.latino gTLD to launch soon

The long-dormant .latino gTLD is set to launch soon, targeting the global Spanish-speaking diaspora.

Registry DISH DBS had originally planned for .latino to be a dot-brand for its Spanish-language satellite TV services, but it’s had a change of heart and now expects it to launch fully open and unrestricted.

General availability has been pencilled in for June 12, according to the registry’s web site and ICANN documents, with sunrise running for the 30 days immediately prior.

It will be the registry’s second launch this year. It went to GA with .mobile last month, so far racking up a modest roughly 4,000 registrations.

.latino will compete against .lat, part of XYZ.com’s stable, which sells for under $2 for a first-year reg and currently has about 125,000 names in its zone.

Amazon readies .pay gTLD

Amazon’s gradual trickle of gTLD releases nlooks set to continue this year, with the company publishing plans for .pay this week.

But it appears that the space will be strictly controlled at first, with general availability not coming until well into 2027.

Amazon’s planning to take .pay to its obligatory 30-day sunrise period, where only registered trademark holders may register names, from April 13, according to ICANN documentation.

From May 13, the company is planning a Limited Registration Period, during which eligibility is restricted to those “that conduct payment transactions online using an approved Payment Service Provider or Third-Party Payment Processor.”

Registrants will have to use their domains “in connection with payment-related services, including but not limited to processing payments, facilitating e-commerce transactions, or providing payment gateway services” or risk suspension.

General availability is not expected until February next year.

.pn relaunches — you’ll never guess what they say it means

Two years after Nominet took over the management of the Pitcairn Islands’ ccTLD, .pn, the domain has modernized and is ready to relaunch, with a predictably inventive take on what the two-letter domain could, if you squint, represent.

.pn domains are to go on sale today from 1200 UTC, according to one of the registrars signed up to sell them, repurposed as a global generic along the same lines as .ai, .io, .tv and .co.

But what are the letters PN supposed to represent? Pretty much anything you want, provided it has a connection to cutting-edge technologies such as crypto, AI, or quantum computing.

Registrar EnCirca, which is strongly promoting the relaunch, suggests the following: Prompt Network, Protocol Native, Payment Node, Photonic Network, Peer Network, Private Node, Precision Numerics, Pioneer, and Panem.

(That last one is a reference to the fictional country from the popular Hunger Games books and movies. Some existing .pn domains are used for that purpose already.)

As far as I can tell, none of those backronyms is in common usage, but I guess it’s not impossible one or more could catch on. We seem to be in “professional web” rather than “artificial intelligence” territory here, however.

While .pn has been around since the 1990s, registration was a painful manual process. But since Nominet took over in 2023, the registry infrastructure and policy framework has been modernized.

The ccTLD now operates on an automated EPP platform and has a standard registration lifecycle that incorporates policies such as the UDRP, as well as Nominet quirks such as a prohibition on names that imply sexual violence.

Domains are available at the second level or third (under .co.pn, .org.pn and .net.pn) with no local presence requirements.

For Pitcairn, a British island territory in the Pacific with fewer than 40 (not a typo) inhabitants, the relaunch has the potential to be transformative, due to its tiny size and the relatively high registration fees.

The islands have a GDP of the equivalent of just $127,000, according to Wikipedia, much of which comes from selling postage stamps to overseas collectors.

Nominet is charging $100 a year at the second level and $50 at the third. EnCirca is charging $129 retail. While Pitcairn’s cut is not public, it seems likely only a few thousand names would need to be sold to double the territory’s GDP in a very short space of time.

“Premium pricing keeps speculative bulk registration out and maintains namespace quality,” EnCirca CEO Tom Barrett said.

Pitcairn is probably best-known for being the place where the mutineers from the eighteenth-century “mutiny on the Bounty” incident, made famous by the 1984 Mel Gibson movie, sought refuge with a group of Tahitians. Most residents today are descended from these original settlers.

EnCirca has put together a lengthy (if somewhat sanitized) history of the territory and the ccTLD at about.pn.

China domains dip in 2026

Both of China’s ccTLD saw their domains under management slide in 2026, according to the latest biannual report from the local registry.

CNNIC said that .cn names ended the year at 20,768,082, down by almost 50,000 from the 20,768,082 names it reported a year earlier and down about 88,000 on its mid-year number.

The internationalized domain name .中国 (.xn--fiqs8s) also continued its downward trajectory, at 159,480 at the end of the year, compared to 165,265 at the end.

The IDN has been going down consistently every half for at least the last five years. Back in 2021, it had over 210,000 names. This in a country of 1.4 billion people.

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”