stupid.domain.name owner fights Verisign turn-off

The registrant of the domain name stupid.domain.name has become the second person to formally complain to ICANN about Verisign’s plan to delete his domain.

Patrik Fältström has filed a Request for Reconsideration, asking ICANN to reverse its decision to allow Verisign to shut down several services associated with its .name gTLD.

As I first reported back in May, Verisign wants to simplify .name by retiring its legacy three-level structure. This would mean about 22,000 domains and email addresses, many of which have been registered for decades, will be unceremoniously deleted.

Verisign asked ICANN for permission to do this via a Registry Services Evaluation Request, which ICANN approved in July. Verisign said that hardly any of the third-level domains are still in use.

But Fältström says he registered stupid.domain.name in August 2001 and still uses it today. His RfR says:

If the approved change is implemented, my registration will be terminated even if I want to continue renewing it. I cannot move stupid.domain.name to another registry operator, and I cannot solve the problem by changing registrar. The domain name will simply no longer be registered to me.

That is different from Verisign deciding not to accept new third-level registrations. I have no objection to Verisign stopping new registrations. I do object to the termination of domain names that are already registered and in use.

He’s the second affected registrant to file an RfR since Verisign’s RSEP was approved. Doytchin Spiridonov of Bulgarian registrar Dom.bg filed one in July, saying he would lose three .name domains that he still uses.

But it looks set to be rejected on procedural grounds, following reports from the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee and the ICANN Ombuds, both of which confirmed that ICANN was well aware that 22,000 domains would be deleted but allowed Verisign to go ahead anyway.

The Ombuds noted, in essence, that this might be a pretty crappy customer service experience but it does not rise to the level of a significant security and stability or competition issue.

The full board of directors has yet to rubber-stamp BAMC’s ruling. It seems likely Fältström’s RfR will be addressed simultaneously.

And Fältström is not just some rando with a grievance. He’s head of security at Swedish registry back-end Netnod and he’s been deeply involved in the technical side of ICANN’s community since the very beginning, including a stint as chair of the influential Security and Stability Advisory Committee. He’s a member of the Internet Society’s Hall of Fame.

So when he points out in his RfR that, yes, unilaterally turning off somebody’s 25-year-old domain and potentially reselling it to somebody else does cause security concerns, he’s not just grasping at straws.

Unliked — Chinese gTLD calls it quits

Chinese technology giant Qihoo 360 is abandoning one of its portfolio of gTLDs, a Latinized version of the Chinese word for “to like”.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contract for .xihuan, which never launched despite being in the root since 2016. No reason was given.

It also has the gTLDs .anquan, .yun and .shouji, (“security”, “cloud” and “cellphone”), but to date only .yun has been launched. It went on sale last year and so far has about 2,700 names in its zone.

Qihoo 360 is primarily a security software company. The US Department of Defense officially classifies it as a “Chinese military company” due to its links to the Chinese information ministry.

.phone domain gets launch dates

The rush to get long-dormant gTLDs on to the market before the 2026 cohort starts to come online continues apace, with Dish Registry announcing launch plans for .phone.

The company intends to run its mandatory sunrise period from October 6 to January 4, with a 14-day premium-priced Early Access Period following the next day. General availability will begin January 19.

There are no eligibility restrictions. Pricing information has not been published, but Dish says some names will carry premium pricing.

Having sat on its portfolio of 2012-round gTLDs for over a decade, Dish has recently started rolling them out, starting with .mobile and .latino, with .dot coming soon.

Domainer AI slop crackdown on the cards in Oz

Startling rule changes have been proposed for Australia’s .au domain, potentially making it much tougher and more expensive to register names to monetize or resell.

If implemented, the proposed new rule “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark” in the .com.au and .net.au namespaces.

The recommendation, one of 10 to come out of a yearlong Policy Advisory Panel review, would remove the part of .au’s eligibility rules that currently acts essentially as a catch-all allowing people to register domains for any purpose.

The change seems to be squarely aimed at making it harder for domain investors to populate the namespaces with large amounts of low-quality monetized domains, particularly now that generative AI has trivialized the practice.

Local registry auDA said its board of directors has approved the panel’s recommendations and will create an implementation plan that will be published for public consultation before coming into effect.

The decision to restrict who can register what domains was the most controversial of the recommendations, with four of the seven-person panel voting in favor of the change, with two votes against and one abstention (who later sided with the minority view).

The panel unanimously voted against the idea of banning domain monetization outright, but said it “reached a different majority view on the use of monetisation to satisfy the allocation rules”.

The panel found that allowing registration purely for monetization “may disproportionately benefit domain investors and weaken trust in the allocation framework”.

The current rule was “viewed either as a legitimate source of flexibility or as a self-fulfilling loophole enabling monetisation”, the panel wrote.

It noted: “The consumer harm identified in submissions was most acute where monetisation was used to achieve allocation. Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it easier to create payper-click websites for this purpose.”

A minority of the panel issued a 10-point rebuttal to the majority view, saying they had failed to identify any harms created by the current rules and that the change could make it harder for the likes of schools or charities to register domains.

The panel attempted to measure how many .au domains are currently in the hands of investors, by assuming that anyone owning more than 50 names was a likely domainer, and found that well over half a million of .au’s 4.4 million domains could be in domainer hands.

It said: “auDA data shows that 3,386 registrants hold more than 50 Domain Name Licences across com.au, net.au and .au direct, out of 1,702,174 registrants in those namespaces. Together, those registrants hold 582,895 domain names.”

The full report of the panel can be read here (pdf).

Helsinki throws in the towel on city gTLD

Helsinki has become the third of the world’s capital cities to decide that it doesn’t want to run its city gTLD after all.

The City of Helsinki has notified ICANN that it wants to terminate its registry contract for .helsinki, which it had experimented with but never fully embraced with gusto.

Curiously, the termination notice was filed in May, but the city specifically requested that ICANN not end the contract before the August 12 cut-off date for new gTLD applications.

Presumably, Helsinki was keen that nobody else applied for .helsinki in the current round — if it was still in the DNS root zone, an applicant would have to be mad to apply for it.

Helsinki becomes the third capital, after Budapest and Doha, to terminate their city gTLD contract.

.net prices going up

Verisign is exercising its option to raise the price of a .net domain, capped by contract with ICANN by 10%, starting about six months from now.

The company told the markets yesterday:

On August 27, 2026, VeriSign, Inc. announced an increase to the registry-level wholesale price for new and renewal .net domain names from $10.91 to $12.00, effective March 1, 2027, per its agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

It will be the first .net price increase to go into effect since February 2024.

Under its registry agreement with ICANN, Verisign is allowed to raise its wholesale fee by 10% per year, most of which is high-margin profit.

.net has about 12.4 million domains in its zone file, and the number doesn’t tend to fluctuate much despite regular price increases.

Texas will object to .texas gTLD

The US State of Texas has become the first government to publicly object to any gTLD applications matching its name.

Anthony Sauerhoff, state chief information officer, wrote to ICANN earlier this month to unambiguously state that Texas does not support any applications for .texas.

“At the Governor’s direction, I hereby inform you that the State of Texas does not support and does object to the application for the gTLD string “.texas,” and any derivative thereof,” he wrote (pdf).

“Delegating this string to an entity other than the State of Texas risks misuse, reputational harm, and potential confusion among residents and businesses,” he added.

The letter does not confirm that Texas itself has applied for the string.

No applicant has yet gone on-record with an announcement that .texas is among their submitted applications, so it’s quite possible that any plans were withdrawn, pre-armed with the knowledge of Texas’s lack of consent.

“Texas” is a protected string under the rules in ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, so government support is required.

WordPress hints it applied for more new gTLDs

WordPress.com owner Automattic has dropped some pretty major hints that it applied for a modest portfolio of new gTLDs in ICANN’s just-closed application window.

In a blog post, the company all but confirmed that it has applied for at least one gTLD, probably more, to sit alongside its currently owned .blog.

“We’re not trying to find the next .com,” Automattic wrote. “We’re not trying to collect as many extensions as possible.”

The post reads:

The people using WordPress today are building far more than blogs. They’re creating businesses, stores, portfolios, communities, publications, restaurants, services, and just about everything else you can imagine. So we’re not looking for one domain extension that can somehow describe all of them.

We’re asking which additional TLDs could give more of those people an address that genuinely makes sense for what they’re building. That doesn’t mean applying for dozens of extensions.

It means thinking carefully about a small number of meaningful options that could complement .blog and better reflect the different ways people use WordPress today.

Annoyingly, no strings are listed in the post, but it’s worth noting that the killer gTLDs for many of the categories it enumerates — stores, restaurants, services and so on — are already taken.

.blog had over 363,000 domains in its zone file at the last count and is generally not considered a bigh-abuse budget extension, making it one of the more successful gTLDs from the 2012 application round.

Could you type a .chrysanthemun domain name?

Does .chrysanthemam portend the end of type-in domain names, or is it just an incredibly dumb gTLD idea?

Chinese portfolio applicant Journey To The West Corporation announced earlier in the week that it has applied for .chrysanthemim, one of 323 strings it revealed on its web site.

It’s not yet clear whether .chrysantemum is a primary string, or a back-up in case one of its primary applications turns out to be in a contention set, come Reveal Day in October.

The chrysanthemom flower is an important symbol in Chinese culture, which fits into the theme of many of Journey To The West’s announced strings, which are a mixture of Chinese-script IDNs and English words relating to Asian culture.

But it’s still a heck of a strange string to apply for, breaking many of the rules of memorability and navigation that most of the domain industry holds to be self-evident.

Not only does .crysanthemum fail the radio test, it fails it hard. Probably harder than any other applied-for string. If you have to spell out the domain audibly in a radio commercial, and the listener still can’t remember how to spell it 30 seconds later, it’s a crappy domain — and the whole .chrysenthumum namespace would suffer from that problem.

Link Freedom Group CEO (and apparent font of incredibly obscure trivia) Vaughn Liley pointed out to me today that “chrisanthemum” is such a tough spell that even top-level spelling bee competitors have flunked on it, just moments away from winning the trophy.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe we should be thinking the long game, where domains-as-navigation is even less important than it has become over the last decade or so. Maybe .chrisanthemum could live perfectly happily in a world where we surf the web using primarily voice, or apps, or AI, or brainwaves.

Still, I wouldn’t buy one.

LFG boss on why Telegram gTLD fight might not be all bad news

It’s currently the highest-profile fight of the 2026 new gTLD round, but the CEO of one applicant has a positive spin on having to go up against one or two deep-pocketed social media giants.

The announcement by Telegram boss Pavel Durov yesterday that his company has applied for the .gram top-level domain has arguably brought more attention to the new gTLD program than ICANN has managed in six months, but it also created the most visible contention set.

.gram was also among the 316 strings that portfolio applicant Link Freedom Group announced late last week, and I’d be very surprised if Instagram owner Meta doesn’t also emerge as a contender (or legal rights objector).

But LFG CEO Vaughn Liley reckons it might not be all bad news. He’s actually taking it as a validation of a business model Nova Registry, the .link registry that he also manages, has been pushing for the last five years.

Durov suggested in his Twitter feed that .gram would not be a dot-brand in the way that most companies use them — keeping all the names to themselves and using them to brand products or business segments.

Rather, he wrote: “a billion Telegram users could get their own second-level domains — yourname.gram. Users would be able to set up their interactive websites hosted by Telegram — with one prompt”.

That’s what I sometimes refer to as the auto-dealer model. Some car brands in Europe already dish out domains in their dot-brands, along with a prebuilt template-driven web site, to their licensed dealerships.

Telegram has applied for the .gram domain zone.

If the application is approved by ICANN, a billion Telegram users could get their own second-level domains — yourname.gram.

Users would be able to set up their interactive websites hosted by Telegram — with one prompt ✨

— Pavel Durov (@durov) August 18, 2026

You’d have to assume Telegram would charge a premium for these billion vanity domains, unless it’s prepared to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in ICANN fees alone annually.

LFG’s Liley told DI he was surprised by the Telegram announcement, and while it’s LFG’s goal to win as many of its applied-for strings as possible without paying more than the $227,000 application fee, he’s happy that Durov seems to be validating part of .link’s business model.

“Nova Registry have been banging this drum for years with the .link TLD so it’s refreshing to see such a high-profile CEO as Pavel Durov championing the use case,” he said.

Nova acquired .link from Uniregistry at auction a few years ago, and set about a model of partnering with other tech companies who could offer custom .link domains as part of an upsell premium package.

It’s signed up the likes of WordPress-owned Gravatar and Bitly on “link in bio” or digital business card services, where .link names are used to consolidate registrants’ contact details in one place.

“The overarching message is very positive for me,” Liley said.

Would LFG prevail in, or even bother with, an auction against Telegram, Meta and potentially other -gram brands? I doubt it, but perhaps if the contention set keeps generating headlines the $227,000 application fee could be written off as a .link marketing expenditure.