.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.

Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders

ICANN has terminated the registrar accreditation agreements of two Chinese companies, which appear to be under common ownership, because they didn’t pay their bills.

EJEE Group Beijing and VIP Internet Industry are both losing their contracts, effective later this month. Both have common contact details, apparently run by the same person who had another registrar terminated in 2017.

EJEE does its business at category-killer domain domain.cn, though the registration storefront appears to be broken. VIP Internet’s web site appears to be down entirely.

While both companies have sold thousands of domains in their time, both have had just one or two gTLD domains under management for the last 12 months, according to my records. No registrants will be affected, in other words.

ICANN seems to have been chasing the registrars for their overdue fees since March 2023, over two years ago, according to the termination notices.

DotMusic has sold a lot of names, but not many are turned on

DotMusic, the company that started selling .music domains seven months ago, has had a relatively successful launch, but one in four domains sold have not yet gone live.

The latest registry transaction reports show that there were just over 30,000 registered .music domains at the end of January. Registry CEO Constantine Roussos tells us it’s over 31,000 today.

“We have more registrations than any community TLD and it is not even close,” Roussos said.

It’s certainly true that .music is already the largest generic-term Spec 12 Community gTLD from the 2012 application round.

But while 31,000 in six months is a good start for a 2012-round gTLD, there are currently only about 7,500 domains in the .music zone file, showing that about three quarters of names have not been activated.

It’s not the lowest unactivated domains rate in gTLDs — only about 15% of .xxx’s registered names are in its zone file, for example — but it’s pretty low. The similarly-sized .baby has about 84% utilization.

A low utilization rate usually means a high proportion of defensive registrations — registrants have no intention of ever using their domains but want to keep them out of the hands of others — but something different might be going on here.

As a Community gTLD, .music has extra hoops to jump through before registrants can activate their domains.

They have to have their identity and nexus to the music industry verified and obtain a special code called a Music ID from the registry, which can also be used for future registrations.

Roussos said that “the majority of the registrants have never owned a domain name before, which is great news for us”. He added: “My other guess is that most just wait until they are ready to use the domain to get verified”.

He said that many registrants are choosing to take advantage of a feature called SmartPage, which gives bands a template-driven profile page containing basic information and links to their socials and such.

.med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal

Medistry, the .med registry with a really strange business model, is looking to normalize its practices and start competing with the cluster of healthcare-related gTLDs already on the market.

The gTLD launched in 2016 and had almost 42,000 domains under management at the last count, which may sound like a pretty decent showing for a 2012-round niche registry (comparable to the likes of .beauty and .chat).

But there are a few caveats. For starters, only one non-registry .med domain has been indexed by Google, and it redirects to a .com web site.

Delve into the .med zone file, and you’ll discover that almost all of those 42,000 domains are 12 characters long and each comprises entirely numbers and hyphens. Doesn’t sound very sexy, does it?

Furthermore, delve into the Whois, and you’ll discover that all of those domains are registered via the registry’s in-house registrar, Name Share, to an entity affiliated with the registry itself.

A couple of years ago, having not sold more than a handful of .med domain names (I’ll get to the reasons for that in a moment), Medistry seems to have decided to reinvent .med as a directory for medicines.

In the US, all human medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration are given a National Drug Code, a 10-digit unique identifier that the manufacturers are required to print on the packaging.

So, the domain name 55150-250-50.med refers to a bupivacaine hydrochloride injection, a surgical anaesthetic made by Eugia US LLC. Almost all .med domains follow this three-part NDC structure.

The domains seem to have been registered in service of Trust.med, another entity affiliated with the registry, which says it offers supply chain management services to the US healthcare industry.

Why the DNS is the best place to store this NDC information isn’t clear to me. All the .med names I checked came back NXDOMAIN and were marked as pendingDelete in the Whois despite being months away from expiration.

So… Plan C? Sell .med domains to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants one, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Medistry says that, as of now:

A registrant of a .med domain name can be an individual or organization. All available domain names in .med are approved for registration on a first come, first serve basis through .med accredited registrars. .med domain names can also be purchased in the domain name aftermarket.

That’s hell and gone from the mission outlined in Medistry’s 2012 new gTLD application and its current Registry Agreement with ICANN, both of which outline some of the harshest registration restrictions of any TLD.

Its current ICANN contract states, in the Public Interest Commitments:

The lone method of domain name allocation in the TLD will be by Request for Proposal (RFP) under guidelines, rules and criteria as set forth by the Advisory Board in its sole discretion.

RFP for domain name registration in the TLD will be reviewed for approval by the Advisory Board, in its sole discretion, independent of Registry Operator.

PICs are enforceable by ICANN Compliance under the rarely used PIC Dispute Resolution Process, should there be a view that a registry is violating the contract.

Could Medistry be heading into stormy waters with Compliance? The company does have form in that regard — it’s owned by the same people who run .jobs registry Employ Media.

Employ Media got into a protracted fight with ICANN in 2012 over a service called Universe.jobs, which saw it register 40,000 generic .jobs domains to a close partner in order to turn the gTLD into a structured taxonomical jobs board.

ICANN thought the service was a breach of the .jobs RA and the two parties ended up in arbitration. ICANN eventually let Universe.jobs go ahead but it fizzled out a few years later when Employ Media came to blows with its partner.

Is history repeating itself with .med’s sudden change of business model?

Medistry says that full general availability for .med names will begin on September 2, but it’s telling registrars (pdf) they can “Pre-Register any domain to guarantee registration beginning on September 2” by emailing them a list of names.

It’s also looking to on-board more registrars. As of the end of January, the only registrars to ever sell a .med domain were owned by the registry. It uses Nominet as its back-end.

.med would compete against the likes of .doctor, .surgery, .health and .clinic.

.es and .pt riding out massive power outage

A lesson in the importance of redundancy in your DNS architecture?

The ccTLDs for Spain and Portugal seem to be largely unaffected by an ongoing power cut that has seen both countries go into blackout (metaphorically) for the last several hours.

At time of writing, no explanation for the outage, which has also affected parts of France, has been given by authorities. Traffic lights, public transport, airports, radio stations and telecommunications networks have all reportedly been affected.

But .es and .pt domains appear to be resolving just fine, at least from where I’m sitting.

Both registries — DNS.pt and Red.es — have DNS resolution services distributed across multiple nameservers managed by multiple providers in multiple global locations.

As well as at home in Lisbon, .pt’s nameservers can be found as far afield as California and Brazil through partners Packet Clearing House and Nic.br. Red.es also uses PCH in California, though its remaining nodes are in Madrid.

Any data center worth a damn has an uninterruptable power supply and backup generators, so one assumes the local DNS nodes are up and running too.

DNS.pt has posted a notice on its web site saying that customer services are currently unavailable due to “circumstances beyond our control”.

It’s not clear if other registry systems have been affected by the outage, but presumably with a total lack of electricity registrants have more pressing things to worry about, like how to get home from work and whether the food in their freezers will be edible when they get there.

.com is back as Verisign discounts bear fruit

Verisign’s .com returned to growth in the first quarter after the company offered its registrars marketing programs that substantially discounted the retail price of domains.

The company ended the quarter with 169.8 million .com and .net domains under management, a 777,000-name increase on the end of 2024. It’s the first time it’s reported quarterly DUM growth in almost two years.

While the company did not break out the split between the two TLDs, my records show that .com’s zone file grew by about 800,000 names during the quarter, while .net’s shrank by about 100,000.

Verisign has now upgraded its guidance for DUM growth this year to between a 0.7% decrease and a 0.9% increase, the first time its guidance has had a top-end in positive territory in some time. In February, it guided at between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The major reason for the reversal of fortunes is the program of discounts that have seen some registrars sell .com domains to customers recently for less than half of the usual $10.26 wholesale price.

“It’s still early, but we do see signs of registrars shifting towards customer acquisition, and we also see more registrar engagement with our marketing programs,” CEO Jim Bidzos said on an earnings call with analysts tonight.

In previous quarters last year, the fact that registrars were focused on squeezing more revenue out of their customers, rather than driving new registrations, was blamed for .com losing DUM.

Bidzos said that sales were up across all three of its core geographic markets — the US, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. On previous calls, North America and China were noted for weaknesses.

If there’s any reason to believe that the guidance is cautious, it’s because of what Bidzos and analysts euphemistically referred to as “the macro”, or “macro-economic situation”.

At this particular point in history, that’s code for US President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior with regard to world trade and tariffs, that has spooked economies globally. It’s not at all clear yet how this crisis might affect the domains market.

Verisign reported net income of $199 million for the quarter, up from $194 million a year ago, on revenue up 4.7% at $402 million. Operating income was up from $259 million to $271 million

The company, which has to date mainly been rewarding investors with share buybacks, has now also started issuing quarterly cash dividends. This quarter, they’re all getting $0.77 per share.

Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted

A Chinese clothing company has asked ICANN to delete its dot-brand gTLD, despite the fact that it is being used for web sites and email.

Redstone Haute Couture wants rid of .redstone, which has been in active use for almost a decade.

My database shows that it has about a dozen names, most registered in 2016 and most of which resolve, not redirect, to web sites.

Several have MX records, suggesting they are or were being used for email too.

No reason was given for Redstone’s request. The brand itself doesn’t seem have been retired, though the company is perhaps better known for its product lines such as Giada and Curiel.

The company was using ZDNS as its back-end registry services provider.

Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours

A screwup by MarkMonitor and GoDaddy was responsible for a two-hour outage affecting Zoom’s videoconferencing services yesterday, according to the company.

The widely used services were offline between 1825 and 2012 UTC yesterday because GoDaddy Registry, apparently acting under MarkMonitor’s instructions, shut down the zoom.us domain.

Screenshots posted to social media show zoom.us returning an NXDOMAIN error in web browsers. In-progress conference calls were reportedly shut off mid-stream.

Zoom said in a statement:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by “server block”, but it sounds consistent with a serverHold EPP status, where a registry prevents a domain from resolving in the DNS.

GoDaddy is the registry for .us domains. MarkMonitor is a hands-on corporate registrar dealing primarily with high-value brand clients.

Zoom is the incredibly popular conferencing service that grew to such popularity during the pandemic one could almost argue that it could be considered critical infrastructure.

While two hours downtime is hardly the end of the world, it’s still one hell of a screwup.

Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”

Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.

The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.

All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.

The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.