Domain world growth despite .com slide

In the fastest-published quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief in many years, Verisign last night reported that the world’s extant domain name registrations increased by 5.8 million in the second quarter.

The report was published to coincide with Verisign’s Q2 earnings report, and came just two weeks after the publication of the Q1 brief.

The trend of the domain universe, hampered by the ongoing decline of Verisign’s own .com and .net, which lost 1.8 million names compared to Q1, being buttressed by ccTLDs and new gTLDs, continued.

New gTLDs were up 1.3 million names sequentially and 6.5 million annually — 4.0% and 23.2% respectively — to 34.6 million, but we sadly have to assume that a great many of these new names are speculative or abusive.

Verisign estimates the “combined renewal percentage estimate” for new gTLDs was 38.0%, about half of where .com’s somewhat depressed number lies.

ccTLD domains were at 140 million at the end of June, up 400,000 (0.3%) sequentially and three million (2.2%) annually, the DNIB states.

Pre-2012 gTLD names were up 122,100 sequentially and 154,200 annually, ending the quarter at 17.2 million.

Comment Tagged: dnib, verisign

Verisign predicts more gloom as registrars shun .com growth

Verisign has yet again massively downgraded its expectations for .com growth, after it lost almost two million domains in the second quarter.

The company said it had 170.6 million .com and .net domains at the end of June, down 1.8 million compared to Q1 and a 2.2% decrease compared to a year earlier.

CEO Jim Bidzos said Verisign now expects the domain name base for the full year to be between -2% and -3%. That compares to a range of between +0.25% and -1.75% predicted in April and +1% to -1% predicted in February.

The Q2 renewal rate is expected to be 72.6% compared to 73.4% a year ago and 74.1% in Q1.

Bidzos said he does not expect the base to return to positive growth until the second half of 2025.

Bidzos, talking to analysts, acknowledged that Verisign’s wholesale .com price increases “may have had an impact” but put the blame for the growth shortfall squarely on what he called the “unregulated retail channel” in the US.

American registrars have been cranking up their prices in order to prioritize average revenue per user over volume, he said, meaning retail prices for .com have gone up “more than twice” Verisign’s own price hikes, leading to fewer sales as a result.

“Our research shows that the benefit from our capped wholesale prices is not always passed on to consumers,” he said.

He faced a barrage of questions from analysts about recent calls for the US government to sever its ties with Verisign over .com and put the TLD out for competitive rebidding, but reiterated the company’s position that if the government cuts it off, it still gets to run .com under its contract with ICANN.

Despite the volume woes, Verisign continues to be a high-margin cash-generating machine.

The company reported Q2 net income of $199 million, up from $186 million a year ago, on revenue up 4.1% at $387 million. Operating income was up to $266 million from $249 million and operating cash flow up to $160 million from $145 million.

Comment Tagged: .com, earnings, financials, ICANN, ntia, pricing, verisign

Republicans quiz NTIA on Verisign .com renewal

Three Republican members of the US House of Representatives have raised the specter of Verisign having to compete to renew its .com deal with the US government.

In a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Congresspeople ask whether NTIA has made any efforts to renegotiate or obtain public feedback on its contract with Verisign.

They also ask whether NTIA has looked at the “effect of the recent price increases implemented by Verisign on the .com domain name marketplace” and “the impact of potential registration price increases on the .com domain name market”.

The Cooperative Agreement between NTIA and Verisign is what allows the company to raise .com wholesale fees. That power was frozen for years under the Obama administration but returned under Trump.

The letter follows missives from three campaign groups a month ago, which called Verisign, NTIA and ICANN a “cartel” that enables Verisign’s monopoly and called for the .com contract to be put out to bid.

The Congresspeople’s letter doesn’t come anywhere close to asking for the same, but it does cite previous instances where legislators and the Department of Justice have called for a competitive bidding process.

Verisign has responded to earlier letters by pointing out that even if NTIA were to cancel the agreement, the .com Registry Agreement with ICANN would still stand.

The letter (pdf) is signed by House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Subcommittee on Communications and Technology chair Bob Latta, and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations chair Morgan Griffith.

The Cooperative Agreement is set to auto-renew in November. The Congresspeople want answers from NTIA before August 8.

Comment Tagged: .com, cooperative agreement, ICANN, ntia, verisign

Smaller, more intense ICANN meetings with no free cocktails?

ICANN has floated the idea of hosting smaller, more focused meetings that eschew tedious PowerPoint presentations and do away with the free cocktail receptions.

Seeking to eliminate $10 million from its annual budget, management recently reached out to community leaders to see if they can put their heads together to make ICANN’s public meetings less expensive.

Ideas include scrapping one of the thrice-yearly in-person meetings entirely and replacing it with a virtual-only event, along the lines of the seven that were held over Zoom during the recent coronavirus pandemic.

The suggestions appear in a “How We Meet” discussion paper (pdf), presented as a jumping-off point for community discussions rather than a top-down edict.

Straight to the important stuff: ICANN is proposing to “reduce or eliminate ICANN-hosted or ICANN-sponsored social and outreach events” such as receptions, group dinners and other social networking events.

ICANN could seek third-party sponsors for these kind of events or, horror of horrors, operate a “cash bar”, the document states.

No more free booze!

If cost-conscious alcoholics have a reason to be concerned, it’s arguably worse news for community time vampires who enjoy nothing more than sucking up 45 minutes of their hour plodding through a PowerPoint explaining what their group has been up to since the last meeting.

The document suggests focusing meetings on “timely topics”, such as those with upcoming deadlines, that require “interactive dialogue in a hybrid format”, and cutting some of the extraneous nonsense.

Therefore, “extensive slide presentations, updates, and meetings (including between ICANN staff and community groups) that do not clearly require in-person or hybrid interactions will not be scheduled”, the document suggests.

Speaking as a remote participant in recent years, I’ve often chose to wait for session recordings to become available, rather than listening live, precisely so I can fast-forward through that kind of thing. That’s obviously not an option for an in-person attendee, many of whom are there on ICANN’s dime.

The document also suggests getting rid of “informational and training” events, such as the “How It Works” sessions, which it says “incur significant costs” but have “limited participation”.

ICANN is also floating the idea of reducing the number of sessions overall, and grouping constituency-specific sessions into a tighter schedule over fewer days (presumably in order to slash the hotel bill).

But the biggest shake-up of them all is arguably the idea of reducing the number of full in-person community meetings from three to two, with the cut meeting replaced with a virtual one.

Given the shared experiences from seven, consecutive Virtual Public Meetings during the pandemic and the costs of a hybrid ICANN Public Meeting, it may be timely to discuss whether there is, in fact, a current need to have three in-person/hybrid ICANN Public Meetings each year, or whether the community can work just as effectively if at least one of these meetings is conducted virtually.

It does not say which meeting could be cut, but points out that reducing the number of public meetings may increase the need for smaller, intersessional events that focus on individual constituencies or topics.

The discussion document will inform a series of calls interim CEO Sally Costerton will hold with community leaders over the next month or so. Any consensus reached could be acted up as early as September.

Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN, meetings

Private auctions to be banned in next new gTLD round

ICANN plans to ban private auctions in the next new gTLD application round, chair Tripti Sinha has told governments.

The board of directors plans to accept the Governmental Advisory Committee’s recent advice to “prohibit the use of private auctions in resolving contention sets in the next round of New gTLDs”, Sinha told her GAC counterpart in a letter published this week.

This is a significant departure from the 2012 round, where many contention sets were resolved privately, with tens of millions of dollars changing hands. Simply applying for a gTLD, in order to lose an auction rather than actually running a registry, will quite possibly no longer be a business model.

What replaces private auctions is yet to be determined. ICANN plans to publish a paper and hold two community webinars in August to discuss alternatives, and reach a decision at its meeting in early September.

Sinha warned that if it cannot reach a conclusion by the September meeting, it might delay the publication of the Applicant Guidebook and thus the opening of the next application window.

It’s quite an aggressive deadline, given the complexity of the problem. ICANN is essentially trying to figure out a way to prevent unscrupulous actors from attempting to game the system for financial gain.

Ideas such as allowing good-faith joint ventures to be formed between competing applicants have been floated in recent months, but have faced scrutiny as they might permit side-deals to be inked that have the same effect as private auctions.

What seems certain is that “last resort” auctions — where ICANN gets all the money for its already $200 million war chest — will still be an option in the next round, which is current penciled in for the first half of 2026.

ICANN’s board plans to pass resolutions on the matter next Monday, so we should have a little more clarity by the start of August at the latest.

2 Comments Tagged: gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, private auctions

.au prices going up

auDA is to raise the wholesale price of .au domains later this year in response to inflation.

The registry said that the price will go up from AUD 7.78 to AUD 8.45 ($5.60 USD), not including sales tax, on October 1 due to “inflation-based cost pressures”.

auDA said the prices mean .au domains will continue “to cost significantly less than the wholesale price of other comparable Top Level Domain options.”

Even after the price increase, .au will be closer to a .uk ($5) than a .com ($10.26).

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, pricing

Nominet names director hopefuls

Nominet has named the five people who have put themselves forward for two seats on its board of directors. While there are familiar faces, there are also notable absences.

Ashley La Bolle of Tucows is defending her non-executive director seat and standing for her second term, but fellow NED Simon Blackler, famously of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, is not.

PublicBenefit.uk resulted in a boardroom bloodbath at Nominet in 2021 and a change of focus for the .uk registry under new management.

Jim Davies, who threatened legal action after being excluded from the 2023 election, is also not on the list.

Rex Wickham of TwentyTwentyMedia, who sits on Nominet’s .UK Registry Advisory Council, is also on the list, along with Rob Golding, who has previously stood unsuccessfully for a NED seat.

Thomas Mangin and David Ward, neither of whom I believe have been candidates in Nominet elections before, round off the list.

Candidates’ election statements appear to be available to members only.

Nominet members get to vote, weighted according to how many .uk domains they manage, from September 23, and the new NEDs take their seats at the company’s AGM the following month.

Comment Tagged: election, nominet

Crowdstrike screw-up took down ICANN’s email

The domain name industry seemed to have dodged a bullet when it came to last Friday’s devastating worldwide computer outage, but it emerged over the weekend that at least one ear was grazed.

ICANN revealed late Friday that its email systems, hosted by an external provider, were affected by the bug, which saw millions of Windows endpoints bricked by a dodgy patch from security firm Crowdstrike.

At 2035 UTC, ICANN said: “ICANN is having email issues and we may not receive your email. ICANN’s external email vendor has been affected by today’s global IT outages”.

But by 0121 UTC Saturday, it reported: “ICANN’s email service has been restored and all email-dependent services have resumed.”

Given that ICANN often uses 2359 UTC as a cut-off point for things like public comment submissions, which are received via email, it’s easy to see how the lack of an inbox over that window could have caused some minor headaches on a different day.

I’m not aware of reports of any serious incidents in the wider domain space caused by the Crowdstrike bug. DNS resolution services do not typically rely upon the uninterrupted availability of Windows endpoints.

1 Comment Tagged: crowdstrike, ICANN

We grassed up .TOP, says free abuse outfit

A community-run URL “blacklist” project has claimed credit for the complaints that led to .TOP Registry getting hit by an ICANN Compliance action earlier this week.

.TOP was told on Tuesday that it has a month to sort of its abuse-handing procedures or risk losing the .top gTLD, which has over three million domains.

ICANN said the company had failed to respond to an unspecified complainant that had reported multiple phishing attacks, and now the source of that complaint has revealed itself in a news release.

URLAbuse says it was the party that reported the attacks to .TOP, which according to ICANN happened in mid April.

“Despite repeated notifications, the .TOP Registry Operator failed to address these issues, prompting URLAbuse to escalate the matter to ICANN,” URLAbuse said, providing a screenshot of ICANN’s response.

URLAbuse provides a free abuse blocklist that anyone is free to incorporate into their security setup. Domain industry partners include Radix, XYZ.com and Namecheap.

3 Comments Tagged: .top, .top registry, abuse, compliance, ICANN, urlabuse

ICANN to earmark $10 million for new gTLD subsidies

ICANN is planning to give $5 million of its auctions war-chest to new gTLD applicants from less well-off nations and wants community feedback on the idea.

The Org is sitting on over $200 million raised by auctioning gTLDs from the 2012 application round, and thinks some of it could be well-spent on subsidizing applicants in the next round.

It wants to create a $10 million fund for the Applicant Support Program, half of which will come from the auction proceeds and half of which will be covered by the existing program budget.

ICANN says this will be enough to provide “meaningful support for up to 45 new gTLD applicants”.

The auction funds have previously been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve and to launch the new Grant Program, which is making $10 million available with year to worthy, on-topic projects.

Clearly, at that rate, the Grant Program may well never exhaust the auction fund, given the likelihood of future auctions and investment gains over the next couple of decades.

The Applicant Support Program will be open to non-profit or small business applicants in most of the world’s territories, as I previously blogged. In the 2012 round, three applicants applied but only one received the discount.

The request to divert some of the cash into the ASP is not subject to a regular public comment process. Rather, ICANN’s community groups have been asked to send their thoughts to the board directly before August 12.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, auctions, ICANN, new gTLDs