New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more

The way ccTLDs fund ICANN is being reformed, with some registries set to pay thousands of dollars more to the Org’s annual budget.

The new rules, adopted by the ccNSO late last week, won’t affect the largest ccTLDs like .de and .uk, but they could drag mid-tier and the smallest registries into higher tax bands.

The funding model, last adjusted in 2013, is based on each registry’s number of domains under management. The suggested contribution is fixed, rather than per-domain, and depends on which DUM range a ccTLD falls into.

The newly approved bands see the top two tiers unchanged — with over five million names the due is $225,000, and over 2.5 million it’s $150,000.

The third tier, which captures at least 14 ccTLDs from the likes of Denmark, Japan and Mexico, starts at 1.2 million names (a change from one million in the 2013 guidelines) and continues to suggest a $75,000 donation.

Moving the threshold from a million to 1.2 million doesn’t seem to affect many registries. Of the ccTLDs I have up-to-date stats for, only South Korea and possibly Montenegro appear to benefit from the change.

Band D, which affects about a dozen ccTLDs from the likes of Malaysia, Norway and New Zealand, is seeing its contributions go up from $25,000 to $35,000, but the threshold is rising from 500,000 domains to 600,000.

This means that .ai would have to pay the higher rate, but historically Anguilla has not contributed to ICANN at all.

As the ccNSO is at pains to point out, ccTLD contributions are all voluntary, and the bands are suggestions rather than binding.

Fees for the smaller ccTLDs seem to have seen the most rejiggering, with three new low-end tax bands being introduced for registries with the lowest DUM counts. There are now 10 bands in total rather than seven.

Under the 2013 guidelines, any ccTLD with under 50,000 names was only asked to pay $500 a year. That lowest threshold has now been reduced to 10,000 names, raising dozens of registries into higher bands.

Countries such as Ecuador, Azerbaijan and Algeria, and the French department of Réunion, will now be asked to asked to pay $2,500, up two grand a year.

The contributions are designed to pay for the services ICANN provides ccTLDs, but the overall amount is pretty small compared to the Org’s overall budget.

The ccNSO has calculated that the 2013 model affected 255 ccTLDs and would raise as much as $4 million for ICANN a year. That would change to $4.7 million from 306 ccTLDs under the 2025 model.

But that’s only if everyone plays ball. In reality, only 109 ccTLDs gave ICANN anything at all in its last-reported year, and the total take was $2.1 million. Some registries, from the UK, Israel and Russia, cut or eliminated their funding.

Since its start of the voluntary contribution model, fewer than half of all ccTLD registries have ever given ICANN any money.

.ai rival lines up gTLD bid

The increasingly popular .ai top-level domain looks like it could have its first full competitor before long.

An organization called 0G Foundation, which says it has made a “decentralized AI operating system”, has announced plans to apply to ICANN for the new gTLD .agi next year.

AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence”, considered by many to be the end goal of AI technology development, where software possesses intelligence equivalent to or better than a human.

0G made the announcement via Unstoppable Domains, its application partner.

The organization plans to make .agi names available on its own proprietary blockchain first, with a “limited-time pre-sale” before launch “in the coming months”.

Unstoppable is selling .agi “reservations”, with prices starting at $5 for gibberish and potentially valuable dictionary words carrying premium price tags.

Team Internet lays off 200

When Google tweaks its algorithms, people lose their jobs.

That seems to be the takeaway from Team Internet’s latest trading update, which includes the revelation that more than 200 employees, more than a quarter of its 2024 end-of-year headcount, have been laid off recently.

The blame was laid squarely with changes to Google’s advertising services, which already scuppered a deal that would have taken Team Internet private back in March.

Google said back then that its advertisers would be opted out of AdSense For Domains, the service that Team Internet used to monetise most of its parked domains, by default.

Team Internet has been migrating its domains to Google’s Related Search for Content, which shows context-relevant suggested searches on content pages, but it’s taking time to make the move.

The result of this is that the company made a lot less money in its first half. Revenue for the six months to June 30 was $263.9 million, compared to $409.7 million for the first half of 2024.

The company also slipped from profit to loss at the operating level, while adjusted EBITDA was $24.6 million, compared to $46.6 million a year ago.

Its Domains, Identity & Software division, which includes the CentralNic registry and registrars such as Key-Systems, saw revenue up a smidge at $103.9 million and adjusted EBITDA up 28.9% at $10.7 million.

The growth was driven by price, not volume. The number of handled domain reg-years was down by 4% to 12.9 million, while the average price was up 7% to $12.79.

So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?

Amazon went into sunrise with three gTLDs this week, and I thought it might be interesting to pore over the latest zone files to see which companies are the most motivated to protect their brands nowadays.

First, because sometimes the results are just weird. Second, because countless new gTLD consultants are trawling the business world for prospects right now, and sunrise participation data might be useful as lead generation.

Amazon launched .you, .talk and .fast on Tuesday, so these results are for the first two days of sunrise, a period that lasts for a month. As such, there are only a few dozen registered domains in each TLD, at most.

Let’s start with the weird: dog food companies seem to fear cybersquatting more than you might imagine. Mars brands Orijen, Champion Pet Foods and Acana are all protected (though no more of Mars’ dozens of consumer brands), as is independent retailer PetSmart.

An AI company have a presence on the list, which is a relatively new phenomenon for sunrise periods. Anthropic has registered both “anthropic” and “claude”, for its chatbot, in all three TLDs.

Financial companies have a strong presence on the lists, with Freddie Mac, Bank of America, Intesa Sanpaolo, Merrill and Astorg all registering names. Energy brands Iberdrola and Avangrid are registered.

Conscious Capital, a Swiss investment company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, has defended its brand. That’s notable because the company uses a .us domain for its web site and the .com is listed for sale by a domainer for $2 million.

1-800-Flowers.com, which has somehow managed to get a Trademark Clearinghouse listing for “flowers” — the product it sells — participated in the sunrises as usual. The gTLD .flowers belongs to XYZ.com.

Hotel chain Hilton, podcasters Wondery, construction company VINCI Concessions (vinci-concessions.you???) and tech firms Broadcom and AT&T have all also got in quick to grab their matching domains.

The sunrise periods run until September 25, with general availability following hot on their heels.

Cloud gTLD gets launch dates

Another long-dormant gTLD from the 2012 round is set to launch soon.

Documents filed with ICANN show that the Chinese software company Qihoo 360 is set to launch .yun, the Pinyin transliteration of the Chinese word and Mandarin character meaning “cloud”.

The ICANN web site states that .yun will enter a one-month sunrise period September 24, with general availability likely coming around October 28.

Qihoo stated in its 2012 application that the domain would be marketed via its existing cloud storage services.

The company also is contacted to run .xihuan (“like”), .anquan (“security”) and .shouji (“cellphone”), but it hasn’t launched any of them yet.

Qihoo has been sanctioned by the US government for the last five years due to its alleged links to the Chinese military.

NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids

Indian national ccTLD registry NIXI is reportedly planning to branch out into new gTLDs, unfortunately it’s picked two strings that are strictly banned under ICANN rules.

According to an Economic Times interview with CEO Devesh Tyagi today, NIXI has eyes on applications for .india and .bharat in next year’s application round. “Bharat” is the Latin transliteration of the Hindi endonym for India.

Unfortunately for NIXI, applications for both strings would be doomed to failure under ICANN rules, according to the current draft of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

The AGB says: “Applications for strings that are country or territory names will not be approved”.

Such names are defined as, among other things: “It is a short-form name listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard, or a translation of the short-form name in any language.”

Both “india” and “bharat” fall into those categories. India is in the ISO 3166-1 standard and Bharat is its translation.

There are no carve-outs or exceptions for national ccTLD registries, even with local governmental approval. The prohibition is based on government advice and pretty much welded into the AGB at this point.

Should NIXI apply for these strings regardless, it would be able to request a partial refund but would still potentially lose tens of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable expenses.

NIXI already runs .भारत (.bharat in the Devanagari script used in Hindi), but that was applied for and won under ICANN’s entirely separate IDN ccTLD Fast Track program, which allows ccTLD operators to apply for internationalized domain name versions of their existing ccTLDs.

Single-letter .com lawsuit thrown out of court

A domainer trying to lay claim to all remaining unregistered single-character .com and .net domain names has had his lawsuit against ICANN thrown out of court for a third time.

Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com (dba First Place Internet) reckons he is owed the rights to domains such as 1.com and a.net because he registered the matching second-level domains in the non-Latin versions of both gTLDs.

His original lawsuit, filed two years ago, stated that he paid Verisign, via registrar CSC Global, $25,285 for 1.닷넷 on the understanding that this would give him exclusive rights to 1.com and 1.net, which would be worth many millions of dollars.

.닷넷 is Verisign’s transliteration of .net in the Hangul script. Tallman registered dozens of other single-character Latin domains in internationalized domain name .com/.net transliterated gTLDs, thinking he could later get the .com/.net equivalents.

His argument was pretty flimsy, based primarily not on ICANN policy but on an ambiguously worded letter from Verisign to ICANN.

The first complaint was rejected by the Los Angeles Superior Court in March 2024. Tallman amended his complaint, but this was also thrown out this January. Tallman plodded on, regardless, with a third amended complaint.

This time, the judge has run out of patience. Last month, he threw out the lawsuit entirely, with no leave to amend, saying Tallman did not have standing to sue as he had failed to show that he had any contractual relationship with ICANN at all.

With a few grandfathered exceptions such as x.com, owned by Elon Musk, all single-character .com and .net domain names have been reserved from reservation since the 1990s for stability reasons that are probably no longer particularly applicable.

A move by Verisign to experimentally auction o.com to a motivated buyer fizzled out a few years ago, likely indirectly due to the likely buyer’s relationship to a sexy Russian spy.

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.