Team Internet sells fewer domains but makes more profit

Team Internet, still reeling from Google’s decision to cut off one of its primary revenue sources, nevertheless stayed profitable in the first half of the year, the company reported.

The company’s domains division, one of three reporting units, saw a 6% dip in revenue when compared to the same period last year, coming in at $97.9 million versus $103.9 million.

At the EBITDA level, its profit for the six months to June 30 was $13.7 million, up by 28% from $10.7 million a year earlier.

Team Internet’s Search division, which had been reliant on Google’s now essentially discontinued AdSense for Domains service, saw a 63% decline in revenue to $48.3 million, converting an EBITDA profit of $8.5 million into a loss of $2.6 million.

The company said that revenue from AdSense for Domains is now “negligible” and that its transition to Google’s Related Search on Content returned the division to profit in June, though this is not visible from the reported H1 numbers.

Combining all three of the company’s divisions, overall Team Internet reported EBITDA profit of $19.5 million, down 21% on last year, on revenue down 32% at $179.1 million.

There was no news on the company’s plans to spin off its domains business, where a deal is expected shortly.

Ireland’s .ie formally changes hands

IE Domain Registry has formally taken the reins at .ie after a decision by ICANN’s board of directors.

The board voted last week to redelegate Ireland’s ccTLD to the company that has in effect been in control of it since the turn of the century.

From the late 1980s, .ie was formally delegated to University College Dublin, which started subcontracting its management to IEDR in 2000.

The redelegation by IANA, now formally approved by ICANN, appears to be a formality, with ICANN saying no significant concerns raised by the university or local internet community.

Verisign’s crystal ball sees more growth for .com

Verisign has cranked up its growth predictions for .com for another consecutive quarter, partly driven by the availability of AI website creation tools.

Announcing its second-quarter financial results last week, the company said that it now expects its domain name count in .com and .net — in practice that usually means .com — to be between 5.2% and 6% for 2026.

That a sharp increase from the 3.1% and 4.3% range it had predicted just three months ago, and more than double the low-end growth in estimate in its February 1.5% to 3.5% forecast.

In Q2, it reported a “record” of 12.7 million new registrations, bringing the .com/.net total to 179.1 million. That compared to 11.5 million in Q1 and 10.4 million in Q2 last year. The net quarterly increase was 3.05 million.

Verisign described its now-confirmed 76.3% renewal rate for the first quarter as the highest it has seen in 20 years.

Explaining the growth, CEO Jim Bidzos said: “Registrars are focused on customer acquisition and are successfully engaged with our marketing programs. Additionally, AI tools are making content and website creation faster and easier.”

The company’s domain base had stagnated for a period whilst major registrars focused more on squeezing higher average revenue per customer rather than growth in domain volume.

Verisign reported net income of $217 million for the second quarter, up from $207 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 6% at $435 million. A cash-printing machine, the company returned hundreds of millions of dollars back to its shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

.web could be a huge payday for Verisign

.web entered the root zone this week, ending over a quarter-century of drama over the once-coveted gTLD, and now it looks like it could be immediately worth tens of millions to its new registry.

Verisign got it, of course, seemingly by paying off the company, Altanovo Domains, that has been doggedly pursuing it through ICANN’s quasi-judicial complaints procedures for the last decade.

The company said in a statement: “The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential.”

Now it seems Verisign is going to use its newfound freedom — the .web registry is not subject to the same feature and pricing controls as .com — to milk it for all it’s worth.

The company told analysts last night that it’s going to launch .web later this year with its mandatory sunrise period for trademark holders, followed by a Limited Registration Period for existing .com registrants.

CEO Jim Bidzos said: “We intend to run an LRP, and the rules that we will use is we will give all of our holders of .com registrations, the opportunity to come and get the same registration in .web before we open registrations for general availability.”

That could be incredibly lucrative. If, say, Verisign charges about $15 per domain per year, and about 1% of .com domains have their matching .web names registered, you’re looking at about $25 million a year of high-margin revenue added to the top line immediately.

I’m plucking those numbers out of thin air, of course. Verisign has not revealed its pricing for .web, and there’s no way of telling how for sure many .com owners will want to defensively register .web equivalents for, as Bidzos put it, “a companion website”.

The fact that .net has been stagnant for over a decade may prove informative — registrants’ mindset of “must get the matching .net and .org”, which was prevalent in the pre-2012 world, is not standard when hundreds of other gTLDs are available.

Verisign also revealed that some .web domains will carry premium prices, which could also prove to be a windfall, particularly if the premium fees carry over into renewal pricing, which the company is now able to do.

Verisign obtained the rights to .web in 2016 when it secretly bankrolled a company called Nu Dot Co, which had applied for the gTLD, in an ICANN-managed auction that saw a $135 million winning bid.

The clandestine nature of the proxy bidding was a huge source of controversy, and the runner-up bidder, Altanovo (then part of Afilias, spun out as an indie after Identity Digital acquired it) started filing ICANN complaints not long after.

While published ICANN documentation does not yet reflect it, it looks like Altanovo has yanked its Independent Review Process complaint against Verisign, with Verisign’s statement strongly suggest it was paid to do so.

I suspect Verisign was eager to bring .web to market to get some form of mind-share advantage before the gTLDs currently being applied for in the 2026 round start to come to market in a couple years. For Altanovo, patience may have meant profit.

Many in the industry, myself included, assumed a decade ago that Verisign’s primary goal in obtaining .web was defensive — it wanted to keep what it saw as .com’s strongest competitor out of the hands of its rivals and would probably just leave it dormant.

That may or may not have been true at the time, but based on current evidence it looks like that’s no longer the plan, if it ever was. Verisign’s talking about a launch before the end of the year.

Freenom is back, but no longer free

Controversial domain registry Freenom has returned, barely two and a half years after Facebook owner Meta sued it into the ground in a massive cybersquatting lawsuit.

But the company seems to have abandoned the free domains business model it pioneered that led to spammers registering millions of abusive domains and huge reputational harm.

Freenom was — and appears to still be — the registry operator for .tk, the ccTLD for Tokelau. It also ran four African ccTLDs: Equatorial Guinea (.gq), Central African Republic (.cf), Mali (.ml), Gabon (.ga).

Today, its web site is offering domains in .tk, .cf and .gq for sale, with a starting price of €8.22 per year.

In 2023, Mali and Gabon moved their ccTLDs to away from Freenom, with .ga going to Afnic and .ml going in-house. It was reported that CAR and Equitorial Guinea had also severed ties, but that does not appear to be the case.

Freenom appears to be starting from scratch — while .tk at one point had over 40 million registered domains, today potentially high-value dictionary keywords are available again.

A DI reader confirmed that he was able to register a short, rather nice keyword .tk for the €8.22 base price earlier this week.

Many keyword domains I checked are also being offered without premium pricing, while others carry higher price tags. For example, football.tk is being offered for €86.08 and whiskey.tk is listed at €1,739.13, while vodka.tk carries the base price.

Domains such as facebooklogin.tk also appear to be available.

Freenom’s original business model saw it primarily give domains away for free, then seize them to monetize their traffic as they expired or, more commonly, were suspended for abuse.

Actually charging for domain names will certainly help reduce Freenom’s exposure to the kind of abuse that caused Meta to file a $500 million cybersquatting lawsuit against it in early 2023.

When Freenom settled the case a year later, it said it had “independently decided to exit the domain name business, including the operation of registries”. The move reportedly made a noticeable dent in the prevalence of cybercrime.

The company also lost its ICANN registrar accreditation, meaning it became unable to sell domains in gTLDs. It gTLD registrations were transferred to Gandi.

But now Freenom is back in the domain game, albeit seemingly with a different, more conventional business model.

First dot-brand of the year self-terminates

It’s been almost 10 months since ICANN last received a demand from a dot-brand registry operator to terminate its contract, but 2026 has now had its first such request.

Networking gear maker Juniper Networks has asked for its .juniper gTLD to be deleted. No specific reason was given.

You might think that a dot-brand ducking out before we’ve had a chance to see what the current batch of applicants — applying during the current new gTLD application window that closes August 12 — could be seen as a harsh commentary on the dot-brand concept.

But that’s not quite the case here. Juniper got acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise last year and is being folded into the HPE brand, a transition that includes the move from juniper.net to hpe.com.

.juniper was never actively used. It was running on Identity Digital’s back-end.

The Tax Man to get domain takedown powers

The Tax Man is going to get powers to ask for domains to be taken down in the UK, according to local registry Nominet.

His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is set to be added to Nominet’s list of approved law enforcement agencies under its Criminal Practices Policy, enabling it to ask for domains to be suspended if it suspects criminal behavior.

The policy is essentially a trusted notifier program where LEAs are given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to takedown requests. Nominet conducts some sanity checks and will give the registrant 48 hours notice before it suspends their name unless it thinks the name poses and imminent risk.

Nominet said that HMRC was being onboarded because it’s already getting similar legal powers under the recent UK Crime and Policing Act, which became law in April.

The law gives statutory takedown powers to a number of LEAs that were already entrusted by the Nominet self-regulatory policy, such as the Financial Conduct Authority and the Gambling Commission.

A Nominet spokesperson said the HMRC was being added to the list to advise on issues where “domains are being used for HMRC impersonation, phishing or other tax-related scams to the public”.

Afnic: all your overseas territories are belong to us

French ccTLD registry Afnic has taken over management of three more ccTLDs assigned to France’s overseas territories, meaning it now looks after all eight such TLDs, according to the company.

Afnic is now running .gf (French Guiana), .gp (Guadeloupe) and .mq (Martinique), in addition to the .pm (Saint-Pierre and Miquelon), .re (Réunion), .tf (French Southern and Antarctic Lands), .wf (Wallis and Futuna) and .yt (Mayotte) domains it has been managing for years.

After the technical transition, expected to conclude this year, Afnic’s policies will come into effect and some small rule changes will apply to .gf, .mq, and .gp.

First, no one or two-character new domain registrations will be allowed.

Second, no new third-level regs under zones such as .com.gp, .net.gp, and .org.gp will be permitted, though existing regs will be grandfathered.

The takeovers were ordered by government decree in June.

.ru ready to crash as Draconian new rules come in

One of the world’s most-popular ccTLDs could be on the verge of losing a substantial number of domains after extremely strict eligibility requirements come in to force just weeks from now.

Registrants of new and existing .ru domains will need to prove their identity via a system administered by the Russian government from September 1 or risk losing their names.

In addition, only Russian-registered companies are authorized to act as registrars, on a list managed by government-selected non-profit entities. That rule came into effect in March.

Machine-translated, the law that was signed by President Putin last December states:

Domain names are registered in accordance with the domain name registration rules only after the person in whose name the domain name is registered has completed identification using the Unified Identification and Authentication System.

The identification system referred to here is also called Gosuslugi or ESIA. It’s the government-run program that enables Russian citizens to access government services online.

Signing up for Gosulgi requires government-issued documentation such as a passport or social security number. Foreigners resident in Russia are able to obtain documentation, but the process is much more complex.

In a recent interview, Coordination Center for TLD RU director Andrey Vorobyov said the move was designed to help prevent fraud and abuse in Russia-focused ccTLDs.

.ru is the 11th-largest TLD and the fifth-largest ccTLD after China, Germany, UK and (barely) the Netherlands, with 6,137,523
registered domains as of today. .РФ has 805,571 and .su (representing the former Soviet Union) has 110,369.

If .ru follows the trend set by other ccTLDs, it could be ready to fall off a cliff. When China’s CNNIC introduced similar rules in 2010, it lost millions of names.

While most Russians already have a Gosuslugi account, foreign-based .ru registrants could find themselves unable to sign up or decide they are unwilling to hand over their ID to the Russian government.

Some registrars, such as Com Laude, are looking into ways to get around the rules with local presence services.

Google adds .here and .eat to launch roster

Google has added the long-dormant gTLDs .here and .eat to its 2026 launch timetable, synchronized with the previously announced launch of .fly.

The company has told ICANN that it plans to runs its sunrise periods alongside .fly’s from September 1 until November 9, with general availability following immediately November 10.

All three gTLDs are expected to be open, with no eligibility requirements.

Google has had control over these domains for well over a decade. It’s perhaps informative that the application for .here talks up the potential for location-based services pointing to “the success of FourSquare and Groupon”, two companies whose stars are substantially less bright 14 years later.

.eat will compete against the likes of Identity Digital’s .cafe (which has roughly 25,000 names in its zone today), Punto 2012’s .rest (97,000 names), and Internet Naming Co’s .food (23,000 names).