Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy

Verisign’s ongoing shedding of its registry back-end services clients continued recently, with two dot-brands moving to GoDaddy Registry.

The two gTLDs are .norton, the anti-virus brand which now belongs to Gen Digital, and .capitalone, the dot-brand for the financial services firm Capital One. Both recently updated their IANA records to show GoDaddy is now the technical contact.

The loss of .norton is perhaps notable because of Verisign’s shared history with the brand. Verisign allowed Symantec, then-owner of the Norton brand, to use the Verisign brand to sell SSL certificates for a few years following a $1.3 billion deal in 2010.

But Verisign has spent the last few years deliberately unloading its registry services clients onto its competitors. Other beneficiaries of this wind-down have included Identity Digital and Nominet.

Goodyear tires of its dot-brand

For the record, I’m not proud of that headline. It doesn’t even work in British English. But if I hadn’t done it, some of you would have complained, and I want you to be happy.

Rubber company Goodyear has become the latest new gTLD registry operator to tell ICANN to terminate a dot-brand.

In this case, it’s not the company’s primary, .goodyear, but rather .dunlop, the brand of one of its tire-making subsidiaries.

The company did not give ICANN a reason for the self-termination; the Dunlop brand appears to be alive and well.

Neither .goodyear nor .dunlop have any registered domains. Dunlop and Goodyear both use .eu and .com domains for their primary web sites.

Team Internet loses Radix to Tucows

Tucows has scored a big win for its back-end registry services business, winning Radix and its portfolio of gTLDs over from rival Team Internet.

The companies said in a press release today that Radix will migrate its 11 TLDs, together comprising about 10 million domains, over to the Tucows platform.

This will bring Tucows’ total to about 17 million domains, following the migration of four million names in India’s .in, taking the deal from GoDaddy, which was the biggest single-TLD migration ever.

Radix’s portfolio comprises the 2012-round new gTLDs .store, .online, .tech, .site, .fun, .host, .press, .space, .uno and .website, as well as the Palau ccTLD .pw.

It’s a blow for Team Internet, which only recently boasted of winning the back-end business for Colombia’s .co, also from GoDaddy.

Tucows expects the Radix migration to go ahead in November.

.com off to strong start in Q3

Verisign’s .com gTLD had a relatively strong showing in the first month of the third quarter, its zone file growing by over half a million domains.

The TLD had 155,946,391 names in its zone at the start of August, up 526,205 names or 0.34% on the start of July.

For comparison, the zone grew by 464,822 names in June, 795,533 in the whole of Q2 and 817,590 in the whole of Q1.

Other strong volume performers in July were cheapo new gTLDs .xyz and .top, which grew by 257,830 domains (5.63%) to 4,840,663 and 224,816 domains (5.2%) to 4,547,051 respectively.

In percentage terms, the biggest growers were .casa, up 82.83% or 14,974 domains to 33,051, .mobi, up 47.05% or 121,174 domains to 378,703 and .help, up 39.55% or 22,513 domains to 79,275.

In raw domain terms, the biggest losers in zone file growth in July were .lol (down 97,718 to 294,656), .sbs (down 42,169 to 839,977) and .bond (down 37,845 to 150,272).

Of the 1,194 TLDs for which I currently have monthly growth stats, about 250 shrank, about 420 grew, and the rest (largely dot-brands or unlaunched generics) were flat.

.my is growing like crazy

Malayasia’s .my ccTLD has almost doubled in size since the start of the year, likely due to rule liberalizations and steep discounts at leading registrars.

MYNIC, the local registry, is reporting 675,607 domains under management at the end of July. That’s up 165,061 or 32% on the 510,546 reported at the end of June.

A total of 523,218 were direct second-level .my registrations, up from 350,441. DUM in third-level spaces such as .com.my and .net.my were all flat or slightly down over the month.

.my started the year with 342,326 domains. The TLD has grown 97% since then. All the growth has been at the second level.

The surge is likely due to a combination of factors — that the ccTLD has only recently dropped its local residency requirements, and that some international registrars have discounted .my to bargain-bin prices.

MYNIC signed a deal with Internet Naming Co and Tucows last year that would see .my names registerable by non-Malaysian registrants, but it was not immediately successful.

MYNIC had hoped to hit 400,000 domains by the end of 2024. It ended up taking until April 2025 to hit that milestone.

Registrars such as Namecheap and Gabia are currently selling .my for around $2 for the first year, a heavy cut from the roughly $50 they usually retail for. Porkbun has gone as low as $1.34, which it says is cost price.

But renewals will hit at full price for the second year, meaning the current growth spurt may not be sustainable.

Chinese domain spikiness ends in first half

China’s typically lumpy .cn domain market seemed to stabilize in the first half of 2025, posting modest growth rather than wild fluctuations.

While local registry CNNIC does not seem to have published its full H1 statistical report yet, it said in a press release this week that the were 20.85 million .cn domains registered at the end of June.

That compares to the 20.82 million names it had at the end of 2024, representing basically flattish growth.

In previous quarters, the world’s second-largest TLD had seen its numbers all over the shop, with growth of 1.2 million names in H224 and a dip of 563,000 in H124.

CNNIC said the total number of domains registered in China was 32.62 million. No further breakdowns were available.

Got junk? June’s biggest gTLD growers do

It’s becoming a truth universally acknowledged that when a gTLD sees a growth spike it’s because the registry is running a promo and tens of thousands of machine-generated junk domains have been registered.

That certainly seems to be true for June’s biggest growers.

The gTLDs the grew the fastest last month were .watch, .yachts, .autos, .irish, .boats and .qpon, each growing by between 50% and 73% and between 7,880 and 47,884 net domains compared to the end of May, according to zone file analysis.

But doom-scroll through lists of domains newly appearing in the zone in June (and presumably registered in the same month) and you’ll quickly see that the vast majority are utter crud.

XYZ’s .autos is a prime example. It’s currently retailing for under two bucks a name at the registrars I checked, and there were over 51,000 names in the July 1 zone that were not in the June 1 file.

Registrants took the opportunity to register hidden gems such as yqtsfg.autos, rgwydp.autos and l2xnnu7.autos… thousands of them. Not quite every new name but, eyeballing the list, very close to it.

I found that 37,428 of these 51,741 newly registered domains contain numerals. In .auto’s stablemate .yacht, 27,335 of its 33,620 new domains were partially numeric. These are not domains registered by investors.

The strings have clearly been algorithmically generated and bulk registered, but to what end?

It can be and is sometimes argued that there are legitimate reasons people might need to register tens of thousands of gibberish domains, but security researchers believe they’re primarily used for spam, phishing and other DNS abuse.

With ICANN being pressured to crack down on bulk regs, these kind of growth stories, along with the revenue they generate for the industry, might sooner or later become a thing of the past.

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.