Verisign cranks up guidance as .com swells

Verisign has significantly bumped up its growth expectations for 2026, saying it expects to sell far more domains than previously thought.

The company said it expects its domain name base — the combined domains under management for .com and .net — to grow by between 3.1% and 4.3% over the course of the year.

That’s a notable increase from the prediction of 1.5% to 3.5% it made just three months ago.

Verisign ended March with 176.1 million names in its base, up 3.7% on a year earlier and 2.54 million domains during the three months of Q1.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the renewed growth came primarily as a result of marketing programs aimed at its registrars, its registrars return to a focus on customer acquisition, and AI web site creation tools.

Verisign reported Q1 revenue up 6.6% versus last year at $429 million, with net income up from $199 million to $215 million.

It threw cash at its shareholders, buying back $214 million of stock and giving them a $0.81-per-share dividend.

More Verisign bitchiness as .com price rise revealed

Verisign is putting up the price of a .com domain again, and it clearly wishes it could raise it even more.

The registry said that it will increase the base annual wholesale fee by 71 cents from $10.26 to $10.97 effective November 1 this year.

That’s the maximum 7% hike it’s permitted to impose under its trilateral arrangement with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce.

It’s the first announced price increase in two years. That’s because its contract only allows rises in the last four out the six years of its duration.

The company has never failed to exercise its price-raising powers, but it did freeze its fees during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it has also never failed in recent years to make catty comments suggesting a profound bitterness that its prices are regulated at all.

Announcing Verisign’s first-quarter financial results last week, CEO Jim Bidzos said:

The new $10.97 price that will become effective November 1 is the maximum price that we can charge registrars. The registrars, however, are entirely price unrestricted and can sell .com registrations at any retail price they choose, and those prices often differ significantly from the price we are limited to.

This apparent frustration has been a prominent mantra since the company negotiated the latest version of the .com contract, during which Joe Biden’s Commerce had evidently wanted lower pricing and Verisign had pushed back with a call for greater regulation in downstream pricing.

Current .com registrants will be able to lock in their current prices by renewing their names for up to 10 (in practice usually nine) years before the price hike takes effect.

Is a .tree gTLD very cool or very silly?

.tree is one of the first-ever publicly announced gTLD applications, predating even the 2012 application round, and it seems to have been proposed for a second time.

A web site using dottree.org, registered a week ago, is saying there’s a plan to apply for .tree in the forthcoming ICANN application round, with a charitable goal.

The project says it will donate a dollar from every .tree domain registration and annual renewal to a charity that plants trees in Dubai, with each $1 donation putting one tree in the ground.

At first glance, it seems like a nice idea, but I’m not sure it holds up to closer inspection.

There may be virtue-signalling advantages to running a site on a .tree domain if you’re in the environmental game or lumber business.

But if a registrant’s primarily interest is getting trees planted, why not just donate a buck to a reforestation charity directly? Why not donate the full amount you would otherwise have spent on the domain? Or more?

And how much demand would there be for .tree domains on their own merits?

Fortunately, DI’s new Stringtel tool has some data there. According to Stringtel, about 47,000 current .com/.net/.org domain names end in the substring “tree”, which may give an indication of potential registrations. About 2,000 of those end in “familytree”.

That’s the same frequency as we see domains end in “wine”, “dog”, or “paris”, and the three gTLDs matching those strings each have 17,000 to 18,000 domains under management, which is not terrible.

Should .tree perform just as well, envelope-based calculation suggest it would create the equivalent of a smallish forest that could be traversed on foot in minutes and not really suck much CO2 out of our increasingly fragile atmosphere.

But the .tree proposal would have a second forest of the same size planted in the second year (assuming 100% domain renewals) and so on. The effect would stack up over time, so maybe the idea does have merit.

The internet just got its first new TLD since 2022

There’s a new gTLD in the root, the first time ICANN has added a string in over four years.

Don’t get too excited though: it’s a dot-brand, kinda.

As of the weekend, .merck is live and resolving, though only the mandatory nic.merck registry domain exists right now.

The gTLD is interesting because it seems to be a rare example of two companies with the same name sharing a dot-brand.

The only other such arrangement I’m aware of is .sas, which is shared by the SAS Institute and SAS Airline, neither of which actually use it.

.merck seems to be jointly controlled by two pharmaceutical companies, one American and one German, both called Merck, which were under common ownership until World War I split them apart.

After they both applied for .merck in ICANN’s 2012 application round, over a decade of lawyering followed before they finally came to an arrangement.

There’s no Specification 13 in the .merck Registry Agreement, so it’s not technically an exclusive-use dot-brand at this time.

The back-end registry services provider, perhaps surprisingly, is South Africa-based DNS Africa, in what seems to be the company’s first deal outside its home continent.

Kid-friendly domains could be reborn

With governments around the world increasingly looking at reducing the harmful effects on the internet on children, it seems child-friendly domain name projects may see a resurgence.

The US government’s new hunt for a registry operator for .us, launched this week, contains a fairly explicit call for whichever company wins the contract to “revitalize” the long-dormant .kids.us space.

And I’m aware of one potential new gTLD applicant that wants to apply for a regulated kid-friendly gTLD when ICANN opens up its application window at the end of the month.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in its .us RFP:

The Contractor shall offer one or more innovative approaches to revitalize the use of the kids.us domain that are consistent with its objective of providing a safe space on the internet for children age 13 or younger, as intended by the Dot Kids Act. In the event a decision is made to reactivate the kids.us domain without any changes to the Dot Kids Act or selection of alternative uses, the Contractor shall be prepared to maintain and operate the second-level kids.us domain as specified by the Dot Kids Act.

It’s not the first time NTIA has tried to get the .us registry operator — now GoDaddy, formerly Neustar — to exhume the .kids.us project, which was closed down in 2012 after fewer than 1,000 registrations and half a dozen active web sites. Prior attempts were unsuccessful.

.kids.us was created by US legislation in 2002, largely as a way for legislators could feel good about themselves in an era when the web was still quite new and frightening and a lot wilder than it is today.

But that was before the dawn of social media and smartphones, the two technology trends driving much of the political focus on child online safety in the 2020s.

At least one new gTLD applicant intends to apply for a child-friendly gTLD this year, known as The Reservoir Project or (preliminarily) the Child Online Safety Association, run by lawyer S Harrison Knudson. The gTLD in question would be .haven.

The early-stage concept would see the registry work patent-pending technology and with ISPs, which would charge customers service fees and split the profit with the registry.

There are already two kid-oriented gTLDs out there — .kids itself and the Russian-language .дети (“.children”).

DotKids launched .kids in late 2022 and has so far accumulated 6,368 domains in its zone file. That’s actually not bad for a niche new gTLD, and based on some of the most uncomfortable Google searches I’ve ever done it looks like the registry is doing a pretty good job of keeping the namespace clean.

.дети has been around longer but has sold fewer domains, with just 1,358 names in its zone file today.

Shrinking .us TLD is up for grabs

The .us ccTLD may change registry operators in the not too distant future, but the domain is currently on a fairly steep downward trajectory in terms of registrations.

There’s also no guarantee that a new operator, should one be selected, would necessarily lead to lower prices for registrants.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration yesterday put the .us registry contract out for bidding, with a May 18 due date for offers.

Only the bigger players need apply — NTIA said it will only entertain offers from companies currently managing over two million domains in a single TLD.

That narrows the field quite a lot — only 27 TLDs I have numbers for clock in over two million. Incumbent GoDaddy qualifies, as does Verisign, Identity Digital, and Public Interest Registry.

CentralNic, Tucows, and a handful of non-US ccTLD operators also would be technically eligible, but the NTIA has ruled out any provider that is majority foreign-owned. The successful RSP would have to be fully based on US turf.

But .us has seen its DUM decline in recent months. As of January, it stood at 2,175,340, according to NTIA documents. That’s down from a peak of 2,575,574 just six months earlier, a not-insignificant dip.

On the upside, this is a different type of ccTLD contract to the likes of .ai or .co — the US government doesn’t want a cut of registration fees. The registry gets to pocket the lot.

How much “the lot” is isn’t exactly clear. Prior to 2019, GoDaddy predecessor Neustar was charging $6.50 a year wholesale, but references to pricing are redacted from the current NTIA contract.

So there’s a different pricing dynamic here. Registries competing for the deal can’t rely on bribing the government with a bigger slice of the pie, and NTIA has let it be known that a lower fee is not necessarily a good thing.

The pricing model will have to be in the “public interest” according to the tender. The NTIA documentation states that it will have to balance “the accessibility of .us domains to qualified registrants” and “the safety and security of the usTLD”, adding:

Offerors are advised that the lowest registration fee for a .us domain may not necessarily be in the overall best interest of the administration of the usTLD. The Government may decide to award to a vendor with other than the lowest cost fee structure or other than the highest cost fee structure.

It’s quite possible that the US will choose to stick with GoDaddy, but it’s perhaps worth noting that the current contract still has one unexercised extension option that would let it run until 2029, rather than the current 2027 expiration date.

Amazon sells three gTLDs to Identity Digital

Amazon appears to have offloaded three of its dormant gTLDs to Identity Digital, judging by ICANN records.

While no formal notices of registry contract reassignment have yet been posted, elsewhere ICANN shows the official registry for .circle, .got, and .jot is now Jolly Host LLC.

Jolly Host is a new Identity Digital affiliate that appeared last year and already took over the .onl gTLD contract from iRegistry a couple months ago.

.circle, .got and .jot are all greenfield namespaces. Unlaunched, they have no registered names beyond the mandatory nic.example domain. They are unencumbered by legacy dot-brand restrictions, which should make for smoother launches.

Amazon appears to have originally intended .circle to play somehow with its Circle brand of home parental control technology, but the 2012 applications for .got and .jot don’t give much of a description of its plans beyond boilerplate text.

The transfers are likely slightly bad news for Nominet, which is Amazon’s primary back-end registry services provider. Identity Digital runs its own back-end (appropriately, on Amazon’s AWS).

.radio’s new owners might have a fight on their hands

Should gTLD registries that avoid costly auctions by promising to serve special limited communities be allowed to later change their business models to improve sales?

That’s the question being asked of .radio, which recently was taken over by a new owner and might be on track to liberalize its registration policies in the near future.

.radio is what is called a “Community” or “Spec 12” gTLD, meaning it has Specification 12 — which imposes eligibility and content rules on registered domains — in its ICANN registry contract.

Four organizations applied for .radio in 2012, but the European Broadcasting Union prevailed, avoiding a potentially expensive auction, by filing a Community application and winning a Community Priority Evaluation.

Afilias, Donuts and BRS Media — all commercial, non-Community applicants — lost out on their chances to run .radio, or make money losing a private auction, because of this successful CPE.

While .radio launched in 2017, it’s never had more than about 3,000 domains under management and earlier this year the EBU sold its contract to Digity, an emerging registry operator with ties to Sav.com.

The suspicion is that Digity is planning to abandon .radio’s community roots and make it more of a mass-market proposition.

That concern was recently expressed by Craig Schwartz, president of fTLD Registry Services, which runs the Spec 12 gTLDs .bank and .insurance, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN’s chair.

Schwartz noted that Digity, unlike the EBU, “appears to have no existing relationship with the originally stated radio community” and said that registries should not be allowed “to game ICANN by preferentially acquiring these assets under one premise and then blindsiding Registrants at a later date.”

ICANN should audit Spec 12 registries for community compliance and open to public comment any attempt to transfer ownership of the contracts, he wrote.

Schwartz reiterated these concerns during a call of the ICANN At-Large community yesterday, adding that ICANN should come up with a way to “wind down” failing Spec 12 gTLDs, rather than transferring them to a liberalizing successor.

He — saying he is supported by other community registries — appears concerned that if ICANN allows registries to play fast and loose with their original commitments, it could not only enable gaming but also tarnish the reputation of other Spec 12s such as .bank.

Consultant Michael Palage, on the same At-Large call, said the the “cheat code” for registries is to get their Spec 12 removed during bilateral negotiations with ICANN Org at the time of contract renewal. He pointed to the liberalization of GoDaddy’s .xxx as an example.

Probably not coincidentally, the current 10-year .radio Registry Agreement is due to expire this July and is currently up for renewal.

ICANN has yet to publicly respond to Schwartz’s letter.

Amazon joining GlobalBlock

Amazon Registry is planning to join the GlobalBlock trademark-blocking system, judging by ICANN records.

The company has filed a Registry Services Evaluation Process request asking for 33 of its gTLDs to be able to offer a “Label Blocking Service”.

That’s usually code for GlobalBlock, the GoDaddy-led service that allows trademark owners to block their marks across hundreds of TLDs, pseudo-TLDs and blockchain naming systems.

Indeed, the Amazon RSEP is pretty much a copy-paste of the usual documentation registries file when they’re gearing up to join GlobalBlock.

Adding Amazon’s portfolio would bring GlobalBlock’s coverage up to 813 extensions.

Some of the gTLDs Amazon wants to add are not actually live and on sale yet, which could lead to a weird and rather cheeky situation where the company is selling blocks but not domains in certain gTLDs.

.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.