ICANN throws a bone to its most stubborn new gTLD applicant

ICANN has offered an olive branch to a new gTLD applicant that refuses to accept defeat well over a decade after it was rejected.

The Org has offered one last chance for Indian applicant Nameshop to get some of its money back for an application that fell at the first hurdle back in the 2012 application round.

Nameshop applied for .idn, apparently not understanding the rule that strings matching protected three-letter country codes are banned under ICANN rules. IDN is the code for Indonesia.

The company filed a request to change its applied-for string to .internet, using a process ICANN had put in place to allow applicants to correct typos (such as correcting .dotafrica to .africa).

When it was explained to Nameshop that it was trying to misuse the process and its only option was to request a refund of its application fee, the company decided instead to fight fruitlessly for the best part of a decade and a half to get ICANN to change its mind.

ICANN has not changed its mind.

The Org informed all remaining failed 2012-round applicants late last year that they had 90 days to withdraw their applications and get a partial refund or lose their money.

Nameshop evidently chose to reject or ignore that offer, missing the deadline for requesting the refund. Because it used ICANN’s Applicant Support program, its refund would be of the lower $47,000 fee.

But ICANN has offered the company one final attempt to leave the process with at least something. It’s given Nameshop until May 15 to withdraw its application and get its money back.

This appears to be special treatment. Eleven other unsuccessful applications, including those for .hotel, .shop, .africa and .salon, were recently flagged as “Terminated” — as opposed to “Withdrawn” — by ICANN.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that applicants in the current application round, which is open until August, can avoid making silly string selection mistakes by using DI’s free Stringtel tool.

Identity Digital acquires another dormant gTLD

Identity Digital has taken over another 2012-round new gTLD that never launched.

The ICANN contract for .safety recently changed hands, with original registry Safety Registry Services handing over the keys to Jolly Host, the same Identity Digital affiliate that has now picked up five gTLDs this year.

The seller is a subsidiary of W W Grainger, a large industrial supply company that has safety products among the wide range of gear it produces.

The company had intended to run .safety in a restricted fashion, perhaps via a controlled membership organization.

But that never happened. It didn’t register a single domain. Its commitment to and enthusiasm for the gTLD is perhaps exemplified by the fact that its registry web site has been headered “SAFETY REGISTERY SERVICES” (sic) for over a decade.

Jolly host this year has taken on three gTLDs from Amazon, and one from iRegistry, bringing its total portfolio of gTLDs to something in the region of eight trillion.

Verisign to delete .name 3LDs and email addresses

If you needed more evidence of how innovation-resistant the domain name industry can be, Verisign is killing off two non-standard services that have been running for a quarter-century.

The registry plans to discontinue sales of third-level domains in the .name gTLD, along with an email forwarding service that offered punters personalized email addresses.

.name is a gTLD approved by ICANN in its first round, in 2000. It went live in 2001 with a novel but arguably confusing registration flow — registrants were only able to acquire third-level domains.

If you wanted to register kevin.murphy.name, the registry (originally Global Name Registry, since acquired by Verisign) would register murphy.name to itself first and control the DNS of the second-level domain.

This has led to the unusual situation where, for example, andrew.hedges.name and david.hedges.name are registered to two different guys, using two different registrars, years apart. Neither David nor Andrew Hedges owns hedges.name.

According to a Registry Services Evaluation Process request approved by ICANN recently, Verisign will not only stop selling third-level domains, but it will also delete existing registrations:

Currently, third level domain names may be registered in the .name TLD. This RSEP seeks to discontinue third level domain name registrations due to declining usage and limited registrar support of the service.

Upon discontinuation, no new third level domain names will be registered and existing third level domain names will be terminated.

How many registrants and domains will be affected by this move is not clear, but it’s not zero. Monthly transaction reports show .name has about 96,000 domains under management, but the mix between 2LD and 3LD is not disclosed.

It appears that the deletion of these arguably premium surnames will make them available for registration again, but it’s not yet clear how Verisign plans to handle this. The drop? Auctions? It’s not stated in the RSEP.

Verisign is also turning off the email forwarding service that GNR offered since launch 25 years ago.

This service offered users email aliases using .name domains. You could pay to have firstname@lastname.name forward to your Hotmail, for example, (this was 2002). The domain would belong to the registry, the user just got use of the alias.

Verisign says this will be discontinued and the associated email addresses and MX records removed. SLDs that were used by the service will become available for registration again after one year.

Again, it’s not clear how many users will be affected but it does not appear to be zero. Verisign said it will give its registrars 90 days notice before it turns off the service, though it seems they’re mostly already aware of it.

It was pretty clear almost from the outset that the three-level structure GNR originally proposed was not a great business model in practice. It only took a couple of years before it started selling .name SLDs as well.

New gTLD applicants take note — non-standard registration paths tend to be unpopular with registrants and registrars alike.

.music has competition as .mu repositions

Identity Digital and it.com Domains are to market the Mauritius ccTLD, .mu, as an open alternative to the .music gTLD.

According to it.com, the ccTLD will be marketed internationally as “Everyone’s Music Domain”, starting with outreach at the trademark-focused INTA Annual Meeting in London this week.

It’s a non-sunrise sunrise period, being called the Trademark Priority Period, though this seems to be a case of branding rather than the imposition of any strict rules — .mu has been around for decades and domains there are already available to buy.

It’s rather a headsup period, it seems, with trademark owners being marketed to before the general public. This period will run from May 15 to June 28, it.com said.

Policies and launch details are expected to be announced soon.

There is already a domain for music, of course — .music. It’s a latecomer from the 2012 application round. It launched in late 2024 and had fewer than 30,000 domains under management at the end of 2025, and fewer than 7,500 names in its zone file today.

The issue with .music is that it’s a “community” gTLD, conceived at a time when concerns about music piracy online were a lot more acute than they are today, and it has registrant eligibility restrictions.

While .music domains have standard shopping cart friction and can begin resolving immediately, registrants are asked to complete a post-reg identity verification process that looks like a bit of a faff. Presumably, .mu domains will be less restrictive.

Pricing for the repurposed .mu has yet to be announced, but it’s on sale today with retail renewal pricing appearing to start at about $75 a year. That’s in the same ball-park as .music.

While rebadging .mu as a domain for music may initially hit like another case of a ccTLD trying to shoehorn itself into a meaning it was not intended to have, the use case is not without precedent. The rock band Muse has long used muse.mu for its web site, for example.

The rebranding of .mu comes about a year after Identity Digital took over the back-end registry services for the ccTLD in partnership with the Government of Mauritius.

Over 100 new gTLD bids have already been announced

With the 2026 ICANN new gTLD application window now officially open, one striking difference compared to the 2012 round is the number of organizations that have broken cover to announce that they will apply.

Back in 2012, consultants excitedly pointed to Canon, the Japanese electronics firm, as the convincer. It had openly revealed it planned to apply for the dot-brand .canon two years earlier.

A handful of gTLDs related to communities, cities or causes — such as .gay, .nyc and .eco — had also been announced. Several had multiple announced applicants and were ultimately contested.

But today, with the application window now five days open, DI’s free risk analysis tool, Stringtel, currently has more than 100 announced applications in its database.

With dot-brands expected to make up a sizeable chunk of 2026 applications, very few major brands have actually put their heads above the parapet. Salesforce seems to be the most well-known, though its revelation came via an ICANN director’s conflict disclosure rather than a full-throated formal announcement.

The biggest cohort of announced applications seems to come from applicants representing an if not entirely then certainly uncommon type of gTLD — which you could call the non-dot-brand-dot-brand, or perhaps more simply “open dot-brand”.

By this I mean organizations, typically in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space, that have said they will apply for gTLDs matching their brand but make second-level domains available to their users, rather then keeping the whole namespace in-house.

There are dozens of such announced bids. Some are already selling domains that resolve on blockchains rather than DNS. Due to cost, complexity, or risk, I don’t expect every announcement in this space to translate into an eventual application.

We’ve also seen announcements of applications for generic strings, often in hot industries such as AI, crypto or podcasting. Stringtel already has records for the likes of .crypto, .agi, .podcast and .blockchain, for example. A couple, such as .chain and .anime, are already contested.

While we’ll likely discover how many applications ICANN has received not long after the application window closes in August, we won’t find out what strings have been applied for until October at the earliest.

Nominet wants to fight shrinkage without self-abuse

Nominet has acknowledged that .uk has been shrinking for some time and wants to do something about it without accidentally inviting hordes of spammers and scammers into its zone.

The registry said this week that it is responding to calls from its registrar members by introducing a new .UK Growth Programme, set to launch June 3.

.uk peaked at 13,348,378 domains in July 2019 (that number includes second and third-level registrations) but it’s lost three million since then, reporting 10,371,270 names at the end of March.

Nominet is throwing money at the problem, saying the new program will offer registrars “either a .UK price promotion or marketing campaign funds”. Public details are scant, but the company said:

The marketing option would be competitive, with campaigns selected on their ROI potential, with caps to ensure a variety of members can take part. The promotions route would offer a discount on new registrations across the .UK family for the first year, during a specific month.

But Nominet acknowledged that discounts often lead to increased abuse and/or reg spikes followed by junk drops, and says it want to design its program to minimize these negate effects. How? The registry didn’t say.

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.