Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program

A surprising number of would-be back-end registry service providers have already been eliminated from ICANN’s Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for not submitting their applications in time.

Program statistics for May recently published reveal that 19 potential RSPs were in the system but failed to submit their required information before the application window closed May 20.

That leaves a total of 46 RSPs still in the system (pretty much in line with expectations) with 26 of those still waiting to clear their background checks. Another 15 have fully submitted their bids, though none have yet been approved.

The stats, which are broken down by geographic region, means that a maximum of one RSP from the Latin America and Caribbean region and one from Africa will be pre-approved to provide back-end services when the next new gTLD application window opens next year.

But wannabe RSPs will be able to apply again, simultaneously with their clients gTLD applications.

Asia-Pacific has 15 live applications, Europe 17 and North America 12.

The RSP program gives new gTLD applicants the chance to tick the technical services questions box by simply signing up with an already-approved provider. Being preapproved gives a pretty strong competitive advantage to RSPs in the 2026 round.

presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life

Celebrities, politicians, tech bros, and hundreds of household brands are among the registrants of roughly 30,000 dormant .xxx domains that have suddenly awoke and found themselves live on the internet.

The sudden explosion of newly live domains happened around May 20, when .xxx registry GoDaddy made some technical changes to its .xxx database as a result of the TLD’s move from “sponsored” to open.

The move means names such as presidenttrump.xxx, presidentobama.xxx, elonmusk.xxx, kanye.xxx, jeffbezos.xxx, adele.xxx and scarlettjohansson.xxx are all suddenly real, resolving domains that could be configured to host web sites for the first time in a decade or more.

If they are defensive registrations, that’s arguably no big deal. If they are registered to third parties, the registrants are now free to throw up any AI-generated Rule 34 mischief they wish.

The .xxx zone file popped from around 6,500 domains to almost 36,000 by May 22, as GoDaddy lifted serverHold status from each affected domain. In the vast majority of cases, these will be domains defensively registered by brand owners, some as far back as 2011, or attempted cybersquats.

From launch until this year, .xxx was considered a sponsored gTLD. Anyone could register a domain, but the registry would keep the names dormant, non-resolving, and out of the zone file until the registrant applied for “Membership” of the porn community and obtained a special software token that their registrar could use to activate the domain.

Because .xxx is no longer a sponsored gTLD, the registry is sunsetting the token system. The current phase of this process has seen GoDaddy remove the serverHold status for domains where the registrant never bothered to obtain their token.

This means that the defensive domains are now discoverable via the zone file for the first time, revealing which brands considered themselves particularly vulnerable to cybersquatting.

Spare a thought for the registrant, presumably Big Three management consultancy Bain, which seems to have been spending north of four grand a year since 2012 sitting on this stash of domains:

bain-blows.xxx, bain-stinks.xxx, bain-sucks.xxx, bainbaingoaway.xxx, bainblows.xxx, baincapital-blows.xxx, baincapital-stinks.xxx, baincapital-sucks.xxx, baincapitalblows.xxx, baincapitaldestroysjobs.xxx, baincapitalfiredme.xxx, baincapitalhypocrisy.xxx, baincapitalkillsjobs.xxx, baincapitallies.xxx, baincapitalliesaboutjobs.xxx, baincapitallootsjobs.xxx, baincapitalscam.xxx, baincapitalscrewspeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewspoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalscrewsthepoor.xxx, baincapitalsteals.xxx, baincapitalstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, baincapitalstealsfromthepoor.xxx, baincapitalstealspensions.xxx, baincapitalstinks.xxx, baincapitalsucks.xxx, baincapitalventures.xxx, baincapitalvultures.xxx, baincausespain.xxx, baincrapital.xxx, baincrematesjobs.xxx, baindestroysjobs.xxx, bainfiredme.xxx, bainhypocrisy.xxx, bainkillsjobs.xxx, bainlies.xxx, bainliesaboutjobs.xxx, bainlootsjobs.xxx, bainscam.xxx, bainscrewedme.xxx, bainscrewspeople.xxx, bainscrewspoorpeople.xxx, bainscrewsthepoor.xxx, bainsteals.xxx, bainstealsfrompoorpeople.xxx, bainstealsfromtaxpayers.xxx, bainstealsfromthepoor.xxx, bainstealspensions.xxx, bainstinks.xxx, bainsucks.xxx, bainthepredator.xxx, bainvultures.xxx, bewareofbain.xxx, blamebain.xxx, boycotbain.xxx, boycotbaincapital.xxx, fuckbain.xxx, fuckbaincapital.xxx, gotohellbain.xxx, occupybain.xxx, occupybaincapital.xxx, puttheblameonbain.xxx, saynotobain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbain.xxx, thehypocrisyofbaincapital.xxx, therealbain.xxx, therealbaincapital.xxx

(In 2012, Bain was closely associated with Republican US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, its former CEO.)

The newly visible .xxx domains do not paint the full picture of defensive registrations in the gTLD. There are another roughly 8,000 registered .xxx domains that do not yet appear in the zone files, according to registry transaction reports.

There are also an unknown number of brands being blocked there, which do not show up in public records, as a result of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services.

One of the dumbest gTLDs just switched back-ends

Why does .blockbuster still exist, seriously?

Old-timers such as your humble correspondent will recall Blockbuster as the once world-conquering video rental chain that spectacularly failed to adapt to adapt to the era of Netflix and streaming and went almost completely out of business.

I say almost because, as was widely reported a few years back, there’s still one branch of Blockbuster open. It’s in Bend, Oregon and has sidelines as a tourist destination and, more lucratively, selling ironic merch mocking its own inexplicable existence.

So that’s a whole dot-brand gTLD essentially for a single retail outlet. Possibly the only smaller, dumber gTLD is .richardli, which is a dot-brand representing just one dude, Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li.

The Bend store is a franchisee, so it pays Dish DBS, owner of the brand, a licensing fee to use its trademark. But the gTLD is unused. Blockbuster has a holding page at blockbuster.com while the Bend store uses bendblockbuster.com.

Why mention this at all? Well, Dish has just changed the back-end registry services provider for .blockbuster and all of its other dormant dot-brands from Identity Digital to Tucows, indicating that it has no plans to terminate its ICANN registry contracts just yet.

.sling, .dish, .latino, .dot, .ott, .ollo, .mobile, .dtv, .dvr, .phone, and .data, none of which have any registered domains (but several of which would surely prove attractive to an acquiring portfolio registry) have also made the move to Tucows.

(Actually, .ollo may be an even dumber dot-brand given that the brand doesn’t exist and seemingly never has existed. Dish filed for a trademark on the string in 2011 but never used it.)

Running a gTLD isn’t free. The current ICANN fee alone is $25,800 a year per string. While Dish had $10.6 billion in revenue last year, its parent, EchoStar, is currently circling the drain-hole of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Ironically, EchoStar faces the dire choice because the US Federal Communications Commission is threatening to revoke some of its 5G spectrum licenses because the company acquired the licenses then didn’t use them.

GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet

Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging.

The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC.

The handover will put an end to GoDaddy’s 15-year stint as .co’s back end. The TLD was relaunched globally as a .com alternative in 2010 by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.

It seems Team Internet was willing to price its services much lower than GoDaddy. The company said in a statement that Equipo PuntoCo is getting 8% of gross revenue from .co sales, compared to the 19% GoDaddy was getting and the 93% .CO Internet originally received. The rest goes into the Colombian public purse.

While it’s not the biggest TLD on Team Internet’s servers (that honor goes to .xyz), it’s going to be the second or third largest migration of a single TLD between registry services providers in the history of the DNS.

.co had about 3.2 million domains at the start of the year. Today, Team Internet says it has “more than 3 million”. It’s the same ballpark as .au’s 2018 move from Neustar to Afilias, which was 3.1 million names, but a million shy of this year’s migration of .in from GoDaddy to Tucows.

When it comes to retaining the big ccTLDs, it seems GoDaddy really can’t catch a break.

Radix and Identity Digital also competed for the contract.

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed

Amazon is set to launch not two but at least three of its dormant new gTLDs in the next few months, according to ICANN documentation.

As reported earlier this week, .talk and .fast are set to go to sunrise in August and general availability in September, and now they’ll be joined by a third: .you.

.you will enter a one-month sunrise period for trademark owners August 25, to be immediately followed by GA. There’ll likely also be a five-day Early Access Period.

The releases follow the launch of .free, .hot and .spot last month.

.TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse

.TOP Registry is off the ICANN naughty step, almost a year after it became the first registry to be hit by a public contract-breach notice over ICANN’s latest rules on DNS abuse.

The Org took the highly unusual step yesterday of publishing a blog post drawing attention to what it clearly sees as a big Compliance win, ahead of its public meeting in Prague later this month, at which abuse will no doubt, as usual, be a key discussion topic.

ICANN said that it has been working with .TOP for months to put in systems aimed at reducing the abuse of .top domains. It posted:

.TOP Registry expressed its commitment to maintaining compliance with the DNS Abuse obligations and continuously strengthening its abuse detection and mitigation processes through newly established collaboration channels and a structured approach designed to drive ongoing enhancement. ICANN Compliance acknowledged that the remedial measures were sufficient to cure the Notice of Breach. We noted that future violations of these requirements will result in expedited compliance action, up to and including the issuance of additional Notices of Breach.

Compliance had hit .TOP with the breach notice last year over allegations that it repeatedly ignored abuse reports submitted by security researchers, and that it was ignoring Uniform Rapid Suspension notices.

Security outfit URLAbuse later revealed it was the party that had reported .TOP to ICANN.

.TOP is a Chinese registry that sells mainly via Chinese registrars, typically at under a couple bucks retail. A non-scientific perusal of its zone files reveals that the majority of the many thousands of domains it sells every day are nothing but disposable junk — random strings of characters with no meaning in any language.

While .top is far from alone in that regard, it is the most successful at the abuse-attractive low-price-high-volume business model. Its zone grew by almost 1.2 million domains in the last 12 months — the biggest growth spurt of any TLD — and it has just shy of four million domains today.

Despite this implausibly rapid growth, ICANN says that abuse reports for .top domains started falling in April and there has been a “noticeable decrease in reported abuse”.

The Org says it will “actively monitor the effectiveness of these new [.TOP] systems and processes, the Registry Operator’s abuse rankings and their compliance with the requirements.”

The registry has told ICANN it has already “mitigated” over 100,000 abusive domain names with its new systems and processes.

Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed

Fresh from the launch of .free, .hot and .spot, Amazon has pencilled in launch dates for two more of its backlog of dormant gTLDs.

The company has told ICANN it plans to launch .talk and .fast later this year, with sunrise coming in August.

It also seems to be planning to start using .audible, one of its dot-brands, but that would not be available for public registration.

.fast and .talk are set to enter their sunrise periods from August 26 to September 25 this year, according to ICANN documentation. General availability would follow immediately.

If Amazon follows the same playbook as it did with the three gTLDs it launched last month, there would also be a five-day Early Access Period, with premium prices for early adopters.

The May launches have yet to set the world alight, perhaps in part due to their pricing (ranging from $30 to $60 retail), with best-performer .free’s zone file containing just 1,150 domains so far.

Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks

Amazon Registry’s launch of three gTLDs last week saw some registrants pay premium prices for .hot domain hacks.

Zone file data shows domains such as moons.hot and slings.hot were registered towards to the end of the five-day Early Access Period, with the registrant likely paying close to a thousand bucks for each.

cums.hot, longs.hot, moneys.hot, mugs.hot, pots.hot and ups.hot have all been registered, seeming by a broad range of registrants, at regular general availability prices since EAP closed May 17.

The EAP was lightly subscribed, if the zones are a guide. There were a handful of defensive registrations towards the end of the week, along with a few context-appropriate keywords like piping.hot.

.hot launched at the same time as .free and .spot, which don’t seem to have the same domain hack opportunities. Most EAP regs there were either defensives or keywords. Names like speak.free and live.free were registered.

As of today, .free is doing the best of the three, with 931 names in its zone, followed by .spot with 373 and .hot with 309.

.hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed

Amazon Registry made three new gTLDs available to non-trademark-holders on Monday, and so far a handful registrants have taken up the offer of premium Early Access Period pricing.

The five-day EAPs for .free, .hot and .spot see prices start high and decrease each day until May 17, when they’ll settle at standard general availability pricing.

While the wholesale prices have not been published by Amazon, the registrar 101domain was retailing them for $6,299 on day one, $3,299 on day two, $1,399 on day three, $799 on day four, and $199 on day five.

GA pricing for .hot at 101domain will be $59.99, while .free will be $44.99 and .spot will be $29.99.

The early adopter(s) in .hot seem to be viewing it as a sex-related TLD along the lines of .xxx, .sex or .sexy. All the day-one registrations (in multiple languages) look set to be used for escort services.

The domains that popped up for the first time in the May 13 zone files were:

be.free
bible.free
sql.free

acompanhantes.hot
escort.hot
escorts.hot
incontri.hot
prepagos.hot
trans.hot

high.spot
hub.spot

The only new domain in the May 14 zones appears to be live.free. They’re not exactly flying off the shelves so far.

Because the zone files are generated at midnight UTC and Amazon’s EAP daily price-increase cut-off is 1259 UTC, it’s not possible to say for sure how much each registrant paid for their domain names.