0.7% decrease and a 0.9% increase, the first time its guidance has had a top-end in positive territory in some time. In February, it guided at between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The major reason for the reversal of fortunes is the program of discounts that have seen some registrars sell .com domains to customers recently for less than half of the usual $10.26 wholesale price.

“It’s still early, but we do see signs of registrars shifting towards customer acquisition, and we also see more registrar engagement with our marketing programs,” CEO Jim Bidzos said on an earnings call with analysts tonight.

In previous quarters last year, the fact that registrars were focused on squeezing more revenue out of their customers, rather than driving new registrations, was blamed for .com losing DUM.

Bidzos said that sales were up across all three of its core geographic markets — the US, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. On previous calls, North America and China were noted for weaknesses.

If there’s any reason to believe that the guidance is cautious, it’s because of what Bidzos and analysts euphemistically referred to as “the macro”, or “macro-economic situation”.

At this particular point in history, that’s code for US President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior with regard to world trade and tariffs, that has spooked economies globally. It’s not at all clear yet how this crisis might affect the domains market.

Verisign reported net income of $199 million for the quarter, up from $194 million a year ago, on revenue up 4.7% at $402 million. Operating income was up from $259 million to $271 million

The company, which has to date mainly been rewarding investors with share buybacks, has now also started issuing quarterly cash dividends. This quarter, they’re all getting $0.77 per share.

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

Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted

A Chinese clothing company has asked ICANN to delete its dot-brand gTLD, despite the fact that it is being used for web sites and email.

Redstone Haute Couture wants rid of .redstone, which has been in active use for almost a decade.

My database shows that it has about a dozen names, most registered in 2016 and most of which resolve, not redirect, to web sites.

Several have MX records, suggesting they are or were being used for email too.

No reason was given for Redstone’s request. The brand itself doesn’t seem have been retired, though the company is perhaps better known for its product lines such as Giada and Curiel.

The company was using ZDNS as its back-end registry services provider.

Comment Tagged: .redstone, dot-brands, ICANN, termination

Verisign gave Trump $100,000

Remember January 20, 2025, about a thousand years ago, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States?

Remember how the dais at the Capitol rotunda was stacked with tech bros including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, each of whom had authorized million-dollar donations to the Trump inauguration fund?

You will not have seen Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos among the crowd of VIP supporters, but it turns out that’s probably only because his company didn’t cough up enough cash.

The .com registry operator donated $100,000 to the Trump Vance Inauguration Committee, records published Sunday by the Federal Election Commission show.

I’ve searched the disclosure (pdf) for other deep-pocketed domain industry companies and CEOs but couldn’t find any.

The Verisign donation is only a tenth of the size of donations made by Meta, Google and Cook, and is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall size of the fund, which reports put at an eye-watering $245.3 million.

The aforementioned tech bros were accused at the time of making the donations in order to curry favor with the new administration. Some, such as Meta, have since changed their policies to pander to Trump’s sensibilities.

Verisign’s most critical engagement with the US government comes via its Cooperative Agreement with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Department of Commerce.

The Cooperative Agreement is the document that cements Verisign’s monopoly over .com and gives it its price-raising powers, currently set at 7% in four out of the six years of the contract’s duration.

The deal was renewed last year and is not due to be renewed under the current Trump administration (unless…). Prices had been frozen for six years under Obama, but Trump reinstated the 7% powers in 2018 during his first term.

But Verisign has also been engaged in talks with the NTIA about downstream pricing — at registrars and domain investors — that have a lot of people worried.

Renewing the agreement last November, the NTIA said that “prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed”.

These talks appear to have stalled due to lack of leadership at NTIA, which is headed by a political appointee. Even 91 days after Trump was inaugurated, the agency does not yet have a confirmed chief.

Adam Cassady, formerly with the Federal Communications Commission, is currently acting assistant secretary, but Trump’s pick as his permanent replacement is Arielle Roth, policy director on the Senate’s commerce committee.

Roth came in for a grilling over suggestions she would use her powers over broadband policy to benefit Elon Musk’s Starlink, but seems to be a shoo-in for confirmation

In Verisign’s most recent earnings call, Bidzos noted that “unregulated retail price increases exceed our wholesale price increases”, adding “we look forward to engaging with our new regulators”.

So what does a hundred grand buy you nowadays? I guess we’ll find out soon.

5 Comments Tagged: cooperative agreement, ntia, trump, verisign

Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS

March saw the lowest number of requests for private Whois data via ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service since the system launched in late 2023.

ICANN’s latest stats show that there were just 91 requests last month, compared to February’s 143 and the previous low, from last November, of 103.

The dip can probably attributed at least in part to the departure of eight companies from the pool of participating registrars.

Notably, Tucows pulled its four accreditations from the service. Four shell registrars belonging to Tracer (Focus IP) also withdrew because their accreditations have been terminated.

Of the 1,307 domain lookups via RDRS in March, also a new low, 19% were for domains at non-participating registrars. That was up slightly from 17% in February and compares to 25% from the service’s launch.

The average time for a request to be approved was 3.3 days, the second-lowest of any monthly reporting period to date. Denials took on average just over a week. Both metrics were well below the lifetime average.

Intellectual property owners and law enforcement are still the largest categories of requestor, together accounting for almost half of requests in March.

Interestingly, UK cops have now submitted more requests for private data than police from any other country, including the US. Law enforcement requests since last October now stand at 30 for the UK and 29 for the US.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, privacy, rdrs, tracer, tucows, whois

Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours

A screwup by MarkMonitor and GoDaddy was responsible for a two-hour outage affecting Zoom’s videoconferencing services yesterday, according to the company.

The widely used services were offline between 1825 and 2012 UTC yesterday because GoDaddy Registry, apparently acting under MarkMonitor’s instructions, shut down the zoom.us domain.

Screenshots posted to social media show zoom.us returning an NXDOMAIN error in web browsers. In-progress conference calls were reportedly shut off mid-stream.

Zoom said in a statement:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by “server block”, but it sounds consistent with a serverHold EPP status, where a registry prevents a domain from resolving in the DNS.

GoDaddy is the registry for .us domains. MarkMonitor is a hands-on corporate registrar dealing primarily with high-value brand clients.

Zoom is the incredibly popular conferencing service that grew to such popularity during the pandemic one could almost argue that it could be considered critical infrastructure.

While two hours downtime is hardly the end of the world, it’s still one hell of a screwup.

Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy, markmonitor, zoom

The Soviet Union might be safe after all

The ccTLD from the defunct Soviet Union may be safe from deletion, judging by the ccNSO’s latest pronouncement on the issue.

It seems like, following a bit of a kerfuffle at ICANN 82 in Seattle last month, IANA has been sniffing around behind the scenes trying to figure out whether its own policy on ccTLD retirements applies to .su.

Responding to an unpublished email from IANA chief Kim Davies, the ccNSO seems to have clarified that .su, which has over 100,000 registrations despite its associated territory ceasing to exist 30-odd years ago, is not covered by the policy.

IANA can put a ccTLD into the root if the International Organization for Standardization adds it to its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list of two-letter country codes.

SU is not on the main list of codes under 3166 but, along with UK, AC (Ascension Islands) and EU, it is on an “exceptionally reserved” sub-list.

ICANN’s policy on deleting ccTLDs was until quite recently not fully codified, but ICANN in 2022 approved a formal Retirement Policy (PDF, from page 13).

That policy allows ICANN to to set the wheels in motion for a deletion whenever a “triggering event” occurs, and:

For 2 letter ccTLDs which corresponded to an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Code Element – The Trigger is the deletion of that corresponding Alpha-2 Code Element from the ISO 3166-1 Standard by the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency (“ISO 3166/MA”)

IANA seems to have wanted clarification on whether “Alpha-2 Code Element” also means “exceptionally reserved” codes. If it does, then .su probably enjoys the same protected status as .uk.

The policy specifically says that .uk, .ac and .eu are eligible as ccTLDs, but ignores .su entirely for reasons unknown.

The ccNSO told Davies in its April 10 letter (pdf):

it is our view that the Policy is relevant only in circumstances where, as a result of action taken by the ISO, a delegated 2-letter code is no longer on the list of country names or an exceptionally reserved code element.

My read of this is that the ccNSO is saying that, unless ISO removes SU from its “exceptionally reserved” list, there’s no “triggering event” that would compel IANA to delete .su from the DNS root zone.

SU has been removed from the 3166 list once before, back in the 1990s, but it might be a stretch to retroactively accept that as a triggering event, given that it’s been “exceptionally reserved”, apparently at the .su registry’s request, since 2008.

So… is .su safe? It’s certainly looking safer now than it did a few weeks ago, in my view.

This could be seen as good news for ICANN, which might now be able to avoid a damaging confrontation with Russia while also dodging accusations that it’s ignoring its own policies in an embarrassing capitulation to Moscow.

Comment Tagged: .su, iana, ICANN, iso 3166, retirement

Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”

Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.

The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.

All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.

The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.

5 Comments Tagged: google

Facebook thinks ICANN is a bit rubbish

Facebook owner Meta came away from the recent ICANN 82 public meeting unimpressed and wondering why the community doesn’t actually seem to be doing much, according to the company’s representative.

Writing to ICANN’s CEO and chair last week, head of IP and DNS Mia Brickhouse praised ICANN’s organizational skills but said she was “concerned regarding the lack of tangible outcomes relative to the significant community investment of nearly one week in Seattle.”

“While there were pockets of progress, it was challenging to identify concrete policy-oriented outcomes that I would use to mark participation in the Seattle meeting as a productive success,” she said.

“Many participants I spoke with felt the experience was more focused on policy status updates and remaining entrenched in legacy positions, rather than making measurable progress,” she said.

Welcome to ICANN, Mia!

She goes on to criticize the amount of navel-gazing at the meeting and said the current review into ICANN’s meetings strategy should not only focus on cutting ICANN’s costs but also on making meetings produce results.

Meta’s pet issues are Whois and DNS abuse. Its social media sites get a tonne of phishing attacks using maliciously registered domains and the company is not above taking registrars to court if they fail to play along with its enforcement efforts.

The company is fairly influential in policy-making circles, and arguably may become increasingly so over the next few years, depending on how deeply Donald Trump can reach into Mark Zuckerberg’s trousers.

But the Brickhouse letter is just the latest critique of what I and other time-haggard ICANN observers have been banging on about for years — the “Do Nothing” ICANN. I first pointed out in January 2022 that ICANN hadn’t actually done anything in about five years, something ICANN acknowledged a few months later.

To be fair, the Org has actually started producing tangible output since then. The Registration Data Request System is, whatever its flaws, a thing that the ICANN community came up with and the ICANN Org delivered.

But RDRS, ICANN’s response to the General Data Protection Regulation, took longer to create and deploy than the GDRP itself. ICANN’s multistakeholder model was slower than the notoriously lumbering EU legislative process.

The next round of the new gTLD program is another deliverable that also seems to be hitting its deadlines ahead of a Q2 2026 launch. But it has still taken longer than NASA’s Apollo Program to get off the ground.

One of the most on-point things I’ve read this year came from GoDaddy policy veep James Bladel, who wrote in his board election candidacy statement that “ICANN must stop telling the world why its role is important and start showing clear examples of multistakeholder successes.”

While Bladel did not get elected, Brickhouse’s letter points to an exchange in Seattle between one current and one former ICANN director, in which both parties agreed that “the current process is not working”.

Michael Palage, a freelance consultant who served a term on the board two decades ago, took to the Public Forum mic to complain that ICANN and its contracted parties are increasingly turning to bilateral contract amendments to address issues of concern, rather that having the whole community come up with formal consensus policies.

Becky Burr, approaching the end of her nine-year directorship, concurred that the “policy development process is not efficient and it’s not working as it should”, but disagreed that bilateral deals were not appropriate for addressing pressing issues.

You’re got two people, both who’ve served on the ICANN board and have over half a century of ICANN experience between them, agreeing that the current multistakeholder policy-making model isn’t working.

I’m certain there are other recent examples of long-serving community members criticising the process that are not readily springing to mind.

Sadly, ICANN’s usual response to broad community concerns is to launch a consultation or working group or comment period or somesuch, which often adds to the bloat and drains already jaded volunteers’ available work hours.

I can’t see anything changing any time soon, but there is a public comment period on the meetings strategy still open here.

5 Comments Tagged: do nothing, facebook, ICANN, icann 82, meta

ICANN spending $365,000 a year on coffee and booze

Scrapping coffee breaks and cocktail receptions is among a raft of proposals ICANN has floated in an effort to cut the cost of its public meetings and get its budget under control.

The Org is also thinking about making some meetings shorter or going online-only in order to cut costs, which were estimated to come in at around $14 million in ICANN’s current fiscal year.

But ICANN has shelved the idea of starting to charge community members to attend, after many pointed out that it could disenfranchise less well-funded would-be attendees.

The proposals, which were developed from seeds put forward by Org and refined with a small group of community volunteers and public sessions at recent meetings, have now been put out for formal public comment

One eyebrow-raising stat, new to me, was that the “current estimated cost of networking receptions and coffee breaks is approximately $365,000 annually”. Meetings typically have two coffee breaks per day and two scheduled evening receptions per meeting.

While $365,000 may seem like a lot, consider that it’s spread over three meetings and about 2,000 attendees per meeting. If each attendee on average has a couple of coffees and a couple of glasses of wine at each event, one could easily argue it’s not really that expensive per head.

But the proposals out for comment suggest that any networking event that does not have an external sponsor could be scrapped.

ICANN’s also talking about shortening its Community Forum — the first of the year’s three meetings, typically held in March — by one day by shifting the Public Forum from Thursday to Monday, so the venue’s main ballroom only has to be rented for one day.

Org reckons it could save $460,000 a year by dropping the last day altogether, also eliminating one hotel night for each funded traveller. It turns out the Thursday sessions are lightly attended anyway, with room utilization rates at 20% to 30%, compared to the 60% to 80% earlier in the meeting.

ICANN reckons it could also save money — 10% to 20% per meeting, which works out to many hundreds of thousands of dollars — by switching to an online-only or hybrid model for one meeting a year. Such meetings were the standard during the recent pandemic.

It is also considering whether to reduce the variety of cities it holds its meetings in. It reckons it could cut costs by picking more economical locations and signing multi-year bulk deals with venues.

The proposals come almost a year after ICANN announced it was looking to slash its budget in response to stagnating revenue.

The proposals are now open for comment until May 19.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, meetings

Regulator going after suicide site that even Epik banned

UK communications regulator Ofcom has opened its first public investigation under the new Online Safety Act, targeting a notorious forum that has been linked to dozens of suicides globally.

The probe demands that the site in question provide evidence that it protects its UK users from illegal or harmful content — in this case “encouraging or assisting suicide”.

Failure to do so could lead to Ofcom fining the site’s owners millions, or seeking court orders to have other companies, such as advertisers or internet service providers, disrupt its business, Ofcom said.

The law is often talked about in the context of large social media companies such as Facebook and TikTok, which are often accused of algorithmically instilling suicide ideation in children, but it applies to any service that allows user-to-user content.

This apparently extends to web forums. Some non-controversial sites have already closed down rather than bear the expense of complying.

The Act doesn’t specifically mention domain registrars and registries as being covered by its provisions, but GoDaddy, for example, certainly seems to think it does. It even reckons its domain search feature might be covered.

Ofcom isn’t naming the suicide site, so I won’t either, but it’s not hard to identify by connecting a few dots.

It uses a domain in Verisign’s .net, currently registered with Cloudflare’s registrar. Both registry and registrar are US companies.

The site in question lost its original .com name in 2021 when Epik — yes, even the controversial, free-speech-loving old Epik under Rob Monster — reportedly thought it was too hot to handle.

The site’s administrators have today called the probe “blatant overreach” and accused Ofcom of a “censorship agenda”. They’re currently begging users for cryptocurrency donations.

Media investigations have linked the site to more than 50 suicide deaths. In some cases, the site’s users reportedly goaded their victims, including some children, to take their own lives.

The admins, knowing the site is a target, have previously said they have back-up domains that they could switch to within minutes if they get shut down.

2 Comments Tagged: .net, cloudflare, epik, ofcom, online safety act, verisign