Identity Digital acquires another gTLD

Identity Digital has bulked out its already substantial portfolio of gTLDs, taking over the ICANN registry contract for another 2012-round string earlier this month.

The company is now running .onl via a newish affiliate called Jolly Host, according to ICANN records. It had been managed by Germany-based iRegistry, the original applicant.

.onl — short for “online” but with substantially fewer registrations than .online — had just shy of 24,000 registered names in its zone file today, but has been experiencing fairly consistent growth over the last few years.

It had 19,787 domains under management at the end of October, a lifetime peak.

Some of the growth may be due to the sub-$4 first-year fees currently being charged by some registrars. I believe the registry annual renewal fee is around $10, but some registrars mark that up to $25-$35.

.onl appears in the storefronts of most major registrars already.

Sav.com owner takes over .radio gTLD

The .radio gTLD appears to have changed hands, with a young registry affiliated with Sav.com taking over the reins.

ICANN documentation shows that Digity, a company led by Sav CEO Anthos Chrysanthou, took over the registry contract for the gTLD last month.

The original registry was the European Broadcasting Union, the entity behind the popular Eurovision Song Contest (.eurovision also exists, but is not used, with the EBU using a .vote domain during its annual broadcast).

Digity is already the contracted registry for .case, a former dot-brand it acquired from CentralNic a few years ago.

Apparently intended to be repurposed as a namespace for the legal profession, .case is yet to properly launch and has just a few dozen domains under management.

.radio, by contrast, if not exactly thriving in volume terms, is actually being sold and used, with about 3,000 DUM at a price point of just under $400 a year at the low end.

Some registration restrictions and pricing variations apply, and the gTLD does not have particularly broad registrar coverage.

British readers may be interested to learn that one of the highest-profile .radio domains belongs to oddball former DJ and TV host Noel Edmonds.

.com zone tops 160 million domains

The .com zone file contained more than 160 million domains for the first time today.

Registry operator Verisign is currently reporting 160,009,277 in the zone, with 162,479,075 .com names registered overall.

Names in the zone file are the ones with nameservers and therefore usable on the internet.

The milestone comes just over five years after the zone passed 150 million names, which happened January 13, 2021, according to my records.

The .com story has been a lumpy one in recent years, as registrars focused on increasing revenue per customer rather than shifting volume, but Verisign seems to have returned to steady growth in recent quarters.

.ai hits seven figures, raises prices

The .ai ccTLD recently crossed over the one million domain milestone and has raised its already substantial registration fee.

According to a social media post from the Government of Anguilla, .ai went into seven figures January 20.

For comparison, roughly a year earlier, .ai was at about 587,000 names. The growth is strong in this TLD.

The registry — technically the Government of Anguilla but outsourced to Identity Digital — has also raised the wholesale fee for .ai domains by 14.3%, according to TLDPriceChanges.com.

That means an extra 10 bucks a year. But .ai still has a two-year minimum commitment, so the price of a hand-reg has gone up $20.

Anguilla says the domain is now one of its primary sources of income and that the money is being channelled into local infrastructure projects.

Former ICANN director could lose control of ccTLD

The government of Ghana has announced plans to nationalize the .gh ccTLD, taking control from a former ICANN director who has run the registry for over thirty years.

The Minister of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovation reportedly said that the government intended to place the ccTLD fully under state control.

Samuel George reportedly said: “It cannot continue to sit in private custody. The state must own it.”

The ccTLD has been run by a company called Network Computer Systems, doing business as Ghana Dot Com (at ghana.com), since 1995, under the control of Nii Quaynor, who was on ICANN’s board of directors in the early noughties.

After a 2008 law called for the nationalization of the registry, the two parties have been engaged in negotiations to ensure the smooth handover of the domain.

ICANN typically does not redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the incumbent, even if the winning party is the local government, but agreement has been difficult to come by due to a dispute over money.

Ghana Dot Com wants 10% of future .gh domain sales to be donated to the local ISOC chapter indefinitely, but the government has resisted, according to documents posted by the company.

It’s not clear from local reporting whether the government and Quaynor, now 81, have made a breakthrough, but the minister is already talking about plans to give away .gh domains to newly registered companies in the nation.

Team Internet still in talks to sell off domains unit

Team Internet says negotiations to spin off its domains business are “progressing well” after a difficult 2025.

The company yesterday issued a trading update, saying that its 2025 revenue and profit will come in towards the top end of analysts’ expectations.

Those top-end estimates are for revenue of $541 million and adjusted EBITDA of $43 million. That’s compared to 2024 revenue of $802.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $91.9 million.

Team Internet suffered last year, laying off hundreds, due to changes in Google’s advertising policies that made it harder for the company to monetize its domain portfolio.

It was already exploring exit options before the Google changes hit, but those efforts were resurrected in November. The company said yesterday that “discussions in relation to a disposal of DIS [Domains, Identity and Software] are progressing well”

Burr joins PIR after leaving ICANN board

Community lifer Becky Burr has joined Public Interest Registry as senior policy advisor, the company announced today.

Burr, who at the US government was instrumental in the formation of ICANN in the late 1990s, recently completed a nine-year stint on ICANN’s board of directors, where she was one of the most active and visible participants.

Lawyer Burr previously headed policy for .biz registry Neustar, before its acquisition by GoDaddy, but she’s most recently been in private practice.

PIR, the non-profit .org registry, said Burr “will advise on a broad range of strategic policy matters and will engage with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) workstreams and global Internet governance matters.”

Refunds galore as gTLD losers finally bow out

There’s been a wave of withdrawals of new gTLD applications over the last couple of months after ICANN gave 15 companies their final notice that it was time to ask for a refund or lose their money forever.

But so far just seven unsuccessful applications from the 2012 round have been withdrawn, from the 19 that were eligible, according to my records.

Notably, all of the remaining applications for .mail, .corp and .home, strings that were banned on account of name collision risks, have been pulled. Google, Amazon and GMO Registry will all get partial refunds of their application fees.

Two applications for the fiercely contested .hotel have also been yanked, with Identity Digital and Radix getting their refunds. GRS Domains, Despegar and Fegistry still have not withdrawn, according to ICANN records.

ICANN had classed .hotel as a “already been delegated to other applicant” gTLD, which isn’t completely accurate. The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, however.

There are plenty of other applications from 2012 that have not been withdrawn, despite the fact that the gTLD in question is already live and freely available for registration.

L’Oreal, for example, is still clinging on to its bid for .salon, despite the fact that Identity Digital has been running it for years and has about 4,000 names in its zone.

Similarly, Planet Dot Eco, DotConnectAfrica and Commercial Connect do not appear to has asked for refunds for their respective bids for .eco, .africa and .shop, despite all three being live and run by successful rival applicants for years.

Asia Green IT System has not withdrawn its bids for .islam, .halal, and .persiangulf, which were banned following government objections. AGIT was essentially kicked out of the industry when its business with five other Middle-East themed gTLDs comprehensively failed.

The 2012 round’s most-stubborn applicant, Nameshop, still has a live bid for .idn. Indian conglomerate Tata has also not pulled its bid for .tata, which failed on geographic similarity grounds.

In a resolution passed last September, ICANN’s board decided to give all of its remaining 2012-round applicants 90 days notice that they could withdraw or lose their money. It’s not clear when that 90-day period began.

.goo terminated as search engine closes down

The .goo gTLD is among a pair of dot-brand gTLDs to recently self-terminate.

goo was a 1990s-style search portal focused on the Japanese market and owned by local incumbent telco NTT. It eventually lost relevance and finally closed down for good at short notice last November.

Despite the similar branding, goo was unrelated to Google and in fact predated Google’s foundation by about a year, according to some accounts. It eventually turned to Google to power its search functionality.

NTT has asked ICANN to terminate its .goo registry contract and ICANN has given it the nod.

There was one active .goo domain, www.goo, which redirected to goo.ne.jp, its primary domain.

Joining .goo in self-termination is .wolterskluwer, one of those gTLDs that really makes me scratch my head for having never noticed its existence despite my daily exposure to vast amounts of gTLD data.

It’s owned by Wolters Kluwer, a large Dutch company that provides software for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unlike goo, the company appears to be in robust health but it never used its gTLD.

GoDaddy to offer domain blocking to people who don’t have trademarks

GoDaddy’s registry arm wants to offer registrants the ability to block others from registering their brands in other TLDs, even if they don’t own a registered trademark.

In what could be a game-changer for the industry, the company has proposed a service called Domain Options, which could allow registrants to eventually claim rights to their domain across dozens or hundreds of gTLDs.

“The service will allow registered name holders to prevent registration of certain labels,” GoDaddy explained in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN just before Christmas.

“Labels will be an exact match of the registered name holder’s second-level domain name label,” the RSEP says. “The number of labels a registrant can protect under Domain Options is limited to the following: only exact match labels, and only for registered domain names held by the registrant.”

Simply put, if you have registered example.beer, you would be able to pay a fee to prevent other people from registering domains such as example.biz, example.cooking and example.photo.

The latest RSEP covers 34 GoDaddy-run gTLDs: .abogado, .beer, .biz, .blackfriday, .boston, .casa, .club, .compare, .cooking, .courses, .dds, .design, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .gay, .health, .ink, .law, .luxe, .miami, .photo, .rodeo, .select, .study, .surf, .tattoo, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .wiki, .work, and .yoga.

But ICANN has already approved the Domain Options service for use in GoDaddy’s .horse gTLD, which was floated (presumably humorously) as a trial balloon earlier in December. The .horse contract has already been amended to include the service.

Registrants would be able to convert the blocked domains into actual registrations at a later date, or cancel the service altogether.

Third parties would also be able to request blocked domains to be unblocked through worryingly unspecified means.

Domain Options appears to be essentially a simplified clone of two-year-old GoDaddy-led service GlobalBlock, known in ICANN contractual parlance as the Label Blocking Service.

GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay substantial fees — from $6,499 a year at 101domain, for example — to block their marks across 710 extensions as a cheaper alternative to buying 710 defensive registrations at full price.

Registry pricing for Domain Options is not revealed in the RSEP, but it’s hard to imagine it enormously undercutting and therefore cannibalzing GlobalBlock.

Now that ICANN has given GoDaddy the nod for .horse, it seems inevitable that the other 34 gTLDs will also be approved, and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a wave of similar RSEPs from other registries over the coming months.