Harper replaces Deutsch on ICANN board

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has revealed its picks for ICANN’s board of directors and it looks like they will be considerably less controversial than last year’s round.

Sarah Deutsch is leaving the board at the end of October’s annual general meeting at the conclusion of her maximum third three-year term. She is designated as North American for ICANN’s geographic diversity quotas.

She’s being replaced by Barbados-born, Berlin-based, UK-educated, Niel Harper, a security expert who runs an Estonian consulting agency.

Apparently a real citizen of the world, he nevertheless represents the Latin America and Caribbean region.

ICANN said he has been chief information security officer for the likes of Interpol and the United Nations Office for Project Services, among other roles around the world.

NomCom also announced that Kenyan tech policy expert Catherine Adeya is retaining her seat for a second three-year term.

Last year’s NomCom selection caused far more friction, with board chair Tripti Sinha publicly criticizing its members for essentially firing her vice-chair.

But the NomCom-appointed gender mix, something that often comes in for scrutiny, will clearly change this year.

The current board has five female directors out of a nominal 20 total. All five are voting members (as opposed to the four non-voting liaisons) and all five were appointed by NomCom, rather than a stakeholder group.

Obviously, Deutsch’s retirement and replacement with a male director would change that mix to a quarter of voting directors and a fifth of total directors being female, lower than the typical ICANN participant ratio.

However, one seat is currently unoccupied due to the recent death of Alan Barrett, an Address Supporting Organization appointee, and it’s not yet clear who will replace him.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

Let’s just get this out of the way: yes there will be a .fart fight

clownpenis.fart will very probably be a real domain name one day, but there will be a .fart fight over it.

Two applicants — Link Freedom Group and Endpoint Domains — have confirmed that they have applied for the new gTLD .fart, meaning that very probably in a couple of years you’ll be able to buy .fart domains.

And the legendary clownpenis.fart domain will inevitably become a reality.

If you’re young enough not to know what the heck I’m talking about, I’m referring to the infamous Saturday Night Live skit that aired in the 1999 season in the US, in which a blue-chip investment company is forced to advertise its services using that domain because nothing else was left.

Here you go:

.fart could of course come in for objections. The applicants might withdraw. They might even go to auction. There’s still a long way to go in the ICANN evaluation/approval process.

But yeah, two sets of industry experts decided to spend at least $227,000 on .fart.

4 Comments Tagged: .fart, contention, endpoint domains, ICANN, link freedom group, new gTLDs

New gTLDs: what we do and don’t know about the 2026 round

We don’t know how many new gTLD applications were submitted during the just-closed 2026 application window, but we do know the floor.

ICANN said late Friday that it had received more than 1,600 — that’s down by roughly 300 on the 2012 application round — when the window closed August 12.

It won’t be able to give a number for the total confirmed applications until every applicant has submitted their $227,000 initial application fee, and the current deadline to pay up is 2359 UTC on August 21.

That’s still during business hours this Friday in ICANN’s home time zone in California, so the absolute earliest a final confirmed number could be released is this coming weekend.

We also don’t know yet the full list of strings that have been applied for. That information will not be released until Reveal Day, which is expected to come some time in October. ICANN said it will put a date to Reveal Day in mid-September.

Due to the more convoluted process of string selection in the current round, even Reveal Day will not paint the full picture.

Unlike 2012, this time around applicants were given the option of submitting a secondary string for consideration that they are allowed to switch to if, following Reveal Day, they find themselves in contention with other applicants they don’t think they can beat at auction.

ICANN said at the weekend that more than 1,100 of the 1,600 applications contained replacement string choices.

It might be unwise to read too much into this immediately, but my hunch is that this means applications for dot-brand gTLDs could be lower than the previous hype would suggest, perhaps as few as 500, far fewer than the 2012 round.

It would be unusual for a company with an unambiguously registered and enforced trademark, and either a desire to either run it as a dot-brand or simply defend it, to apply for an alternative string as a contention back-up. I can’t imagine trademark lawyers advising such a move in anything but fringe cases.

We do know who some of the big non-brand applicants are, however.

Probably the biggest is Link Freedom Group, a new outfit from the same people behind Nova Registry, which operates .link, and headed by CEO Vaughn Liley. It’s published a list of 316 gTLDs it said it has applied for.

That means it wrote a check to ICANN for $71,732,000 just in up-front application fees. It’s also the largest known bulk applicant in the new gTLD program to date, beating the Donuts/Rightside record for even the 2012 round.

More on the LFG bids later.

Another old-hand putting in a bid is Colin Campbell, who headed 2012 success story .CLUB Registry before its sale to GoDaddy, has co-founded USA Made in America with industry veteran Michele Van Tilborg to apply for .factory.

This new company has already found itself in contention with LFG, which has also submitted a bid for .factory. Funnily enough, the same string was applied for in the original application round 26 years ago, but not in subsequent rounds.

USA Made in America says it has secured a $10 million debt facility to fight an ICANN auction of last resort, should it come to that.

John Alagna, brother of Joe of subdomain provider it.com Domains, said he’s formed a new company, TLD1 LLC, and what he saved on branding consultants he’s invested in applications for .bewell, .etc, .joinus, and .whatsnew.

He’ll be in contention with LFG too. Both companies say they have applied for .etc.

Out on social media, somebody under the name suffix.domains claims to have applied for 13 strings — .asap, .create, .future, .lfg, .mvp, .out, .pal, .planet, .research, .share, .tag, .this and .visit. There are a few LFG contentions there too.

Another new company, Endpoint Domains, says it has applied for .big, .fab, .fart, .ftw, .happy, .nsfw, .private and .true and that it might reveal more strings in future.

Elsewhere, the CEOs of registrars Porkbun and Dynadot, Ray King and Todd Han, have reportedly formed a new entity called Oinkadot to apply for 25 strings: .anime, .bit, .bug, .cancel, .dine, .dragon, .ghost, .glitch, .hack, .heart, .king, .loop, .manga, .moon, .panda, .puff, .queen, .sign, .spice, .stack, .stay, .super, .weed, .wire and .zzz.

I make that a total of 367 announced strings so far.

What you’ll notice from these TLD lists is an absence of non-Latin (maybe even also non-English) strings.

That could simply be because I haven’t seen any announcements yet, but if it proves that the level of internationalized domain names, or names serving under-served regions, is low, that’s going to be bad optics for ICANN, which has made globalizing the gTLD space one of the key selling points of the program.

1 Comment Tagged: 2026 round, contention, endpoint domains, ICANN, link freedom group, new gTLDs, oinkadot, suffix.domains, tld1, usa made in america

Government moves to nationalize .me

The government of Montenegro says it has set the ball rolling on the creation of a state-owned entity that will eventually manage its local ccTLD, .me.

The ccTLD, which enjoys over a million of registrations largely due to its friendliness to English speakers, is currently managed by a joint venture, doMEn, primarily controlled by GoDaddy and Identity Digital.

In a statement issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Policy, the government said (machine translated from the original Serbian):

Launching the process to establish a state-owned company that will manage the national .ME internet domain represents an important step towards returning the management of one of the country’s most valuable digital resources into the hands of the state.

In this way, we are strengthening Montenegro’s digital sovereignty, ensuring greater control over a strategic resource, and creating the conditions for a larger share of the benefits arising from management of the domain to remain in the country and be directed towards its further development.

The move squares with government policy documents published in May which indicated that Montenegro wants to take greater control over its TLD, at the same time putting the squeeze on revenues that today primarily flow to its American managers.

The May statement strongly suggested continued involvement of doMEn, at least as part of a transition process to state ownership, with the government taking more than 50% of the profits from the estimated €10.1 million ($11.75 million) .me brings in annually.

1 Comment Tagged: .me, domen, godaddy, identity digital, montenegro

Now you can plant “for sale” signs directly into your domains

In what could prove to be a game-changer for the domain industry aftermarket, domain investors can now place “for sale” signs directly into their DNS records, potentially bypassing middlemen such as brokers.

The Internet Engineering Task Force has published an informational technical standard that allows any registrant to flag their domains as available for sale, along with contact information and a price, without having to list them on a marketplace.

They would do so by adding a specially crafted TXT field to their DNS record, easily discoverable by relatively simple software and pretty much readable by humans.

The IETF standard is called RFC10023 or “The _for-sale Underscored and Globally Scoped DNS Node Name” and was written by Marco Davids of SIDN Labs, part of the Dutch ccTLD registry manager.

SIDN has been piloting the technology with its own registrars since last year, saying it has the aim of “helping to make the domain name market more transparent and accessible, so that domain names can be traded more quickly, fairly and effectively.”

SIDN said last year:

We want to provide registrants with an easy way of selling their .nl domain names themselves. That would enable a registrant to get a fair price for their domain name, rather than simply dropping it and getting nothing. We also hope that the system will help to keep .nl accessible to everyone, rather than becoming the exclusive province of professionals such as domainers and drop-catchers who specialise in ‘catching’ dropped domain names.

The spec calls for registrants to add TXT (text) records to their DNS, specifying that the domain is for sale and, optionally, how much it costs, in what currency (including Bitcoin), and how to get in touch to purchase it.

The purchasing process would not usually be automated; some human interaction would be required along the way.

But registrants can add a URL for a web form, or if they feel like taking the risk of falling victim to spammers (all DNS records are publicly accessible) their email address or phone number.

The spec would not be restricted to domainers or average domain owners — registries themselves could flag up their reserved premium stock as “_for-sale” in much the same way. They could even wildcard their entire TLD.

Whether the new technology has a major impact on the industry depends of course on adoption. Most registrants lack the technical nous to manually edit their DNS and will have to rely on registrar support to streamline the process with “click to sell” buttons and the like.

And given many registrars are plugged directly into the secondary markets, there might not be a sound business case to let their customers disintermediate them.

But it’s easy to see how enterprising individuals could leverage _for-sale records to compile lists of purchasable domains without the need for marketplace APIs or web scraping. If the price tag and contact address is in the DNS, it’s public data.

There are security risks as well, as the RFC makes clear. As TXT records permit free text, it would be fairly easy for a Bad Guy to put a malicious URL or scam text into their DNS, so anyone building a tool to parse such records will have to do a certain amount of sanitization.

The RFC is also fairly explicit about its lack of an off-switch. While you can unlist a domain at any time, you can’t use the new spec to state unequivocally that it is not for sale, so it’s no good if your goal is to fend off unwanted offers.

Comment Tagged: _for-sale, secondary market, sidn

Bali to apply for .bali, and the dot is delightful

The regional government of the Indonesian province of Bali is to formally announce an application for the .bali top-level domain at ICANN 87 in October, according to a local report.

Governor Wayan Koster said the local government is supporting a bid for .bali, according to IndoBaliNews

It’s not clear from the report whether the government is the applicant or merely signing off on an application by a third party, which is a necessity under ICANN’s rules regarding geographic strings.

What makes the proposal for .bali uniquely interesting — delightful, even — is that the dot also has meaning.

The Balinese word “dot” means “want”, so it’s not too much of a stretch to interpret .bali as “I want Bali”. The marketing is built-in.

This is handy given that tourism apparently accounts for 80% of Bali’s economy.

According to DI Stringtel, the only significant wrinkle to the application would be that Bali is also the name of a small town in Rajasthan, India, which also enjoys geographic protection.

.bali is only the third geographic gTLD to be announced that I’m aware of. The other two were .india and .bharat, both of which were announced by the Indian national registry, NIXI.

As I reported last year, the two Indian bids would likely be rejected because there’s a hard ban on country names under ICANN’s rules.

Bali will host ICANN’s Annual General Meeting in October, following the postponement of the Oman meeting.

Comment Tagged: bali, ICANN, icann 87, new gTLDs

ICANN board seat up for grabs

ICANN’s Country Code Names Supporting Organization has put out a call for nominations for candidates to potentially replace one of its current directors on the ICANN board next year.

It’s the seat currently held by Byron Holland of .ca registry CIRA. His first term on the board is up at next year’s AGM — the ccNSO starts its election process well in advance — and he’s eligible to be nominated again for another term.

The only people not eligible are those hailing from the Latin America and Caribbean region. That’s because the ccNSO has geographical diversity rules and its other director, Patricio Poblete, is from Chile.

Nominations must be submitted before the end of August 13, with voting taking place in November. A formal appointment will be made before the end of April 30 next year, with the successful candidate taking their seat at the end of the ICANN 90 public meeting in early November 2027.

Only representatives of ccTLD managers that are members of the ccNSO may be nominated. Further details have been published here.

Comment Tagged: ccnso, elections, ICANN

As .web goes live, “.website” changes hands

Identity Digital’s 2026 acquisition spree has continued, with the registry taking over a gTLD that means “.website” but has remarkably few registrations even a decade after launch.

ICANN records show Jolly Host, an Identity Digital subsidiary, is now the contracted party for .网站 (or .xn--5tzm5g as it appears in the DNS), which is the Chinese for “.website”.

The original registry was Hong Kong-based Global Website TLD Asia, part of the DotAsia registry group managed by former ICANN director Edmon Chung.

Despite the apparent goldmine of such a common term, addressing a market as large as China’s, as of today .网站 has just 2,871 domains in its zone file, the most it has ever had.

The news comes just a few days after the fate of English-language .web was finally sealed, with Verisign getting its prize delegated after a decade of legal wrangling.

It’s the seventh gTLD contract Jolly Host has had reassigned to it since February.

Comment Tagged: .xn--5tzm5g, .网站, acquisition, assignement, Global Website TLD Asia, identity digital, jolly host

Domain name universe tops 400 million

The number of registered domain names topped 400 million for the first time, according to the estimates in Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief quarterly report.

There were 401.6 million domains across all TLDs at the end of June, up 9.1 million or 2.3% compared to the first quarter and 29.9 million, or 8.1%, compared to a year earlier, the company reported.

About a third of the net new names were registered in .com and .net (let’s be frank, mostly .com), leaving Verisign’s flagships with a combined total of 179.1 million names. Annually, .com/.net was up 8.9 million names.

ccTLD domains were up 2.3 million at 148.6 million, while legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs, such as .biz and .info, were up by a total of 400,000 names to 21 million.

Post-2012 gTLDs slightly outperformed .com, with 3.3 new names to end Q2 at 52.9 million. The larger of them, including .xyz, .top, .site, .online and .vip, all experienced six-figure growth, with .vip pushing .site out of the top 10.

The top 10 largest ccTLDs all experienced growth and there was no change in their rankings.

That said, I don’t fully understand the source of some of Verisign’s numbers. For example, for not the first time the DNIB reports Russia’s .ru at 6.9 million domains, which is about 800,000 more than the .ru registry self-reports.

That’s the difference between .ru being the clear number-four ccTLD and it being pretty much tied with the Netherlands’ .nl. Both ccTLDs self-report 6.1 million names, rounded, on their own web sites.

1 Comment Tagged: dnib, verisign

Team Internet sells fewer domains but makes more profit

Team Internet, still reeling from Google’s decision to cut off one of its primary revenue sources, nevertheless stayed profitable in the first half of the year, the company reported.

The company’s domains division, one of three reporting units, saw a 6% dip in revenue when compared to the same period last year, coming in at $97.9 million versus $103.9 million.

At the EBITDA level, its profit for the six months to June 30 was $13.7 million, up by 28% from $10.7 million a year earlier.

Team Internet’s Search division, which had been reliant on Google’s now essentially discontinued AdSense for Domains service, saw a 63% decline in revenue to $48.3 million, converting an EBITDA profit of $8.5 million into a loss of $2.6 million.

The company said that revenue from AdSense for Domains is now “negligible” and that its transition to Google’s Related Search on Content returned the division to profit in June, though this is not visible from the reported H1 numbers.

Combining all three of the company’s divisions, overall Team Internet reported EBITDA profit of $19.5 million, down 21% on last year, on revenue down 32% at $179.1 million.

There was no news on the company’s plans to spin off its domains business, where a deal is expected shortly.

Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials, google, team internet