Burr joins PIR after leaving ICANN board

Community lifer Becky Burr has joined Public Interest Registry as senior policy advisor, the company announced today.

Burr, who at the US government was instrumental in the formation of ICANN in the late 1990s, recently completed a nine-year stint on ICANN’s board of directors, where she was one of the most active and visible participants.

Lawyer Burr previously headed policy for .biz registry Neustar, before its acquisition by GoDaddy, but she’s most recently been in private practice.

PIR, the non-profit .org registry, said Burr “will advise on a broad range of strategic policy matters and will engage with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) workstreams and global Internet governance matters.”

Refunds galore as gTLD losers finally bow out

There’s been a wave of withdrawals of new gTLD applications over the last couple of months after ICANN gave 15 companies their final notice that it was time to ask for a refund or lose their money forever.

But so far just seven unsuccessful applications from the 2012 round have been withdrawn, from the 19 that were eligible, according to my records.

Notably, all of the remaining applications for .mail, .corp and .home, strings that were banned on account of name collision risks, have been pulled. Google, Amazon and GMO Registry will all get partial refunds of their application fees.

Two applications for the fiercely contested .hotel have also been yanked, with Identity Digital and Radix getting their refunds. GRS Domains, Despegar and Fegistry still have not withdrawn, according to ICANN records.

ICANN had classed .hotel as a “already been delegated to other applicant” gTLD, which isn’t completely accurate. The gTLD is currently in pre-delegation testing, however.

There are plenty of other applications from 2012 that have not been withdrawn, despite the fact that the gTLD in question is already live and freely available for registration.

L’Oreal, for example, is still clinging on to its bid for .salon, despite the fact that Identity Digital has been running it for years and has about 4,000 names in its zone.

Similarly, Planet Dot Eco, DotConnectAfrica and Commercial Connect do not appear to has asked for refunds for their respective bids for .eco, .africa and .shop, despite all three being live and run by successful rival applicants for years.

Asia Green IT System has not withdrawn its bids for .islam, .halal, and .persiangulf, which were banned following government objections. AGIT was essentially kicked out of the industry when its business with five other Middle-East themed gTLDs comprehensively failed.

The 2012 round’s most-stubborn applicant, Nameshop, still has a live bid for .idn. Indian conglomerate Tata has also not pulled its bid for .tata, which failed on geographic similarity grounds.

In a resolution passed last September, ICANN’s board decided to give all of its remaining 2012-round applicants 90 days notice that they could withdraw or lose their money. It’s not clear when that 90-day period began.

.goo terminated as search engine closes down

The .goo gTLD is among a pair of dot-brand gTLDs to recently self-terminate.

goo was a 1990s-style search portal focused on the Japanese market and owned by local incumbent telco NTT. It eventually lost relevance and finally closed down for good at short notice last November.

Despite the similar branding, goo was unrelated to Google and in fact predated Google’s foundation by about a year, according to some accounts. It eventually turned to Google to power its search functionality.

NTT has asked ICANN to terminate its .goo registry contract and ICANN has given it the nod.

There was one active .goo domain, www.goo, which redirected to goo.ne.jp, its primary domain.

Joining .goo in self-termination is .wolterskluwer, one of those gTLDs that really makes me scratch my head for having never noticed its existence despite my daily exposure to vast amounts of gTLD data.

It’s owned by Wolters Kluwer, a large Dutch company that provides software for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unlike goo, the company appears to be in robust health but it never used its gTLD.

GoDaddy to offer domain blocking to people who don’t have trademarks

GoDaddy’s registry arm wants to offer registrants the ability to block others from registering their brands in other TLDs, even if they don’t own a registered trademark.

In what could be a game-changer for the industry, the company has proposed a service called Domain Options, which could allow registrants to eventually claim rights to their domain across dozens or hundreds of gTLDs.

“The service will allow registered name holders to prevent registration of certain labels,” GoDaddy explained in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN just before Christmas.

“Labels will be an exact match of the registered name holder’s second-level domain name label,” the RSEP says. “The number of labels a registrant can protect under Domain Options is limited to the following: only exact match labels, and only for registered domain names held by the registrant.”

Simply put, if you have registered example.beer, you would be able to pay a fee to prevent other people from registering domains such as example.biz, example.cooking and example.photo.

The latest RSEP covers 34 GoDaddy-run gTLDs: .abogado, .beer, .biz, .blackfriday, .boston, .casa, .club, .compare, .cooking, .courses, .dds, .design, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .gay, .health, .ink, .law, .luxe, .miami, .photo, .rodeo, .select, .study, .surf, .tattoo, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .wiki, .work, and .yoga.

But ICANN has already approved the Domain Options service for use in GoDaddy’s .horse gTLD, which was floated (presumably humorously) as a trial balloon earlier in December. The .horse contract has already been amended to include the service.

Registrants would be able to convert the blocked domains into actual registrations at a later date, or cancel the service altogether.

Third parties would also be able to request blocked domains to be unblocked through worryingly unspecified means.

Domain Options appears to be essentially a simplified clone of two-year-old GoDaddy-led service GlobalBlock, known in ICANN contractual parlance as the Label Blocking Service.

GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay substantial fees — from $6,499 a year at 101domain, for example — to block their marks across 710 extensions as a cheaper alternative to buying 710 defensive registrations at full price.

Registry pricing for Domain Options is not revealed in the RSEP, but it’s hard to imagine it enormously undercutting and therefore cannibalzing GlobalBlock.

Now that ICANN has given GoDaddy the nod for .horse, it seems inevitable that the other 34 gTLDs will also be approved, and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a wave of similar RSEPs from other registries over the coming months.

Happy new year expected for domain industry, says ICANN

ICANN’s revenue for 2026 is expected to be significantly above its earlier predictions, and it isn’t just because the Org cranked up its registry and registrar fees last year.

The budget for fiscal 2027, published shortly before Christmas, paints a picture of a much healthier domain industry than earlier thought.

The budget revises expectations for the Org’s current fiscal 2026 upwards in terms of transactions (meaning registrations, renewals and transfers) for gTLDs both new and old.

ICANN now expects legacy gTLD transactions for FY26, which ends June 30, to come in 7.7 million or 4.3% ahead of the predictions contained in the budget for the period its board approved last May.

Transactions are now expected to be 187.5 million versus the earlier estimate of 179.8 million.

It’s a similar story in new gTLDs, where transactions are now predicted at 43.1 million versus 33.1 million, a 10 million or 30.2% difference in estimates December versus May.

ICANN says in its draft FY27 budget (pdf) that the uptick became apparent about a year ago:

Beginning in the second half of FY25 [about a year ago], domain name transaction volumes began to increase, which was unexpected at the time of budgeting for FY25. Continued transaction volume growth and upward guidance from the industry resulted in an increased funding forecast for FY26, a trend that is expected to continue in FY27.

Due to this bullishness, the Org has no plans to raise its fees in FY27.

The growth spurt means that ICANN now thinks FY26 funding for operations will come in $11.6 million ahead of budget — $161.4 million compared to the $149.8 million it budgeted for six months ago.

The Org also expects to end its FY26 with about 400 more accredited registrars and about 20 more contracted registries than it thought. Likely due to drop-catcher registrars and dot-brand registries.

None of these figures include the upcoming new gTLD application round, which will not create any new fee-paying registries for some time.

For FY27, which begins July 1, ICANN is expecting transactions to hit 191.9 million and 44.4 million, growth of 2% and 3%, for legacy and new gTLDs respectively. That’s compared to the newly updated FY26 guidance.

ICANN is budgeting for $161.1 million in operations funding for FY27, down a bit on the $161.4 million it’s now predicting for FY26, due to lower application fees from new registrars seeking accreditation.

The draft budget is open for public comment until February 12.

Salesforce to apply for a dot-brand

Salesforce has become the most significant company to date to announce it plans to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD.

Specifically, the company plans to apply for a dot-brand, according to a disclosure made by David Lawrence, software engineering architect at Salesforce and IETF liaison on ICANN’s board of directors.

The disclosure came when the board approved the new gTLD program’s latest Applicant Guidebook at the conclusion of the ICANN 84 public meeting in Dublin last month.

While the IETF liaison is a non-voting role, he nevertheless recused himself from the AGB discussion, saying: “I work for an employer to apply for a brand TLD.”

While there are dozens of companies and organizations with public plans for new gTLDs, most of them are little-known brands associated with the blockchain space.

By contrast, Salesforce is, according to Wikipedia, the 61st-largest company in the world, with a market cap of $238 billion.

Team Internet looking to break up

The return of CentralNic? Team Internet this week announced that it is seeking to break up the company, selling off its various divisions to different buyers.

The move follows devastating changes to Google’s advertising services, which led to 200 layoffs and a $140 million drop in revenue in the first half of this year.

“We are in active discussions regarding the divestment or formation of strategic partnerships for substantially all parts of the business in separate transactions,” the company said in a statement to the markets.

The company said it has already received “a number of inbound approaches”, adding that “discussions are most advanced” for the sale of its Domains, Identity & Software segment, which includes its registries and registrars.

It’s not clear whether we’re talking about potential industry consolidation or another private equity deal. Google’s move scuppered the planned sale of Team Internet as a whole to a PE group in March.

Google turned off its Adsense for Domains this year, making domain monetization substantially more difficult. It’s been replaced by Related Search on Content, which requires content to function.

Team Internet said that other Google policies designed to improve the quality of advertising have also slowed down its transition to the new model. It’s looking at ways it can diversify its revenue sources.

Glitch redux: ICANN screws up new gTLD security again

No lessons learned from 2012? ICANN admitted this morning that a glitch in its Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program exposed the identities of more than a dozen companies to their rivals.

The Org fessed up that some companies looking to get pre-approved as RSPs were able to see “identifiable organizational information” belonging to another user when using ICANN’s technical testing system.

“A total of 14 of 26 organizations using RST OT&E were affected. All affected organizations have been notified,” ICANN said. “No personal data was exposed, with the exception of a single minor and limited instance.”

It doesn’t sound like any gTLD application intentions were revealed — that part of the program doesn’t open until next year.

There were probably not too many surprises among the leaks. The landscape of the RSP market is well understood.

The only exceptions that spring to mind would be ccTLD registries that have not yet revealed their plans for the gTLD space, and completely new market entrants that have not yet tipped their hand.

The glitch sounds remarkably familiar for ICANN watchers with long memories. A bug discovered in 2015 exposed much more data, and about applicants themselves, but it was only exploited by one person on a handful of occasions.

That “glitch” led to allegations of hacking and trade secret theft and a long-running Independent Review Process case that wasn’t resolved until October 2023.

ICANN said it has taken down its testing environment to fix the bug and has hired an outside consultant to kick the tires.

This delay means testing will be offline for around two weeks, coming back November 12 at the earliest, and the reveal date for the list of participating RSPs has been pushed back from December 9 to an unspecified future date we realistically have to assume will be in the new year.

It’s not expected to delay the April 2026 opening of the next application round.

CentralNic claims second-largest TLD migration ever

CentralNic today boasted that it successfully completed the migration of the .co TLD from GoDaddy to its own servers earlier this month, claiming the number two spot in the record books.

The company, part of Team Internet, said it moved more than 3.3 million .co domains to its registry back-end on October 4. The process took 29 hours, it said in a press release.

The 3.3 million number confirms .co’s place as the second-largest TLD migration, ahead of the 3.1 million .au names moved from Neustar to Afilias in 2018, but behind the four million .in names moved from GoDaddy to Tucows completed this May.

.io sales almost double over three years

The .io ccTLD continues to be a cash cow, with sales up 6.70% in 2024, according to the registry’s latest financial filing.

The company also faced its largest-ever UK tax bill last year, at a time when the future of .io came under sharp focus due to the imminent dissolution of the British Indian Ocean Territory to which .io is assigned.

UK-based Internet Computer Bureau last month reported revenue for 2024 of £31.6 million ($42.4 million), up from £29.6 million ($39.7 million) in 2023. Revenue has grown 93% since 2021, mostly due to a spike in 2022.

While ICB, an Identity Digital subsidiary, also runs .ac and .sh, the vast majority of its business is certainly in .io, a popular ccTLD with tech start-ups.

The company is essentially a single-employee shell, structured to pass the vast majority of its revenue to US-based parent Identity Digital. Its gross margins are barely 4%, an implausibly low number for a .com-comparable, high-volume registry business.

ICB reported operating profit for 2024 of £1.6 million ($2.1 million), reversing a loss of £1.7 million in 2023. But its bottom line was bolstered by £2 million of unspecified investment income, leading to profit after tax of £2.8 million ($3.7 million).

The UK tax bill was almost three times as large as any previous year at £807,000 ($1 million) seemingly due to this investment income.

The future of .io is still ambiguous, after the UK and Mauritius signed a treaty to transfer sovereignty over BIOT, which is also known as the Chagos Archipelago. Implementation of the treaty is currently being enacted by both countries’ legislatures.

A UK diplomatic team recently met with Mauritius’ prime minister to discuss the transfer of power, and the discussions reportedly touched on the “domaine Internet”.

A Mauritian newspaper reported that the discussions covered “l’avenir du domaine Internet, qui représente un enjeu économique intéressant pour Maurice”, which could translate as “the future of the Internet domain — which represents an interesting economic opportunity for Mauritius”.

The industry trend at the moment is for the governments of countries with popular ccTLDs to put the squeeze on their registry operators, but neither the UK nor Mauritius has a direct governance or contractual relationship with .io.