ICANN maps out new gTLD timeline

ICANN’s 85th public meeting kicked off in Mumbai at the weekend, the last community face-to-face before the next round of new gTLDs kicks off, and the Org took the time to spell out exactly what is expected to happen and when.

Surprisingly, given ICANN’s track record, it will hit its target of April 2026 to open the doors to applications. Unsurprisingly, given ICANN’s track record, it’s picked April 30 — the last possible day of its promised window — to do so.

The application window will remain open for 104 days. Applicants will have until August 12 to file their paperwork. It doesn’t matter when they hit submit; it’s not first-come, first-served.

Then, the process goes into quiet mode for at least two months while ICANN filters through the applications. If there’s about the same number of applications at the 2012 round — about 2,000 — ICANN reckons Reveal Day could come before ICANN 87, which begins in Muscat October 17.

So far, the timeline closely follows the 2012 round, but this time there’s a new wrinkle — applicants can change their gTLD strings to preselected “replacement strings” if they want to.

From Reveal Day, they’ll have 14 days to swap their strings if, for example, they find themselves in a contention set they don’t like the look of or if they get the vibe that they’re probably face objections.

After those two weeks are up, its String Confirmation day, expected some time in November. From that moment, the applicants are locked into their string of choice.

That’s also the day when the timer starts on the objections period, 104 days in which companies and organizations can object to applications based on criteria such as intellectual property rights, the public interest, and community rights.

Governments can also object on essentially any basis, as long as it’s well-articulated. Unilateral GAC Early Warnings are available, but a full consensus of the Governmental Advisory Committee would be needed to stand a chance at nuking an application outright.

The objection period should end some time next February. While that’s going on, some time in December, ICANN will conduct the Prioritization Draw, a lottery to decide the order in which applications will be processed.

The 2012 draw was important because the gTLDs that were first out of the traps had a measurable first-mover advantage in terms of speculative registrations. With hundreds of gTLDs now on the market, I believe it will be less important this time around.

After the draw, applicants will have to wait half a year before they are finally notified which contention sets, if any, they fit into, after the results of the String Similarity Review have been published.

ICANN has yet to select the panel for this review or create its detailed guidelines, but it’s expect to name it chosen vendor some time in Q2.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 85, new gTLDs, next round

War disrupts ICANN 85

It seems a bit tasteless to whine about disrupted flights when the Middle-East is erupting into war; nevertheless, that’s the immediate issue facing would-be attendees at this week’s public ICANN meeting.

ICANN 85 is taking place at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai, India from this coming weekend.

While Mumbai is over 2,000km from Tehran, Iran has been attacking many neighbouring nations in retaliation for the ongoing US-Israeli bombardment, which has resulted in the closure of several airports as missiles, drones and fighter planes invade their airspace.

Some ICANN travellers, mainly those traveling west-to-east, will find that hub airports in Dubai or Bahrain are in their connections itinerary. Those flying Emirates will be particularly affected.

ICANN said in a statement at the weekend that 85 “will proceed as planned” and that would-be attendees feeling uncomfortable traveling can take advantage of online participation if they prefer.

The Org and its travel agent are together responsible for funding and arranging the travel of hundreds of participants, and ICANN said they were working to route travellers around the affected airspace.

2 Comments Tagged: .mumbai, ICANN, icann 85, iran, war

Namecheap abandons fight for .org price caps

Namecheap seems to have thrown in the towel in its long-running fight to get ICANN to cap the prices of .org and .info domain names.

The registrar terminated its Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN back in November, with the IRP panel formally closing the case December 16, according to documents ICANN published last week.

Namecheap said it “has decided to terminate these proceedings without prejudice”, meaning it would be free to re-file the IRP at a later date. The company and ICANN have agreed to pay their own costs.

It was the second Namecheap IRP related to ICANN’s decision to remove price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts when it renewed them in 2019, bringing the two gTLDs into line with almost all other registries.

Namecheap filed its first IRP in February 2020, and scored a stonking win in 2023, with the panel ruling that ICANN had breached its bylaws and behaved in an overly secretive manner when it approved the contract renewals.

But the panel offered up remedies that gave ICANN a lot of interpretative leeway and important did not mandate the reintroduction of price caps. The second, now-defunct IRP saw Namecheap trying to force ICANN to undo its price caps decision.

It also sued ICANN in Los Angeles two years ago for essentially the same purpose, but it lost the case last July.

Since the price caps were lifted, non-profit Public Interest Registry has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, identity digital, irp, lawsuit, namecheap, pir, price caps

Identity Digital acquires another gTLD

Identity Digital has bulked out its already substantial portfolio of gTLDs, taking over the ICANN registry contract for another 2012-round string earlier this month.

The company is now running .onl via a newish affiliate called Jolly Host, according to ICANN records. It had been managed by Germany-based iRegistry, the original applicant.

.onl — short for “online” but with substantially fewer registrations than .online — had just shy of 24,000 registered names in its zone file today, but has been experiencing fairly consistent growth over the last few years.

It had 19,787 domains under management at the end of October, a lifetime peak.

Some of the growth may be due to the sub-$4 first-year fees currently being charged by some registrars. I believe the registry annual renewal fee is around $10, but some registrars mark that up to $25-$35.

.onl appears in the storefronts of most major registrars already.

1 Comment Tagged: .onl, ICANN, identity digital, iregistry, new gTLDs

Seven dead registrars on the out

When a registrar stops paying its registry partners, they tend to be cut off relatively quickly. ICANN takes a bit longer.

That seems to be what’s happening to a collection of accredited registrars under the same ownership, which have been given just a few weeks to pay over a year’s worth of overdue ICANN fees or lose their ability to sell names.

ICANN Compliance is gunning for Haveaname, InstantNames, MisterNIC, NetEstate, Neudomain, OpenName, and TopSystem for non-payment of fees going back at least to September 2024.

Probably not coincidentally, that’s the same month that all seven registrars abruptly lost all of their domains under management — not much more than 1,000 per registrar — and apparently lost its .com accreditation.

According to the ICANN notice, Compliance spent the last few months of 2024 unsuccessfully attempting to get in touch with the registrars, before ignoring the case for the whole of 2025 and only returning to it this month.

The registrar web sites are all simple placeholders, with broken SSL certs, doing the bare minimum to stay in compliance with the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement without actually attempting to sell any domains.

While almost all ICANN Compliance breach notices contain an allegation of unpaid fees, this is a rare instance where the allegations stop there; there’s no claim of any other breach.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, ICANN

Sav.com owner takes over .radio gTLD

The .radio gTLD appears to have changed hands, with a young registry affiliated with Sav.com taking over the reins.

ICANN documentation shows that Digity, a company led by Sav CEO Anthos Chrysanthou, took over the registry contract for the gTLD last month.

The original registry was the European Broadcasting Union, the entity behind the popular Eurovision Song Contest (.eurovision also exists, but is not used, with the EBU using a .vote domain during its annual broadcast).

Digity is already the contracted registry for .case, a former dot-brand it acquired from CentralNic a few years ago.

Apparently intended to be repurposed as a namespace for the legal profession, .case is yet to properly launch and has just a few dozen domains under management.

.radio, by contrast, if not exactly thriving in volume terms, is actually being sold and used, with about 3,000 DUM at a price point of just under $400 a year at the low end.

Some registration restrictions and pricing variations apply, and the gTLD does not have particularly broad registrar coverage.

British readers may be interested to learn that one of the highest-profile .radio domains belongs to oddball former DJ and TV host Noel Edmonds.

Comment Tagged: .case, .radio, acquisition, digity, ebu, new gTLDs

.com zone tops 160 million domains

The .com zone file contained more than 160 million domains for the first time today.

Registry operator Verisign is currently reporting 160,009,277 in the zone, with 162,479,075 .com names registered overall.

Names in the zone file are the ones with nameservers and therefore usable on the internet.

The milestone comes just over five years after the zone passed 150 million names, which happened January 13, 2021, according to my records.

The .com story has been a lumpy one in recent years, as registrars focused on increasing revenue per customer rather than shifting volume, but Verisign seems to have returned to steady growth in recent quarters.

Comment Tagged: .com, verisign

ai.com, the most-expensive domain sale ever

The domain name story that has it all? A record-setting sales price. A launch commercial during the US Super Bowl broadcast. A category-killer string reflecting the world’s hottest technology. It ticks a lot of boxes.

The domain ai.com sold almost a year ago for $70 million, according to Financial Times and the brokers, who negotiated the deal, beating the $30 million voice.com record set in 2019.

The seller was Arsyan Ismail, whose initials are AI, and the buyer was Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency exchange. The sell-side broker was Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The $70 million was reportedly paid in cryptocurrency rather than cash. Crypto-sceptics may worry whether this makes apples-to-apples comparisons with previous big sales appropriate.

Marszalek’s plan for the domain is to allow users to create autonomous AI agents that, rather just respond to chat prompts and instructions, are actually taken off-leash to perform tasks on behalf of their creators without waiting for permission.

The service was unveiled in an Super Bowl ad on Sunday, in a 30-second spot that encouraged viewers to create their usernames on on the currently pretty bare-bones ai.com web site.

The ad, which would have cost in the ball park of $8 million, was reportedly the most-successful of this year’s broadcast and caused the web site to crash under the weight of viewer curiosity.

1 Comment Tagged: ai.com, crypto.com, getyourdomain.com

.ai hits seven figures, raises prices

The .ai ccTLD recently crossed over the one million domain milestone and has raised its already substantial registration fee.

According to a social media post from the Government of Anguilla, .ai went into seven figures January 20.

For comparison, roughly a year earlier, .ai was at about 587,000 names. The growth is strong in this TLD.

The registry — technically the Government of Anguilla but outsourced to Identity Digital — has also raised the wholesale fee for .ai domains by 14.3%, according to TLDPriceChanges.com.

That means an extra 10 bucks a year. But .ai still has a two-year minimum commitment, so the price of a hand-reg has gone up $20.

Anguilla says the domain is now one of its primary sources of income and that the money is being channelled into local infrastructure projects.

1 Comment Tagged: ai, anguilla, idetnity digital

Typosquatter gets two years in jail

A man who used a typosquatted domain to defraud a man out of $146,000 has been given a two-year jail sentence in Australia.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Indian national Pardeep Pardeep, who was in the country on a student visa and worked as an Uber driver, registered a typo of a local law firm, which the paper did not name.

He then used the domain to email a man who was attempting to buy a house, ultimately tricking him into paying him AUD 209,000, which he then used to buy gold bullion. The victim has been unable to recover his money, the SMH reported.

Pardeep, having spent nine months on remand, will be eligible for parole in June, the paper reported.

Comment Tagged: typosquatting