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.web could be a huge payday for Verisign

Kevin Murphy, July 24, 2026, 13:08:17 (UTC), Domain Registries

.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.

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