These are the .gov domains Trump has deleted so far

US government domain names covering policies on child support benefits, law enforcement accountability, and clean energy are among over a dozen deleted by the Trump administration since January 20.

The deletions, some of which seem to be linked to the overturning of former Presiden Biden’s executive orders, may give some insight into the new administration’s priorities.

Notably, childtaxcredit.gov has been deleted from the .gov zone file, based on a comparison of the January 19 and February 6 zone files.

The domain previously redirected to a page on whitehouse.gov that espoused the virtues of the Child Tax Credit, which since 1997 has provided tax breaks to American families currently worth $2,000 per child.

That page has also been deleted, though versions can be found on Archive.org.

Also deleted is nlead.gov, the domain for the Biden-created National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which sought to make records of police misconduct available to LEA recruiters. The web site is now down.

The domains build.gov, invest.gov and others that promoted the Biden-era $568 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, are also gone.

Also deleted, publicserviceloanforgiveness.gov and pslf.gov, which promoted Biden’s student loan forgiveness project, and cleanenergy.gov, which promoted his environmental investment policies.

Here’s the list of domains that have been deleted since January 20. I’ve excluded names that appear to have been owned by state and local governmental registrants.

build.gov
buildbackbetter.gov
childtaxcredit.gov
cleanenergy.gov
economicopportunity.gov
invertir.gov
invest.gov
investinamerica.gov
investinginamerica.gov
nlead.gov
pslf.gov
publicserviceloanforgiveness.gov
unitedwestand.gov
whitehousedrugpolicy.gov

The domains in most cases are still registered, according to Whois records, so they could come back online at a later date, but the fact they have been deleted from the .gov zone file means they no longer resolve.

As DomainGang notes, the domains dei.gov and waste.gov are among those that have been registered since Trump’s inauguration, though neither currently resolve.

About 150 .gov domains have entered the zone file since January 20, but almost all appear to represent small towns around the country, rather than the federal government.

Did Trump just create the world’s next ccTLD?

Could there be a .gz?

I’m sometimes happy that DI has such a narrow beat. Today, it means I don’t have to discuss the legal, political, moral or ethical implications of US President Donald Trump’s just-announced plan for Gaza.

At a press conference last night, Trump said he wants the Palestinians to leave Gaza, to be resettled elsewhere in the region, and for the US to “take over” the territory and have a “long-term ownership position” on it.

The details of Trump’s aspiration are not immediately clear. Is he talking about a military occupation? Annexation? Does he just want to build another golf course?

It’s almost certainly too early to speculate, so let’s speculate.

With Trump talking about US ownership of Gaza, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Gaza’s future, should his plan come to fruition, is as a US territory, or something very much like one.

Populated territories of any nation in general get their own ccTLD. Puerto Rico’s .pr and Guam’s .gu are two examples of US territories with their own ccTLDs.

The US annexation of Gaza would not necessarily even have to be legal under international law or recognized by America’s peers in the United Nations to create the possibility of a new ccTLD.

The path to the root involves a lot of buck-passing and at no point includes a qualitative evaluation of whether a territory is legal or otherwise deserving of recognition.

As you may know, ICANN’s IANA department is responsible for adding and removing ccTLDs from the DNS root, but it takes its cues from the International Organization for Standardization.

Under long-standing IANA convention known as ICP-1, any territory with a two-letter code on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list qualifies for a ccTLD. If a registry can show technical nous and local support, it can claim the TLD.

But the ISO takes its cues in turn from the Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat, and its M49 standard, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”.

A territory appears on that list as a matter of “statistical convenience” for the UN, and does not imply that the UN or its member states recognize that territory politically.

Palestine itself was granted its ccTLD, .ps, a quarter-century ago, as “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, despite the legal status of the territory being disputed, because UN Stats and ISO decided to put it on their lists.

So Gaza could possibly get its own ccTLD if the US takes it over and splits it from the West Bank, even if it becomes a contested hell-hole where the luxury beachfront hotels are bombed to rubble faster than Trump can build them.

.gz is available, assuming Gaza is not renamed Trumpland or Disneyworld East or something.

$10 million ICANN giveaway winners picked

ICANN has picked the beneficiaries of up to $10 million it plans to give away in the first year of its Grant Program.

The board of directors approved the final slate of applicants, which will now have to sign contracts with ICANN, at its retreat this weekend.

While the recipients will not be publicly named until March at the earliest, ICANN has previously said it expects to give an average of $200,000 to about 50 applicants.

The applications — there were 247 in this round — were all expected to be funding requests for projects that align with ICANN’s technical stability and internet governance missions.

The Grant Program is funded by the proceeds of auctions for contested new gTLDs, notably .web, up to a decade ago. The fiscal 2025 budget sees the fund start with $217 million in the bank.

The program is expected to cost $2 million to administer this year, with the cost covered by expected investment gains on the principle sum.

Could ICANN approve an R-word gTLD?

ICANN could be faced with the headache of approving or rejecting a new gTLD containing a term broadly considered a slur for the first time.

Unstoppable Domains has revealed that it is working with a client on an application for .retardio, which is linked to a memecoin cryptocurrency of the same name.

Unstoppable says the domain “symbolizes pride and a blend of brilliance with eccentricity”.

But the application could come up against significant challenges if it goes ahead, due to the various reviews and objection procedures all applications face.

The word “retard”, originally a medical term for people with mental disabilities, over the years morphed into a fun playground insult but is now considered offensive enough that, unless you’re Elon Musk, it’s often referred to as the “R-word”.

(I’m only typing it out in full here for the benefit of people who are reading this in their second language, who otherwise might not know what I’m talking about.)

Since 2009, the Special Olympics has held an annual Spread the Word to End the Word awareness day, which seeks to reduce usage of the word, which it describes as a form of “bullying”.

The British comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, faced a barrage of criticism from her own community when she provacatively titled her 2023 documentary about online ableist bullying “Am I a R*tard?” (asterisk in original).

There can be little doubt that it’s an offensive term in most of the Anglophone world, but does that mean it cannot be included in a gTLD string?

The current draft of ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook says that applicants “should be mindful of limitations to free expression” and there are multiple avenues through which a .retardio application could be killed off.

The most obvious way would be via the Governmental Advisory Committee, which has broad powers to instruct ICANN to reject applications on public policy grounds.

The AGB says the GAC Advice objection is for applications that are “problematic” or “potentially violate national law or raise sensitivities”, but that’s a pretty wide net.

If a couple of governments decided to champion an objection to .retardio, it’s easy to imagine they’d be able to rustle up enough support to meet the “consensus” threshold for formal GAC Advice.

ICANN’s board of directors is able to reject such advice, but in the 2012 application round it pretty much did what it was told.

Another way .retardio could fail is through the Limited Public Interest Objection, which can be filed against strings that are “contrary to generally accepted legal norms of morality and public order that are recognized under principles of international law”, such as:

Incitement to or promotion of discrimination based upon race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion or national origin, or other similar types of discrimination that violate generally accepted legal norms recognized under principles of international law

Literally anybody can file a LPI Objection, and they presumably could use the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to tick the “principles of international law” box.

If successful, such objections force the applicant to withdraw.

The International Olympic Committee has never been shy about participating in ICANN, so if the affiliated Special Olympics, or the IOC, or indeed any disability rights advocacy groups, wanted to make a point by objecting to .retardio, the LPI Objection would be the way to do it.

ICANN eyes more price hikes as it predicts dismal year for industry

The domain industry may not be set to shrink, but it’s not set to grow either, according to predictions in ICANN’s newest draft budget, published this week.

The Org’s bean-counters have also confirmed that the recently announced fee increases for registries, registrars and registrants may become a “repeatable” occurence.

ICANN says its budget for fiscal 2026, which starts next July, sees funding and expenditure both at $142 million, down $3 million on its adopted 2025 budget.

It’s predicting a pretty flat domain industry for FY26, with no growth in transactions from legacy gTLDs (mainly .com) and 1% growth from new gTLDs. Legacy would stay at $83.1 million and new would grow to $12 million.

ICANN reckons it will lose 17 contracted gTLD registries by the end of FY26, going from 1,109 to 1,092. It reckons it will accredit just three new registrars over the same period.

The estimates are all mid-points. ICANN has also given high and low estimates that vary from transactions growing by 9% or shrinking by as much as 14%.

The financial predictions are also probably going to get revised, as they don’t include the impact of ICANN’s planned fee increases, which have not yet been given final approval.

The Org said in October that it plans to raise the per-transaction fee for registrars, which buyers usually added on at the check-out, from $0.18 to $0.20.

The registry transaction fee will go up from $0.25 to $0.258. Fixed fees for registries and registrars will also go up.

The draft budget calls the increases “equitable, contractually efficient, pragmatic, and repeatable”.

“Inflationary increases can continue at ICANN’s discretion as contemplated by the Base gTLD Registry Agreement,” suggesting they could become an annual inflation-linked event.

The budget us currently open for public comment.

Meet the six people battling to join ICANN’s board

Candidates from Verisign, Amazon, GoDaddy, Identity Digital, Tucows, and DotAsia have put themselves forward to become the domain name industry’s next pick for the ICANN board of directors.

The GNSO Contracted Parties House — registrars and registries — are currently holding an election to pick the next occupant of board seat 13, which will be vacated by term-limited incumbent Becky Burr next year.

These elections are usually pretty secretive — not even the names of the nominees are published — but this time around I am able to name all six candidates and five of them have kindly provided DI with their candidate statements, bringing candidates’ views to a public audience for the first time.

The candidates, in alphabetical order, are:

• James Bladel, VP of government and industry affairs at GoDaddy
• Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia
• Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon
• Keith Drazek, VP of policy and government relations at Verisign
• Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows
• Jonathan Robinson, director of Identity Digital subsidiary Internet Computer Bureau

While most of the candidates work for companies that operate as both registries and registrars, each only officially votes in one of the two CPH Stakeholder Groups, as indicated by “RySG” or “RrSG”, below.

Four of the candidates come from the North America region, while Chung is from the Asia-Pacific region and Robinson is European. Burr, who they would replace, is North American.

All of the candidates have been involved with ICANN for well over a decade, some since almost its foundation. Four are former or current chairs of the GNSO Council. One up until a few weeks ago served on the ICANN board for a single term in a different capacity.

Some of the candidates’ statements focus on issues at ICANN they would like to fix, improve, or build on, while others focus more on the candidate’s personal qualities and qualifications.

James Bladel, GoDaddy, RrSG

Bladel is an ICANN veteran with 20 years of experience on various policy-making working groups and committees, including a stint as chair of the GNSO Council. He’s also sat on the boards of the .uk and .me registries.

His candidate statement lists three shortcomings he sees in ICANN’s current trajectory that he believes he could help correct.

He says ICANN “faces a crisis of credibility” due to its failure “to make timely progress on key policy initiatives” and has “fallen into endless discussions and efforts to mitigate unknown risks”.

He gives the Next Round of new gTLDs and Whois policy as examples of where ICANN has moved too slowly to implement policies.

“ICANN must stop telling the world why its role is important and start showing clear examples of multistakeholder successes,” Bladel states, warning that governments will get involved if ICANN can not prove its worth.

He adds that while he does not believe blockchain-based naming systems are viable alternatives to the DNS, ICANN should be paying more attention to how they could be complementary and looking into why there appears to be demand for them.

Bladel provided his statement (pdf).

Edmon Chung, DotAsia, RySG

Chung is a 25-year ICANN vet and has just completed a three-year term on the board, as a Nominating Committee appointee, where he regularly fielded questions related to internationalized domain names, which is one of his specialties.

Chung said he would champion efforts such as Universal Acceptance Day and the new Applicant Support Program, both of which are intended to promote the newer TLDs, particularly those in non-Latin scripts.

As CEO of DotKids, he led the only new gTLD application in the 2012 application round to qualify for the ASP.

“I believe with another term on the board, I can contribute substance to shaping the discussions on [conflicts of interest], board agility and the business of TLDs,” Chung wrote.

Chung provided his statement (pdf).

Greg DiBiase, Amazon, RrSG

Current GNSO Council chair DiBiase claims credit for helping steer the community through its negotiations with the board over new gTLD policy recommendations, which if not exactly fractious have certainly been convoluted, over the last couple years.

He says he would focus on “improving communication” between board and CPH through informal channels with the contracted parties, building on Burr’s work.

He says he would attempt to plug gaps in processes, such as the uncertainty about the board’s power to change its mind on community recommendations it has already adopted.

The board’s attitude to risk is also a concern.

“Many in the ICANN Community view ICANN Org as extremely risk-averse and willing to reject community-made policy recommendations if they increase the probability of ICANN being sued,” DiBiase wrote.

“Whether true or not, I believe ICANN should focus on bigger-picture risks, like harm to credibility… and not just specific risks like lawsuits or IRPs,” he wrote.

DiBiase has headed Amazon Registrar’s legal team for eight years and previously worked in compliance for the Endurance group of registrars (now Newfold Digital).

He provided his statement (pdf).

Keith Drazek, Verisign, RySG

Drazek has been involved with ICANN for over 20 years, according to the bio published by current employer Verisign, the company for which he has been working since 2010. Prior to Verisign, he held a similar policy relations role at Neustar.

He has been GNSO Council chair, a member of the ccNSO Council representing North America, and chair of the RySG, among other roles in important policy working groups.

Drazek has not yet responded to my inquiries and I do not have his candidate statement. I will update this article should I receive it.

Reg Levy, Tucows, RrSG

Levy presents the fact that she is not following the typical path to the board — via, for example, sitting in the GNSO Council chair or on the Nominating Committee — as a strength.

She says she would be “a strong voice for the Community” on the board, which she said has shown a “worrying trend of the Board ignoring the Community and ignoring the role of the GNSO Council”.

Levy is the only candidate to take aim at ICANN’s finances in her statement, with criticisms of how its budget has ballooned beyond the scope of most non-profits over the last couple of decades, of its costly deals with long-incumbent vendors, and of its “shocking” and “disingenuous” executive compensation practices.

Levy says that she would probably be the youngest person on the current board, which could help with “ushering in a generational shift”. As the only female candidate, who would replace a female director, she notes that she’s the only chance of maintaining the current gender balance on the board.

Tucows published Levy’s statement (pdf) on its web site a couple weeks ago.

Jonathan Robinson, Identity Digital, RySG

Robinson’s statement focuses on his extensive industry experience, which dates back to when he founded the UK-based registrar NetBenefit back in 1997, and his long-time participation in the ICANN community.

His only current paid role in the industry is as the director of Internet Computer Bureau, the .io registry and Identity Digital subsidiary.

But Robinson’s key selling point appears to be that he would quit the ICB gig should he be elected, likely freeing him up to be able to engage in board discussions about new gTLD policy and other issues affecting the domain name industry.

ICANN directors are expected to recuse themselves from discussions on issues for which they have conflicts of interest. Burr does not currently recuse herself from such votes because, while she was originally elected while working for Neustar, she no longer has ties to the industry.

Robinson provided his statement (pdf).

*

The candidates have already faced at least one round of interrogation by their voters, including at a closed-door session at ICANN 81 last month.

I’m told the first round of voting takes place this Wednesday, December 18, with a second round likely given the number of candidates. The current timetable published on the GNSO web site appears to be out of date.

The winner of the election will take over from Burr at ICANN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting next October in Muscat.

ICANN lawyers want to keep their clients secret

IP lawyers in the ICANN community have come out swinging against proposed rules that would require them to come clean about who they work for, rules that are supported by registrars and governments.

A proposed policy that would force lawyers to disclose the identities of their clients when they participate in policy-making would violate their clients’ human rights, according to the Intellectual Property Constituency.

The criticisms came in response to an ICANN public comment period on a draft Community Participant Code of Conduct Concerning Statements of Interest, which opened in October and closed this week.

The draft would close a loophole that allows ICANN policy makers to keep their potential conflicts of interest secret when “professional ethical obligations” prevent them from disclosing this information.

“When disclosure cannot be made, the participant must not participate in ICANN processes on that issue,” the draft states.

The changes are keenly supported by the Registrar Stakeholder Group as a whole and by GoDaddy and Tucows in particular. As far as the registrars are concerned, the main problem with the draft is the somewhat vague enforcement mechanisms.

GoDaddy, for example, said in its comments:

We recognize that there may be situations in which a party is unable to disclose their client(s), and in those rare cases, GoDaddy agrees with ICANN’s conclusion that the participant forfeits the ability to participate in associated processes.

It added, echoing the RrSG as a whole, that more clarity is needed on enforcement, where the buck seems to stop with the chair of the working group where the disclosure infraction is alleged to have taken place, with no escalation.

On the opposing side are the IPC, the Business Constituency, and the International Trademark Association, which all filed comments criticizing the proposed changes. The IPC said:

The often-argued response of having attorneys not participate if they fail to uphold their ethical duty to their clients effectively vitiates the human right of representation by counsel and is not for the public benefit. ICANN has agreed to uphold human rights and therefore counsel cannot be compelled to disclose client identity.

Two of the concerns from lawyers is that the policy could require their clients to divulge trade secrets, such as whether they intend to apply for a new gTLD in the forthcoming application round.

Perhaps anticipating the Governmental Advisory Committee’s expected support for the policy changes, which was no secret, the IPC also raises the specter of the policy being broad enough to apply to the governments themselves: should they all be compelled to reveal the names of all the lobbyists who knock on their doors?

This forcing of transparency of national interest would significantly inhibit GAC members from fulfilling their role. Imagine a GAC member from one country filing an SOI saying that their government was being lobbied by numerous parties to gain favor in the New gTLD Rounds?

The GAC’s response to the public comment period was in fact cautiously supportive of the rule changes, saying:

Prima facie, the proposal referring to Statements of Interests seems to be in the right direction, and to fulfil the expectations expressed by the GAC. At the same time, the GAC looks forward to the reactions from ICANN org to the views expressed during the public comment period

Like the registrars, the GAC is looking for more clarity on enforcement mechanisms.

The public comments will by summarized for publication mid-December and the ICANN board could take action on the proposals next year.

Facebook cybersquatter asks ICANN to overturn UDRP ruling

A registrant who lost a slam-dunk cybersquatting complaint to Facebook owner Meta has asked ICANN to overturn the ruling, accusing WIPO of of breaching the UDRP rules by not publishing its decision fast enough.

The registrant apparently registered meta-platforms-inc.com earlier this year out of “frustration”, and in a state of some distress, after her social media accounts were closed by Meta. Meta’s full name is Meta Platforms Inc.

The registrant then asked Meta, when contacted by its lawyers, for financial compensation in exchange for the domain, according to WIPO’s findings (pdf).

It’s pretty much a clear-cut case of cybersquatting under the UDRP, and Meta prevailed. The domain was transferred to its ownership.

But the registrant has now complained to ICANN, using its Request for Reconsideration accountability procedure, saying WIPO broke its rules and behaved “fraudulently”.

The RfR is somewhat confusingly written, but the main thrust appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the UDRP rules, which require panels to submit their rulings to WIPO within 14 days of the complaint being submitted.

The registrant takes this to mean that the decisions also need to be published online within 14 days, which doesn’t appear to be the case. She wants the decision overturned on this basis.

Regardless of the merits, the RfR has zero chance of success. UDRP losers have tried and failed to invoke the Reconsideration policy to have their decisions reversed in the past.

Most notably, in 2022 Indian Covid-19 vaccine maker Zydus Lifesciences got miffed about the Reverse Domain Name Hijacking ruling it was given and filed two RfRs with ICANN.

The first was dismissed because RfR is used to challenge ICANN’s decisions and WIPO is not ICANN. In the second case, the Ombuds made a rare intervention to confirm that ICANN has no responsibility for UDRP rulings.

ICANN confirms two bans on new gTLD gaming

ICANN’s board of directors has just voted to approve two bans on practices in the new gTLD program that could be considered “gaming”.

It’s banned applicants for the same string from privately paying each other to drop out of contention, such as via private auctions, and has banned singular and plural versions of the same string from coexisting.

The plurals ban means that if, for example, one company applies for .podcast and another applies for .podcasts, they will go into the same contention set and only one will ultimately go live.

It also means that you can’t apply for the single/plural equivalent of an already-existing gTLD. So if you were planning to apply for, oh I dunno, .farms for example, you’re out of luck.

The move should mean that lazy applicants won’t be able to rely on piggybacking on the marketing spend of their plural/singular rivals, or on purely defensive registrations. I will also reduce end-user confusion.

The ban on private contention resolution means that contention sets will largely be resolved via an ICANN-run “auction of last resort”, in which ICANN gets all the money.

In the 2012 application round, private resolution was encouraged, and some companies made tens of millions of dollars from their rivals by losing auctions and withdrawing their applications.

Both bans had been encouraged by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and received the unanimous support of the board (excluding conflict-related abstentions) at the Org’s AGM in Turkiye this afternoon.

Will Donald Trump be .io’s white knight?

US President-Elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration is reportedly looking into torpedoing a deal between the UK and Mauritius that raises serious questions about the future of the .io ccTLD.

According to The Independent, Trump wants to veto the deal that would see the UK cede sovereignty over most of the Chagos islands, currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, and is seeking legal advice from the Pentagon.

The largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, is home to a secretive US-UK military base used to support US actions in the Middle East. Native Chagossians were forcibly removed from the territory to allow its construction in the early 1970s.

The proposed UK-Mauritius treaty would allow the base to continue to exist for at least 99 years, but critics of the deal reportedly worry that Mauritius taking over the rest of BIOT would encourage Chinese espionage.

Since the treaty was announced, questions have been raised about the .io ccTLD, which is assigned to BIOT and commercialized globally by Identity Digital via a UK shell company.

ICANN confirmed in writing today that if the International Standards Organization removes IO from its list of territories, “a five-year time window will commence during which time usage of the domain will need to be phased out”.

But there are other considerations that have received fewer column inches. Head of the IANA function, which looks after the root zone, Kim Davies added:

Country-code top-level domains are operated for the benefit of the country or territory they represent. Managers of these domains must maintain an operational nexus with that country to ensure they have appropriate local accountability mechanisms for how the domain name is operated. Should this jurisdictional change take effect, changes may be required to ensure proper accountability to the new country.

In other words, there’s a scenario in which .io disappears and a scenario in which Identity Digital and Mauritius have to come to some kind of arrangement. Both would cost the registry money, but the latter seems like it would be less costly for registrants.

But if a new Trump administration decides to ignore international law and somehow persuades the UK to withdraw from the deal, the status quo for .io could persist.

The UK-Mauritius treaty has not yet been ratified. It’s expected to be debated by the UK parliament, where the new Labour government certainly has the votes to get it passed, early next year.