Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?

Three more of Google’s stockpile of long-dormant gTLDs showed signs of activity recently, strongly suggesting the company may be preparing to launch them.

The domains get.eat, get.fly and get.here were all registered February 20, according to zone files and Whois records. While none yet resolve, Google typically uses “get” domains for its customer-facing registry web sites.

Other than nic.[tld] and domaintest.[tld], none of the three had previous registrations apart from .here, which had on.here registered back in 2016. That domain resolves for me, but to an infinitely reloading blank page.

Google is currently fresh from the launch of .channel, which went into general availability February 11 and currently has 1,451 names in its zone file.

Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications

Nova Registry, which runs .link, has announced it plans to apply for 200 new gTLDs when ICANN opens up the next application window about a year from now.

It’s the first time in this round a company has announced plans to build a huge TLD portfolio. It would cost around $45.4 million in application fees alone, if ICANN’s guide price of $227,000 stays true.

It would make Nova the second-largest applicant by gTLD count to date, dwarfed only by the over 300 Donuts applied for in 2012. It would be about twice as large as the 101 Google applied for last time.

In the 2026 round, only Unstoppable Domains has announced a large number of applications — more than 50 — but those are all with partners that would presumably eventually become the contracted registry.

It’s not entirely clear from today’s announcement whether Nova is financing this project, which it calls SuperNova200, alone, or whether it’s looking for business partners.

“We will apply for 200 new Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs),” the registry says. “A new breed of gTLDs to drive innovation, competition, and consumer choice while enhancing the utility of the DNS.”

Nova entered the market in 2022 when it acquired .link from UNR. It appears to be ultimately owned by domainer Yonatan Belousov and is managed by ICM Registry alum Vaughn Liley.

Registry makes .ai an option for Koreans

South Korea’s ccTLD registry is seeking to borrow from the success of repurposed ccTLDs, including .ai, with the release of four new third-level namespaces under .kr.

This week local registry KISA started selling names in .ai.kr, .it.kr, .me.kr, and .io.kr, following the growth of the ccTLDs .ai, .it, .me and .io, which have all seen sales because they mean other stuff in English as well as being geographic identifiers.

The company acknowledged its inspiration for the new products in a recent press release:

Recently, as overseas country domains such as ‘.ai (Anguilla)’, ‘.io (British Indian Ocean Territory)’, ‘.it (Italy)’, and ‘.me (Montenegro)’ have been actively used among the AI ​​field, startups, IT companies, and bloggers, a policy was developed to allow our citizens to use the domains they want by creating a new 3-level country domain that reflects the latest trends.

The domains are only available to registrants with a presence in Korea.

KISA said the new namespaces are priced more competitively than the two-level equivalents, with .ai.kr selling for the KRW equivalent of $14 a year, compared to .ai’s $70.

it.com now bigger than Guatemala

There are now more than 25,000 registered it.com domain names, according to it.com Domains.

The company said earlier this week that it recently crossed that milestone, about two years after it went to general availability.

it.com sells third-level names under the .it.com domain, much like XYZ.com sells .uk.com domains, representing information technology, Italy, or just the pronoun “it”.

The 25,000-name milestone means .it.com now has comparable domains under management to cTLDs such as Guatemala’s .gt, as well as 20-year-old .travel and new gTLD first-mover .ninja.

It would be ranked around 230th by size if it was included on the list of TLDs that DI tracks.

Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD

Identity Digital appears to have taken over the back-end registry for Mauritian ccTLD .mu, potentially improving the company’s chances of future-proofing at-risk .io.

IANA records show that .mu has started using Identity Digital’s nameservers and Whois service. Registrars say the migration to ID’s EPP system happened last week.

Mauritius is poised to be given sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago, formally known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, from the UK, assuming the still-unpublished treaty is approved by both governments.

BIOT is assigned the popular .io ccTLD which may have more than a million registrations and makes Identity Digital, which acquired the UK-based registry operator a few years ago, about $40 million a year.

The change of control of Chagos, which would certainly come with a name change for the territory, puts the future of .io at risk, as I have been reporting for the last several months.

But with Identity Digital now in bed with the .mu ccTLD manager — a private company named Internet Direct that also goes by MU-NIC — it has a foot in the door for improving relations with the country, should .io come under threat in future.

I believe MU-NIC was previously using CoCCA’s software to manage .mu.

(Hat tip: DI reader “Tom”)

Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba is throwing its weight behind its dot-brand gTLD, .toshiba.

The company announced today that from next month it will start to migrate all of its employees to @mail.toshiba email addresses, starting with group parent Toshiba Corp, which currently uses @toshiba.co.jp.

For an unspecified period, mail sent to the current .jp addresses will auto-forward to .toshiba, but this backwards compatibility will be turned off eventually, the company said.

Toshiba said the switch will “prevent unauthorized use of email addresses by phishing emails impersonating people in Toshiba Group and reduce security risks”. This is often pitched as a key benefit of dot-brands.

The company has been using global.toshiba as its primary web site domain for a few years already. It maintains other localized domains in ccTLDs and .com as well.

Apart from global.toshiba and mail.toshiba, .toshiba has no other functioning dot-brand domains.

Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company.

Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it “does not intend to make an offer” because “there has been a material change of circumstances”.

While Verdane did not elaborate, there was a simultaneous announcement from Team Internet that Google’s recently announced changes to AdSense for Domains present a “challenge” that will harm its business faster than it can adapt.

Google said last week that as of March 19 it will start opting its advertisers out of AFD, the service domainers and registrars use to monetize many parked domain names. Advertisers will be able to opt back in, but are not expected to do so en masse.

Team Internet’s Search reporting unit made $72 million of its $91 million net revenue from AFD last year, which it expects to decline following the changes.

The company said it plans to instead monetize its domains using Google’s newer Related Search On Content product, which shows Google search results including paid results on the publishers’ own sites, based on the content of the page.

That presumably means Team Internet is going to have to populate its domains with spammy, low-quality and presumably AI-generated content, in order to trigger the RSOC contextual algorithm. Thanks, Google!

“The market development has been long-anticipated, though the announced acceleration is a challenge,” Team Internet told investors.

“It is anticipated that, during this transition period, contributions from AFD will decline faster than contributions from RSOC appreciate, meaning that the financial performance of Team Internet’s Search segment will see a trough in 2025 before it recovers from 2026 onwards and returns to the long-term pattern,” it added.

It expects adjusted EBITDA to more than halve for the year in its Search segment, from $57 million last year to between $20 million and $25 million this year. The company said its domains business, which includes its registry and registrars, should be unaffected.

But that domains business seems to be still up for sale. Team Internet said it has received “repeated approaches” for the domains unit and is carrying out a “comprehensive review of its asset ownership”.

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.