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.

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

Ireland’s .ie formally changes hands

IE Domain Registry has formally taken the reins at .ie after a decision by ICANN’s board of directors.

The board voted last week to redelegate Ireland’s ccTLD to the company that has in effect been in control of it since the turn of the century.

From the late 1980s, .ie was formally delegated to University College Dublin, which started subcontracting its management to IEDR in 2000.

The redelegation by IANA, now formally approved by ICANN, appears to be a formality, with ICANN saying no significant concerns raised by the university or local internet community.

Comment Tagged: .ie, iana, ICANN, iedr, redelegation, university college dublin

Verisign’s crystal ball sees more growth for .com

Verisign has cranked up its growth predictions for .com for another consecutive quarter, partly driven by the availability of AI website creation tools.

Announcing its second-quarter financial results last week, the company said that it now expects its domain name count in .com and .net — in practice that usually means .com — to be between 5.2% and 6% for 2026.

That a sharp increase from the 3.1% and 4.3% range it had predicted just three months ago, and more than double the low-end growth in estimate in its February 1.5% to 3.5% forecast.

In Q2, it reported a “record” of 12.7 million new registrations, bringing the .com/.net total to 179.1 million. That compared to 11.5 million in Q1 and 10.4 million in Q2 last year. The net quarterly increase was 3.05 million.

Verisign described its now-confirmed 76.3% renewal rate for the first quarter as the highest it has seen in 20 years.

Explaining the growth, CEO Jim Bidzos said: “Registrars are focused on customer acquisition and are successfully engaged with our marketing programs. Additionally, AI tools are making content and website creation faster and easier.”

The company’s domain base had stagnated for a period whilst major registrars focused more on squeezing higher average revenue per customer rather than growth in domain volume.

Verisign reported net income of $217 million for the second quarter, up from $207 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 6% at $435 million. A cash-printing machine, the company returned hundreds of millions of dollars back to its shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

Comment Tagged: earnings, financials, verisign

.web could be a huge payday for Verisign

.web entered the root zone this week, ending over a quarter-century of drama over the once-coveted gTLD, and now it looks like it could be immediately worth tens of millions to its new registry.

Verisign got it, of course, seemingly by paying off the company, Altanovo Domains, that has been doggedly pursuing it through ICANN’s quasi-judicial complaints procedures for the last decade.

The company said in a statement: “The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential.”

Now it seems Verisign is going to use its newfound freedom — the .web registry is not subject to the same feature and pricing controls as .com — to milk it for all it’s worth.

The company told analysts last night that it’s going to launch .web later this year with its mandatory sunrise period for trademark holders, followed by a Limited Registration Period for existing .com registrants.

CEO Jim Bidzos said: “We intend to run an LRP, and the rules that we will use is we will give all of our holders of .com registrations, the opportunity to come and get the same registration in .web before we open registrations for general availability.”

That could be incredibly lucrative. If, say, Verisign charges about $15 per domain per year, and about 1% of .com domains have their matching .web names registered, you’re looking at about $25 million a year of high-margin revenue added to the top line immediately.

I’m plucking those numbers out of thin air, of course. Verisign has not revealed its pricing for .web, and there’s no way of telling how for sure many .com owners will want to defensively register .web equivalents for, as Bidzos put it, “a companion website”.

The fact that .net has been stagnant for over a decade may prove informative — registrants’ mindset of “must get the matching .net and .org”, which was prevalent in the pre-2012 world, is not standard when hundreds of other gTLDs are available.

Verisign also revealed that some .web domains will carry premium prices, which could also prove to be a windfall, particularly if the premium fees carry over into renewal pricing, which the company is now able to do.

Verisign obtained the rights to .web in 2016 when it secretly bankrolled a company called Nu Dot Co, which had applied for the gTLD, in an ICANN-managed auction that saw a $135 million winning bid.

The clandestine nature of the proxy bidding was a huge source of controversy, and the runner-up bidder, Altanovo (then part of Afilias, spun out as an indie after Identity Digital acquired it) started filing ICANN complaints not long after.

While published ICANN documentation does not yet reflect it, it looks like Altanovo has yanked its Independent Review Process complaint against Verisign, with Verisign’s statement strongly suggest it was paid to do so.

I suspect Verisign was eager to bring .web to market to get some form of mind-share advantage before the gTLDs currently being applied for in the 2026 round start to come to market in a couple years. For Altanovo, patience may have meant profit.

Many in the industry, myself included, assumed a decade ago that Verisign’s primary goal in obtaining .web was defensive — it wanted to keep what it saw as .com’s strongest competitor out of the hands of its rivals and would probably just leave it dormant.

That may or may not have been true at the time, but based on current evidence it looks like that’s no longer the plan, if it ever was. Verisign’s talking about a launch before the end of the year.

Comment Tagged: .web, afiias, altanovo, ICANN, irp, new gTLDs, nu dot co, verisign