Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

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

Kevin Murphy, August 3, 2026, 02:39:49 (UTC), Domain Tech

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.

Domain Incite relies on support from readers like you to survive. Please consider making a one-off or recurring donation via PayPal. Please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.

Tagged: , ,

Add Your Comment